Winning is a conventional dictionary word, though. You can't easily just redefine it without causing confusion. "Winning" and "maximising" have different definitions and connotations.

Right, but you could be wrong about it being randomized, or having negative expected value; not winning it can be taken as evidence that you're not being rational.

Suppose that everyone on your street other than you plays the lotto; you laugh at them for not being rational. Every week, someone on your street wins the lotto - by the end of the year, everyone else has become a millionaire. Doesn't it seem like you might have misunderstood something about the lottery?

Of course, it could be that you examine it further and find that the lottery is indeed random and you've just noticed a very improbable event. It was still evidence that was worth investigating.

I don't accept that this Universe creates things that he has no information for

It is possible to create something without having the information for it. The classic example; if enough monkeys type at random on enough typewriters for long enough, then sooner or later (probably much, much later) one of them will randomly type out the complete works of Shakespeare. Even if none of the monkeys have ever heard of Shakespeare.

I think yes, more ordered state must be unsustainable, eternally. But, chaos also must be unsustainable. If so [...]

You're putting the cart before the horse here. You've said that they must be - why must they be? If they are then what predictions does their being so let you make and how have you tested them?

What, for that matter, are your formal definitions of order and chaos? The way I'd define them, chaos exists mostly on a quantum level and when you start to generalise out correlates start showing up on a macroscopic level really quickly, and then it's not chaos anymore because it's - at least in principle - predictable.

I mean it's not silly to suppose that selection and mutation - with the former being the order enforcing part of evolution and the latter being the 'chaotic' part, operate in cycles. I believe if you model evolution of finite populations using Fokker Planck equations you tend to have an increasing spread of phenotypes between periods of heavy selection - but it's not really an area I've much interest in so I couldn't say for sure.

We have two systems modelling evolution at Earth. 1) the astronomical system (biggest size and less evolved), which is our ancestor, but we are inside it, he created us. This system is a perfect machine, but not intelligent, not rational like us. Whatever, he is the agent behind natural selection, because he is the whole environment. 2) The second system is untenable, but he must exists, because here there is mind, consciousnesses and our ancestral astronomic has no mind.

I don't know what this means. You're assigning an overarching system agency. But agency tends to mean that something is alive and thinking in English. Like a human would be said to have agency, whereas a computer - at least in the common "I've got one under my desk" sense - wouldn't. Systems don't tend to be considered to have gender in English either. In French lots of words are gendered but in English very few are. The only English things I can think of that are gendered other than living creatures are ships; traditionally thought of as female.

The second system just seems to be undefined.

I don't accept that this Universe creates things that he has no information for, so, the system that made the emergence of mind here must be superior to the Universe.

If you want to find a human how easy is that for you to do? Turn out of your front door and go to town and you'll probably find a fair number of them. If you want to find a specific human how much information do you need? I believe if you start off knowing nothing about them other than that they're somewhere on Earth you only really need something like 32 bits of information but in any case it's a lot more.

If you want to create a table you just make a table. It's not hard. If you want to create a specific table design you need to know what it looks like at the very least.

If you want to create a child you need a partner. If you want to create a brown haired, blue eyed girl and no other kids besides ... you're probably going to be off picking particular partners to up your chances or running off to play with genetic engineering.

Generally the rule is that the more picky you want to be the more info you need.

If you just wanted to create a person, and nothing else, you would require a lot of information. If you wanted to create an entire universe you would need very little information. The universe is very large, and seems to consist mostly of repetitions of fairly simple things, which suggests to me an informationally sparse genesis.

And if he is ex-machine, makes no sense to talk about ordered or chaotic states. He must be more sustainable than the Universe. I am not talking about supernatural gods, I am suggesting a natural superior system from which this thing called consciousness is coming from..

Do you need to suppose a system at all? If what you're talking about can be defined entirely in terms of a conflict between order and chaos - which really just seems to be evolution in progress. What explanatory power does this system have?

So, it is possible that a natural super-system existing beyond our universe have transmitted before the Big Bang the informations for the mind appears here at the right time.

Sure, anything's possible. But how probable is it and what grounds do you have for believing that it's that probable?

In the alternation between cycles, there are the alternations between dominant and recessive. If chaos is dominant here and now, the ordered state is weak and a loser, till the chaos being extinct. And rationality is more relative to order than chaos. But rationality is not the wisdom. Must have a third superior state. What do you think ?

Broadly you seem to be saying something to the effect of: In the absence of strong selection pressures the trend is towards disorder and decay. Which I agree with. And I can see how that would relate to rationality - there are systems, like schooling, that lose their purpose and essentially go insane in the absence of strong demands. Why are schools so crappy? A large part of it seems to be because adults don't have an economic need for children at that age and it's politically expedient to conduct education in a certain way that seems to produce work - without actually testing whether that work is useful because by that point the government will be out of power.

I suspect rationality carries connotations in your language that it doesn't necessarily have in English. If a chaotic/random/brute force method of traversing the search space turns out to be better suited to certain situations I'd assign it a really high prior that people who define themselves as rationalists would make their decisions in that regard by throwing dice or some equivalent that introduced chaos into their actions. Like my passwords - what are my passwords? I don't know. Most of them are 128 character gibberish.

If you think of rationality as systematised winning it seems more like: Whatever works. Than anything particularly tied to a specific selection/mutation ratio.

An embryo gets " mind" because it comes from a superior hierarchic system that exists beyond his "Universe" (the womb). The superior system is the human species, his parents.

Well, an embryo develops a mind because it's got the genetic code for it - which, yes, comes from the larger external system that evolved that code. Is that what you meant?

So, it is possible that a natural super-system existing beyond our universe have transmitted before the Big Bang the informations for the mind appears here at the right time.

I must admit, I don't see how that follows. Are you suggesting our universe was designed specifically as a "womb" to create us? That's the only analogy I can see, and evolutionary advantage seems a simpler reason for sentience to evolve - although I guess those aren't mutually exclusive, if this "natural super-system existing beyond our universe" anticipated that would result in us. But why postulate this? It could as easily have designed the universe as a "womb" to produce muffins! We could as easily be part of this muffin-womb. (Man, there's a sentence I never expected to type.)

If chaos is dominant here and now, the ordered state is weak and a loser, till the chaos being extinct. And rationality is more relative to order than chaos.

But science again and again has discovered that what we thought was "chaos" is merely the complex result of simple rules - order, in other words, that we can exploit with rationality.

And rationality is more relative to order than chaos. But rationality is not the wisdom. Must have a third superior state. What do you think ?

If rationality works in ordered states, what's the analog that works in "chaotic" states?

Thanks, MugaSofer, for yours constructive reply. No, I am not a native English and my brain was hard-wired at the salvage jungle here, so, I think is a good opportunity for me debating our different experiences and world views. I hope that it must be curious for you too.

It certainly is that.

Yes, these things (personality, memories, etc.) composes our " state of being" and they are merely product of brains/nature.

So ... what's left? Doesn't that explain everything we mean by "mind"?

But, we have a real phenomena where we watch the emergence of consciousnesses without being product of brains: the embryo. There is no natural architecture able to be conscious of its existence, neither are the brains alone. So, where comes from the conscious state of embryos? From a superior hierarchic system that exists beyond his universe (the womb), and this system is called " human species" .

So, it is not zero the probability that human mind is product of a hidden superior natural system whose bits-information are invading our immediate world and being aggregated to our synapses, besides the possibility that it was encrypted into our genes (if my models about Matrix/DNA are right).

I've replied to this assertion elsewhere; hope I got the interpretation right.

No, evolution will make us more suitable to real natural world. But, due the alternation between chaos and order, and due our origins coming from chaos, the flow of order (which is the basis for rationality) is the baby and weak force just now. Chaos is dying, order is growing, but now, chaos still is the strongest, so. irrationality and randomness are the winners, by while.

You know, I'm not sure what you mean by "chaos". If it's just randomness, rationality can tell you how to choose ptimally using probabilities; perhaps that's not what you mean? Is it complexity?

I don't understand your question. Being still virgin and untouchable, the elements of Amazon hidden niches are witness of life's origins. And we see chaos here. So, our origins came from terrestrial chaotic state of Nature, which came from ordered state of Cosmos... Cyclic alternations.

Oh, I think I get it; the Amazon is emblematic of Earth before civilization, right? The ancestral environment. Which is, naturally, where we evolved.

Natural world is the Universe, not this terrestrial biosphere alone. This biosphere is a kind of disturbance, a noise, in relation to the ordered state of Cosmos. Biosphere is product of an entropic process, like the radiation of sun. So, the disturbance is corrected by the ordered Cosmos, from which is coming the emergence of those rules you are talking about. The curious thing is that humans are the carriers of those rules, we are bringing order to our salvage environment.

But even the biosphere follows laws, even if sometimes the results are so complex we have trouble discerning them.

The Universe, as a conglomerate of galaxies, seems to be mass with no shape, not a system. We don't know if there is a nucleus, relations among parts, etc. We can't know if it is ordered or chaotic. Evolution is the result of a flow of energy moving inside this Universe. Like any fetus is under evolution due a genetic flow producing more designed looking structures. The source of this "evolution" is a natural system (human species) living beyond the fetus' universe (the womb). This is the unique real natural parameter we have for theories about the universe.

Sorry; by "evolution" I meant natural selection. You know, Darwinism?

It is not magical thinking, it is the normal natural chain of causes and effects. Every system that reaches an ordered state is attacked by entropy, which produces chaos, from which lift up order again, but each cycle is more complex than the ancestors cycles. At chaotic states, like our biosphere, generations of empty minds are more likely to be winners, while generations of reasonable minds must be losers at short time and the final winner at long time. But, maybe the jungle is teaching me everything wrong. What do you think?

Well, I understand physically entropy is always increasing, and replicators tend to overrun available resources and improve via selection, but I'm not clear on these "cycles".