“Complex Varieties from Simple Laws?” (SB 2.10.10)
Thompson uses a “tinkertoy” analogy to help illustrate the improbability of producing complex consciousness based exclusively on elementary physical laws. In one example he questions, who would expect to produce a model of the Empire State Building by randomly assembling tinkertoy pieces? Thompson proposes that the empirical evidence rather suggests a necessary role for intelligence.
TRANSCRIPT: Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, Canto 2, Chapter 10, Text 10. “Complex Varieties from Simple Laws.” Alachua – September,1994 / (073)
[Text 10]:
After separating the different universes, the gigantic universal form of the Lord [Mahā-Viṣṇu], which came out of the Causal Ocean, the place of appearance for the first puruṣa-avatāra, entered into each of the separate universes, desiring to lie on the created transcendental water [Garbhodaka].
[repeating back and forth]
Purport by Srila Prabhupapda:
After analysis of the living entities and the Supreme Lord, Paramātmā, the independent source of all other living beings, Śrīla Śukadeva Gosvāmī is now presenting the prime necessity for devotional service to the Lord, which is the only occupational business of all living entities. The Supreme Lord Śrī Kṛṣṇa and all His plenary portions and extensions of plenary portions are nondifferent from one another, and thus the supreme independence is in each and every one of them. In order to prove this, Śukadeva Gosvāmī (as promised to King Parīkṣit) describes herein the independence of the puruṣa-avatāra Personality of Godhead, even in the sphere of the material creation. Such activities of the Lord are also transcendental, and therefore they are also līlā, or pastimes, of the Absolute Lord. Such pastimes of the Lord are very conducive to the hearers for self-realization in the field of devotional service. Some may argue, “Then why not relish the transcendental līlā of the Lord as exhibited in the land of Mathurā and Vṛndāvana, which are sweeter than anything in the world?” Śrīla Viśvanātha Cakravartī Ṭhākura replies that the pastimes of the Lord in Vṛndāvana are meant to be relished by advanced devotees of the Lord. Neophyte devotees will misunderstand such supreme transcendental activities of the Lord, and therefore the Lord’s pastimes in the material sphere related to creation, maintenance and destruction are verily relishable by the prākṛta, or mundane devotees of the Lord. As the yoga system mainly based on bodily exercises is meant for the person who is too much attached to the bodily conception of existence, similarly the Lord’s pastimes related to the creation and destruction of the material world are for those who are too materially attached. For such mundane creatures the functions of the body and the functions of the cosmic world through physical laws in relationship with the Lord are also therefore included in understanding of the lawmaker, the Supreme Personality of Godhead. The scientists explain the material functions by so many technological terms of material law, but such blind scientists forget the lawmaker. The Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam points out the lawmaker. One should not be amazed by the mechanical arrangement of the complicated engine or dynamo, but one should praise the engineer who creates such a wonderful working machine. That is the difference between the devotee and the nondevotee. Devotees are always full with praising the Lord, who directs the physical laws. In the Bhagavad-gītā (9.10) the direction of the Lord upon the material nature is described as follows:
mayādhyakṣeṇa prakṛtiḥ
sūyate sacarācaram
hetunānena kaunteya
jagad viparivartate
“The material nature full of physical laws is one of My different energies; therefore it is neither independent nor blind. Because I am transcendentally all-powerful, simply by My glancing over material nature, the physical laws of nature work so wonderfully. The actions and reactions of the physical laws work on that account, and thus the material world is created, maintained and annihilated again and again.”
Men with a poor fund of knowledge, however, become astonished by studying the physical laws both within the construction of the individual body and within the cosmic manifestation, and foolishly they decry the existence of God, taking it for granted that the physical laws are independent, without any metaphysical control. The Bhagavad-gītā (9.11) replies to this foolishness in the following words:
avajānanti māṁ mūḍhā
mānuṣīṁ tanum āśritam
paraṁ bhāvam ajānanto
mama bhūta-maheśvaram
[5:00]
“The foolish men [mūḍhāḥ] do not know the Personality of Godhead in His eternal form of bliss and knowledge.” The foolish man thinks of the transcendental body of the Lord as something like his own, and therefore he cannot think of the unlimited controlling power of the Lord, who is not visible in the acting of the physical laws. The Lord is, however, visible to the naked eyes of people in general when He descends Himself by His own personal potency. Lord Kṛṣṇa incarnated Himself as He is and played very wonderful parts as the Lord Himself, and the Bhagavad-gītā concerns such wonderful actions and knowledge. Yet foolish men will not accept Lord Kṛṣṇa as the Supreme Lord. Generally they consider the infinitesimal and infinite features of the Lord because they themselves are unable to become either the infinitesimal or the infinite, but one should know that the infinite and infinitesimal sizes of the Lord are not His highest glories. The most wonderful manifestation of the Lord’s power is exhibited when the infinite Lord becomes visible to our eyes as one of us. Yet His activities are different from those of the finite beings. Lifting a mountain at the age of seven years and marrying sixteen thousand wives in the prime of His youth are some of the examples of His infinite energy, but the mūḍhas, after seeing them or hearing about them, decry them as legendary and take the Lord as one of them. They cannot understand that the Lord Śrī Kṛṣṇa, although in the form of a human being by His own potency, is still the Supreme Lord with full potency as the supreme controller.
When, however, the mūḍhas give submissive and aural reception to the messages of the Lord as in the Śrīmad Bhagavad-gītā or in the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam through the channel of disciplic succession, such mūḍhas also become devotees of the Lord by the grace of His pure devotees. And for this reason only, either in the Bhagavad-gītā or in the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, the pastimes of the Lord in the material world are delineated for the benefit of those men with a poor fund of knowledge.
om ajñāna-timirāndhasya
jñānāñjana-śalākayā
cakṣur unmīlitaṁ yena
tasmai śrī-gurave namaḥ
śrī-caitanya-mano-'bhīṣṭaṁ sthāpitaṁ yena bhū-tale
svayaṁ rūpaḥ kadā mahyaṁ dadāti sva-padāntikam
Translation:
After separating the different universes, the gigantic universal form of the Lord [Mahā-Viṣṇu], which came out of the Causal Ocean, the place of appearance for the first puruṣa-avatāra, entered into each of the separate universes, desiring to lie on the created transcendental water [Garbhodaka].
So… quite a long purport, and Śrīla Prabhupāda covers a lot of points.
So, let's see, one of the first points that he made here is that the Supreme Lord Śrī Kṛṣṇa is completely independent and that Śukadeva Gosvāmī is pointing that out in connection with the creation of the material universe. So Śrīla Prabhupāda points out that the activities of the Lord in creating the material universe are also līlā of the Supreme Personality of Godhead. So the material universe does not come about by some automatic process. But it's actually personally created by the different expansions of the puruṣa-avatāra, and this done according to their will. So they exhibit independence in this connection.
Śrīla Prabhupāda makes an interesting point here as to why the Bhāgavatam is presenting this information considering the creation. So he makes the point that: Well, after all, the transcendental pastimes of the Lord in Vṛindāvana are far superior to the pastimes of the mundane creation. They are sweeter than anything that exists anywhere. So why not simply relish these pastimes? Why bother with these descriptions of creation? And so Śrīla Prabhupāda makes the point that the descriptions of the creation are there for the sake of the mundane devotee. That's an interesting idea: Who is a mundane devotee? So you don't have to answer that one. But at least the mundane people who [unclear], these pastimes are very important because as Śrīla Prabhupāda points out, the pastimes of Kṛṣṇa in Vṛindāvana are on a very elevated platform, and various targeted advanced devotees can relish these pastimes. But if a person isn't highly advanced then he can misunderstand the pastimes of Kṛṣṇa in Vṛindāvana. So for that reason, the pastimes of the Lord in connection with the material creation are also described in great detail in the Bhāgavatam.
[10:45]
So, Śrīla Prabhupāda then goes on to make some points concerning the physical laws. So, of course the creation means the institution of the physical laws, and of course in the modern day and age the creational emphasis is placed on the laws of physics. And so all kinds of questions have come up concerning the relation between God and the laws of physics. And people have been writing books about that subject for quite some time.
One idea that inevitably comes up is that the laws of physics act independently of the Supreme Lord, that everything is just running according to certain laws. And you may say: Well perhaps Kṛṣṇa originally set up those laws and set everything into motion, but then everything runs simply according to laws. In fact, that's not actually correct. The actual fact is that the independent action of the Supreme Lord, by his will, is involved in every step of the creation, maintenance, and annihilation of the material universe.
Therefore, actually the creation of this material world and its maintenance and destruction and so forth, this is part of the pastimes of the Lord. And that was good news actually for the [unclear]... for a mundane person because it means that actually we're surrounded by the pastimes of the Supreme Lord, we just have to become aware of what's going on around us. It's not that the pastimes of the Supreme Lord are something very much unattainable for persons on the mundane platform. Of course in the Bhagavad-gītā there are so many statements in which Kṛṣṇa says that I am the taste in water. He compares himself with the greatest of different categories of beings – out of the many different categories seen in the world, the greatest is representative of Kṛṣṇa. So the different qualities and actions of matter in the material world are there specifically because of the actions of the Supreme Personality of Godhead. It's not something like just winding up a clock and letting it run.
Of course, you can make some analogies here. If you build a clock and wind it up and let it run, it doesn't do anything very exciting – just the hands move around at a steady pace and that's all it has ever done, that's it. Now consider a computer in contrast to a clock. You can build a computer and set that into motion. Push the start button, and the thing boots up, and then what happens? Well, if you don't do anything more, the computer just sits there and the cursor will blink on the screen. That's all that happens.
So then you have to enter some program in the computer and if you do that, then the computer will execute that program. But that will also become pretty stereotyped after a while. It will just continue executing the same program. Then if you put in more software it will do more things, but whatever the computer does is determined by the software that you feed into it. And we haven't yet seen a computer in which you can feed it a software package [unclear]... creativity, and then after you do that the computer becomes creative and you don't have to feed any more information into it. It can write novels and come up with all kinds of amazing things through its own creativity. We don't actually know of a software like this. I guess maybe somebody was trying to design that.
[15:10]
One hears about artificial intelligence, but somehow we haven't met any artificially intelligent computers yet. Actually, artificial intelligence was very popular in the early days of computers. After the days when they were called giant electronic brains, this was the term that was used. But now the computers have become much more powerful. For even the laptop computer you can buy for a few hundred dollars today is much more powerful than the huge computers that they had years ago. Artificial intelligence isn't so much talked about because the whole program failed.
However, people discovered they could do a lot of things with computers because by very elaborately programming a computer you can do many complicated things according to the program and that turns out to be very useful. So, one could say that the material universe is similar to that. Kṛṣṇa is programming the material universe and He's constantly introducing His own input.
The material universe has its metaphysical side as well as its physical side. And the things that are happening physically are due to the metaphysical elements. So this is an aspect which is very mystifying to the mundane scientists. The big emphasis that you find in science is that everything is just running according to certain laws, and these laws are basically something very simple. They like to emphasize this. Ultimately, there's underlying simplicity in the universe, and that all the complexity came about by the evolutionary process. So the idea is that you start with some simple things and you wind up with complex things like human beings. And then figure out all about this sort of thing. But there's really no explanation for this. Ultimately, this explanation involves just evoking chance. For example, you start with atoms – I won’t go into exactly what atoms are [unclear]...
But imagine you've got a lot of little billiard balls with pegs sticking out of them – a tinkertoy-type atom. So imagine that you have a lot of little balls and pegs and you just throw them together just sort of mash them together randomly. Is it likely that they're going to come together and make a model of a windmill? You can try this experiment, I think tinkertoys are still built. And you can try it, you can put a bunch of tinkertoy parts together in a big box and shake it like anything and see if you get a model of a windmill or maybe a model of the Empire State Building or something like that. The thing is, you won't, and the reason is easy enough to understand.
There's nothing in the shapes of those pieces that would force them to come together to make a model of, say a windmill. There's just nothing in those shapes. You can try a different experiment, you can take one of these big crossword puzzles in which the pieces only fit together in one certain way. And if you made them so they had a decent size and something like that, and put in a big box and shook it long enough, it could well be that the thing will all come together because the pieces are pre-designed so they sit in a certain way. And they can sit together by chance in various ways until they sit in the right fashion, you could keep on going and eventually the puzzle would come together. You could do that. So the point is, that will only work if the puzzle pieces are shaken in such a way that they go together in one particular fashion. And that means the whole thing was designed in advance by intelligence.
That's the difference between the tinkertoy case and the puzzle case. In the case of the tinkertoy, there's no design in the shapes of those little pieces which would cause them to go together so they can make the model windmill. But in the case of the puzzle there is design in the pieces so it only goes together in one particular way to make the complete picture. So, we see in the material world, that so many incredible things are there in the material creation. But if you look at the description of atoms, let's say, in modern science, it's more likely the tinkertoy parts.
[20:20]
Much more can be said about what they say atoms are. But basically, it's a very simple little thing, and the atoms sit together in a certain simple way, and that's the end of the story. So if you have a bunch of those parts and they're all ramming into one another at random, you can't expect that all these different complex things that we see in the world are going to come out from that. So yeah, all these things are there. So the explanation is that behind the action of the laws of nature, there's the intelligence and the guiding control of the Supreme Personality of Godhead. So all of these manifestations of matter are actually being controlled.
To make another analogy, it's like having clay and a sculptor. Clay you could say by nature is simple, at least in the gross sense it’s simple, because it’s just sort of a smooth [unclear] stuff – it's got some stickiness, it's got viscosity and whatever else it has, it has mass, and I guess that pretty much sums up the important features of clay. But if you have a sculptor, the sculptor can shape the clay into some statue. And the statue may have all kinds of artistic properties. So that some student of art history can write an essay about it and say: Well, this sculpture is in the style of Praxiteles, the famous Greek sculptor and so on and so forth. So, because the intelligence and the guiding power of the sculptor is there, the clay can assume this very remarkable form. So there are two things involved: there's the properties of the clay and there's the guidance and intelligence of the sculptor.
Going into the material universe, what that corresponds to is you have the physical laws of nature, the things that you study in chemistry or physics and so on. And then you have the guiding intelligence of the Supreme Personality of Godhead, which is manifested at every point to cause these laws to bring forth all kinds of creations. Of course, creation is an ongoing thing. It's not just that the creation occurred in the beginning and that was the end of it. Of course it's interesting, the idea of starting in the beginning and progressing to the end. Interestingly enough it's pretty much a Christian idea. This is a point that we have been writing about lately in connection with the Forbidden Archeology book. But basically from Christianity, there's this concept that there’s a beginning of creation, usually thought to be not too long ago, and everything proceeds towards the end, which would be the second coming of Christ or something like that. So it’s linear and one dimensional.
But in the Vedic system you see that time is different, time goes in cycles. So there are many creations and within each cycle, there are sub-cycles, and then there are sub-sub-cycles within those. And so they're small creations and annihilations within the big creations and annihilations. So creation is always going on.
So that explains why it is possible also for things to come up repeatedly. This is an interesting point because you'll see in the Bhāgavatam that many things repeat themselves almost precisely. This is sometimes a bit mystifying. Of course Kṛṣṇa's pastimes repeat themselves within innumerable universes. Kṛṣṇa is going continuously on a grand tour through the different universes. So at any moment His pastimes are being manifest inside a particular universe, or perhaps many universes, in the material world.
But apart from that, even different things in the material world repeat so that a particular personality in the material world such as Mahārāja Pṛthu – he would come many times and thus different pastimes would develop on many different occasions within the material world. And as a result of this, in the Purāṇas you'll find different stories of the same personality, which vary. And I'm sure it's different in different texts. And so sometimes people will say, well, this looks like a contradiction because in this text it says this person did this, and then in another text it said that he did that. But the explanation generally given is that in different kalpas the same manifestation of different personalities and different activities occur, but there are variations on the theme. So, just like...