No matter how much order nor how many distinctions we make about the universe, in essence, it’s just a soup of subatomic waves and particles. Whether this represents some sort of primordial order or billions of years of entropy and chaos, is incidental.
As human beings, we gather information and give names to objects and ideas. These distinctions do not disturb the continuing primordial condition. You and I and all and everything emerged from and are suspended within this primordial soup. At the moment our material selves are people, but the probability exists for such material to be carrots.
How it is that this becomes this, and that becomes that? The universe is free to do as it does so nobody knows for certain. Speaking of knowing, consciousness itself may also be purely incidental; the universe has the freedom to create consciousness or not.
The freedom of the cosmos manifests as evolution. The universe and everything within it are evolving in real time. This is not to say that time is any more of a constant than anything else. It too is evolving, and time itself varies upon the circumstances of mass, gravity, velocity, and dimension. Although humanity has tried to treat it otherwise, time too is free.
For a while, leading physicists believed that the universe was machine-like, a deterministic mechanism of predictable cause and effect. Quantum theory’s reliance on probability and experiments with entanglement did away with that deterministic model. At the very smallest scale, the universe is alive with free movement, what’s called the “quantum jitters,” particles and waves virtually popping in and out of existence seemingly from out of nowhere. And deep down within all material things, as solid as they appear, including us, are the quantum jitters. We are never fully at rest, and not just from the effects of that cup of black coffee. The entire universe is constantly becoming, and all of us along with it.
The true nature of existence is inconceivable, even to clever primates like us. We are really good guessers, and we may have cracked one code of existence through higher mathematics, which is uncannily accurate. But basically, we’re still ignorant. In the face of the inconceivable and unknowable enormity of existence and the tentative nature of its contemplation, our pension to create order is understandable, if perhaps a fool‘s errand.
Order is so important to us that when things are disorderly, we get our panties in a bunch. We pass laws, create institutions, establish cultural norms and enforce them by persuasion, peer pressure, and punishment. This is order on a human scale, of course, which means the primordial soup of the universe itself is undisturbed. Whatever perturbations we suffer in human culture, like “The Dude” in the movie The Big Lebowski the universe abides. You gotta love that in a universe.
In any event, as free as it may be, to us the universe appears as if it has a purpose, one moment following another. Many people lean toward believing in a force, a God or Demi-urge, that guides the aspirations of time and space, and clearly something significant happened roughly 14 billion years ago that got the ball rolling. We keep trying to find out what that was, but all we can do is look backwards in space-time and do the math. And in the end, we may conclude “Hey, man, like that’s just your opinion.”
