…of course, falling through what may itself have been emergent logical, statistical and/or combinatorial self-regulation into the potential/stored energy of configuration states that generate and sustain complexity may have in some sense been the Universe’s necessary, if fatal, error.
Sure, it’s kind of cool to be able to exist, experience and adaptively reflect back upon whatever this life actually is – for a while, but it is possible that the kinds of complex system that can experience and/or think can only occur in a cosmos that is in some sense doomed to dissipative oblivion.
Or, perhaps, the universe can only ever appear as the kind of system that is destined for equilibriar apocalypse TO the kinds of minds that can possibly exist AS configuration states IN the kind of Universe that allows FOR those observational experiences, knowledge accrual and, eventually, technology of some but not necessarily familiar description.
There are various arguments for and against our own inevitability as passengers in, and functional microcosms of, this cosmological vessel but I think that they, and quite a lot of related thinking besides, are far too parochially narrow and tautologically self-deceptive as to their own privileged aspiration to any kind of perpetually defensible objective perspective.
Our failures, if indeed that is what they are, to comprehensively and/or completely understand the Universe are a feature (not a bug!) of that cosmological system.
The philosophical vector is that the essential questions and dynamical symmetries here are also those of self, subjectivity, experience, personality and – ultimately – of life and of death.
The cybernetic vector is that if we can define it, we can design it. Pragmatic perspicacity suggests that if we can design it, building is “simply” a problem for the engineers. Potentially. (Your own mileage may vary.)
In other consequences of this kind of thinking: machines can never be self-conscious and experience their own experience because we can also never (provably) be. Now, there’s something to think about and don’t let that it comes back to your own mind kid you as to the very real possibility that it can only ever appear to us this way, so how can we ever know a world that is in any manner “beyond” ourselves or unproblematically confirm that anything at all is completely, utterly and forever proven as objectively true?
We can not.
Daedelus Kite 