Taken from http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/This is the part I want to talk about specifically. It's reminiscent of
universal Darwinism but it brings something so much more to the table. It offers an explanation to why there is something rather than nothing, why and how reality exists, and how the Universe was initiated. Douglas Adams' idea, combined with universal Darwinism and other related theories, is potentially the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Is it possible that there could have been nothing? How could have the Universe, or reality, have been different? Is it true that the Universe was spawned from reality simply by a trick of logic, a tautology carrying zero information, that goes without saying? The idea boggles my mind. I haven't properly been able to think it through yet, although I've been pondering it since yesterday afternoon, when I read it in Adams' posthumous anthology
The Salmon of Doubt.
I want to pick up on a few other things that came around today. I was fascinated by Larry (again), talking about tautology, because there's an argument that I remember being stumped by once, to which I couldn't come up with a reply, because I was so puzzled by the challenge and couldn't quite figure it out. A guy said to me, 'yes, but the whole theory of evolution is based on a tautology: that which survives, survives' This is tautological, therefore it doesn't mean anything. I thought about that for a while and it finally occurred to me that a tautology is something that if it means nothing, not only that no information has gone into it but that no consequence has come out of it. So, we may have accidentally stumbled upon the ultimate answer; it's the only thing, the only force, arguably the most powerful of which we are aware, which requires no other input, no other support from any other place, is self evident, hence tautological, but nevertheless astonishingly powerful in its effects. It's hard to find anything that corresponds to that and I therefore put it at the beginning of one of my books. I reduced it to what I thought were the bare essentials, which are very similar to the ones you came up with earlier, which were anything that happens happens, anything that in happening causes something else to happen causes something else to happen and anything that in happening causes itself to happen again, happens again. In fact you don't even need the second two because they flow from the first one, which is self-evident and there's nothing else you need to say; everything else flows from that. So, I think we have in our grasp here a fundamental, ultimate truth, against which there is no gain-saying. It was spotted by the guy who said this is a tautology. Yes, it is, but it's a unique tautology in that it requires no information to go in but an infinite amount of information comes out of it. So I think that it is arguably therefore the prime cause of everything in the Universe. Big claim, but I feel I'm talking to a sympathetic audience.
Continue reading at http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/
Have we found our answer, or at least something close to it?