Are We Living in an Algorithmic Universe?

Today, we hear constantly about news and discussions on AI, and references to algorithm for  this, algorithm for that. Let's take a  dive, not too deeply I might add, into a world  defined by this seemingly mysterious, but almost ubiquitous word. We'll look at it from a different set of colored lenses.

Merriam Webster definition: 

al·​go·​rithm ˈal-gə-ˌri-t͟həm 

: a procedure for solving a mathematical problem (as of finding the greatest common divisor) in a finite number of steps that frequently involves repetition of an operation

broadly : a step-by-step procedure for solving a problem or accomplishing some end

For most folks algorithm will seem intimidating but we can ignore the mathematical trimmings  associated with it.  Let's pick the last phrase in the broader definition - a process for "accomplishing some end" as focus for this musing.

Whether one believes in a universe with or without a Creator, one must deal with how we got to this point of our existence. From the development of our civilization, and the time that it took to get us here - 13.7 billion years from the first spark of creation to about 200-800 million years ago for when complex lifeforms may have begun - took a succession of events, a very long process, if you will, to get us to the present moment.  All these numbers are, at best, a bunch of estimates based on what scientists can squeeze out of the best science available up to the present moment.  Be that as it may, despite our inability to know everything - ever - there is one certainty we can establish: it took innumerable succession of steps in a particular order to arrive at some end (where we are today), or millions upon millions of algorithmic steps to make you out of that primordial cell 4 billion years ago.  

That primordial cell was hypothesized as the last universal common ancestor or LUCA.

Now, whether there was just that one LUCA or multiple versions of it in our history, one undeniable fact is that there were simple life forms millions and millions of years ago. From those origins arose all complex living things that are in existence today, although presently only a mere 1% of all living things that ever existed are still around as a result of at least five known extinction eras (from fossil records) over time. 

At the instant moment of creation ("Let there be light" .. Genesis 1:3) from that primordial spark of pure energy to some of it condensing into the first elementary particles of matter, to the first electron, to the first hydrogen atoms, to molecules, polymers (combination of molecules) and to the first reproducing cells that took millions upon millions of succeeding steps - some were dead ends, others continued on - until the pairing of cells for sustained reproduction, then onto more cell divisions, and voila, here you are.  You are in fact at the tip of countless cell divisions, uninterrupted algorithmic steps to make you.  Keep in mind that if there was one break along the way, you will not be here.

In fact, you are you and uniquely you because  of the combination of genetic characteristics from your mom and dad. In those genes, all contained in an embryonic cell no bigger than a pinhead, were a complex code of steps that regulated what parts will be formed first and strictly in the order that they were to take place so that nine months later you became an individual being. You'd have to admit that it took perfectly executed algorithmic steps during those nine months; otherwise, you will not have been what you became after nine months, at the very least, or worse, there will not even be a you. 

So, you were a product of a series of perfectly written algorithmic codes.  And the question then becomes - if there was a code, there had to have been a coder.  There lies the argument against a universe without a creator.  Some will say that is a huge leap to make.  Is it?

Well, yes, but the alternative is for  everything to have happened randomly, in no particular order, no repeatable algorithm to regulate the continued propagation of species.  You see, without a code writer, it will be as if we gave a monkey, or, generously, have a million of them tap on a million typewriters and expect one or a combination of them will have produced a Shakespearean tragedy or comedy. Of course, you are far more complex, by a billion fold, at least, than one Shakespeare's complete play. 

Okay, so we got that out of the way.

Let's make one more leap.  You are a product of an algorithmic universe. If so, you are faced with this: At this particular moment in time, when you  look back and then forward, was it fate that made you become you to the exclusion of your own free will?  Fate versus free will. Is that a fair question? Or, is it neither here nor there?

The avenue of fate leads to a dead end repository of total blamelessness.  One can't be responsible.  It was fate. And there lies the rub into a pointless existence.  And we know that is not true. So, what is the next option?

There is a case for a hybrid of fate and free will. It can be said that fate is only the starting point.  One is born in a house of wealth or abject poverty, a bad neighborhood, etc. An advantageous circumstance of birth, or an uphill struggle from poor beginnings had many times been proven to be not the absolute determinant of a future life.  There are just too many stories about spectacular reversal of fortunes that can only be explained by the individual's will or the absence of it.

That would be one micro-view at the individual level. Does algorithm work at the macro level?  Say, at the collective level of a kingdom, an empire, a nation, does algorithmic sequencing of events and circumstances determine the path of the collective?  

I more than hinted at the possibility that indeed algorithms had a way of determining the rise and fall of empires in an earlier musing, "2050: The Ebb of the Tragic Trajectory of a Once Powerful Nation".  Did God preordained for empires to rise and fall every 250 years?  

We cannot question the mind of the Creator, can we?  At one time I used the analogy of the characters in a comic strip who obviously live in a two-dimensional world of flat panels of a comic book.  Their creator, illustrator and story teller, lives in a three-dimensional world of a room, drawing board, pens and chair, etc.  The characters have no way of seeing anything beyond the flat panel and so they can't know what the illustrator is doing and or what it is he or she intends for the story to go.

We are like those characters in, this time, a three dimensional comic strip.  The three dimensions we exist in, make that four if we include time, allow us to live our lives under a framework of algorithmic codes, and some leeway, facilitated by our ability to exercise some free will towards some end.  We have advanced this far into our development, physically and mentally; humanity had accumulated a compounding wealth of information and knowledge but for as long as we are confined to this four-dimensional world, we have no access to dimensions beyond this.

Back to the illustrator/creator two paragraphs above and let's assume he or she decides to give the characters free will to go about making decisions for themselves.  Farfetched, isn't it? Imagine the steep learning curve, missteps and miscalculations will abound.  Permit me another analogy I've used before.  Imagine a fish wondering whatever happened to its friend who seconds ago took a wiggly worm and it's gone! It left the watery world, the only one they knew, never to know or understand where the other fish went. There's an airy world above, the dangling fish at the end of a fishing pole, that they could not understand or even survive in.

We are the creatures today that took eons to develop.  Our ancestors, limited in their understanding in the beginning, went on to inhabit a civilized world (for the most part) even though brain anatomy did not change much at all. It seems then that there was an algorithmic code in our being that allowed us to progress from the world of Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons and other earlier sub-species to a society of law  and order, the Magna Carta, Geneva Convention, etc. 

Is human nature part of the algorithmic code?  Is the "selfish gene" as proposed by Richard Dawkins the beginning and the end that bookends our humanity?  We would like to think not.

There must be more to the algorithmic universe.  If we've gone this far, it is a good bet that we can go much farther.  Somehow it must also be built in to our algorithmic brain that brought about  in various iterations  our hopes and dreams expressed by  philosophers, spiritual leaders and ordinary people in our history - the longing for this Enlightenment, the Nirvana that, the Eternal Bliss, Heaven, Salvation and all the higher meanings that transcend physical life.  

We would like to think that.