[FamousDrScanlon]

Hello, Ilargi. First time commenter here. I get your frustration as I’ve experienced it many times myself when attempting to convey the centrality of the MPP. Methinks the deterministic nature of the MPP triggers the defensive cognitive biases to fire off, including changing the subject. This, in my experience, is standard in almost all the humans anytime they are presented with evidence they are not in control. Normal human reaction & not a knock on anyone’s intellect.

Here is extra material for anyone interested in exploring the matter further.

The purpose of life is to disperse energy

“The truly dangerous ideas in science tend to be those that threaten the collective ego of humanity and knock us further off our pedestal of centrality. The Copernican Revolution abruptly dislodged humans from the center of the universe. The Darwinian Revolution yanked Homo sapiens from the pinnacle of life. Today another menacing revolution sits at the horizon of knowledge, patiently awaiting broad realization by the same egotistical species.

The dangerous idea is this: the purpose of life is to disperse energy.”

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10674

The Natural Science Underlying Big History

“Human beings and our cultural inventions are not special, unique, or apart from Nature; rather, we are an integral part of a universal evolutionary process connecting all such complex systems throughout space and time. Such evolution writ large has significant potential to unify the natural sciences into a holistic understanding of who we are and whence we came. No new science (beyond frontier, nonequilibrium thermodynamics) is needed to describe cosmic evolution’s major milestones at a deep and empirical level. Quantitative models and experimental tests imply that a remarkable simplicity underlies the emergence and growth of complexity for a wide spectrum of known and diverse systems. Energy is a principal facilitator of the rising complexity of ordered systems within the expanding Universe; energy flows are as central to life and society as they are to stars and galaxies. In particular, energy rate density—contrasting with information content or entropy production—is an objective metric suitable to gauge relative degrees of complexity among a hierarchy of widely assorted systems observed throughout the material Universe. Operationally, those systems capable of utilizing optimum amounts of energy tend to survive, and those that cannot are nonrandomly eliminated.”

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/tswj/2014/384912/

https://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~polsen/nbcp/sagan_whiteside_05_sm.pdf

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