Persisting Patterns
The universe has a general organizing principle that I don't see talked about much: Patterns that are good at persisting tend to persist, and patterns that are bad at persisting tend to stop persisting.
It's not really a law of physics. It's more like a necessary truth, but it makes some predictions.
- Unstable elements will decay into stable ones.
- Brittle things will break into less brittle things.
- Species good at surviving will be selected for.
- High entropy low energy states will tend to stay that way.
- Stable societies will last longer than unstable ones.
I'm not the only person to think of this. Here are some quotes from others:
"Things that persist, persist; things that don’t, don’t. This tautology underlies every single phenomenon we see around us, from molecules to religions. The purpose of science is simply to discover how and why any given class of pattern manages to persist. Life is best understood as a group of patterns that are able to persist because they spontaneously duplicate themselves and adapt to change. Equally, an electron is a pattern that persists as a self-maintaining resonant mode in the electromagnetic field. The universe is what is left over when all the non-self-maintaining patterns have faded away." - Steve Grand
"Unchanging things don’t change, and changing things do change – until they change into things that don’t... [This] turns out to make surprisingly strong predictions about how the world works. If every changing thing really can change into an unchanging thing, then we should expect all changing things to change into unchanging things eventually." - Addy Pross
So what should we expect in the future? That the universe, at all levels of analysis, will be populated with patterns good at keeping themselves in existence, either through stability or through adaptability.