Everywhere I look I see order. Whether it be the vastness of space and the dispersement of galaxies or the muons dispersal in an atom, I see order.

Consciousness is very orderly as well. How many humans have been born and lived sharing the same basic parameters of consciousness? How many have been born without it? When you think of the complexity necessary for a structure to generate & sustain thought, it boggles the imagination.

I think it is the relativistic nature of the universe that provides for the perception of chaos. After all if an infant sees a brown truck pull up and a man carrying a package come to his door, he has no understanding of the reasons for that event, his appearance or anything else. His parents, however, are fully aware that this is the UPS man and he is delivering a package they ordered two weeks ago. They know exactly what is inside the package, even without opening it. They see the order in all these events whereas to the infant it is purely random and inexplicable.

But the parents look across the street and see a car pull up in their neighbors driveway. They've never seen this car before and have no idea who it is or why they are there. This event is purely random to them because they could not see the logical order that put that car in that driveway.

Their neighbors however know this is the appraiser who is going to appraise their house and was scheduled to arrive at 2PM. To them this event is not random at all.

I believe this is how our relationship of the universe must be. We can't know everything and so much appears random and chaotic. However that which we do understand appears orderly and predictable.

I've received strong reactions against the cause & effect, orderly,equilibrium universe. Some feel this order in all things excludes personal choice-that a cause and effect universe somehow robs one of free will. I don't see this either. I see billions of folks with free-will and society is the coherent result of these interactions. The future cannot be predicted in any absolute manner, rather only general trends can be identified based on previous observations of human interaction.

Consciousness becomes a variable. How folks react to any event will depend on all sorts of variables we cannot yet perceive or measure. Consciousness therefore supercedes mechanical reaction and is likely our link to another dimension of the universe. Without consciousness our world's course would be determined solely by mechanical interactions of energy conversion. Each wave could be predicted were one to see how the solar energy is converted into heat and heat into motion.

Yet without such knowledge order then becomes chaos. Chaos seems to become order. It doesn't matter to us whether chaos is real or not, as it appears real. At no point in human evolution will the perception of chaos cease to exist.

That's my 35 cent Spinoza-esque lecture for the day.

;-)