Tree of Life
2,748 views · Published 2 August 2011 · 0:37 · Indexed 11 October 2026
Channel: Paul Nathan · 2011 · Education
In the beginning was the Root Node, and the Root Node was....? The Root Node of a biological tree is its seed, the Root Node of our planet was a spec of dust from a nebula, the Root Node of our galaxy is a (supermassive) black hole. All these are themselves child nodes stemming from the ultimate Root Node - the big bang, the seed of our Universe. In this simulation, the Root Node did not spontaneously come into existence, I the programmer initialised it according to my will and then planted it in the fertile soil of my computer memory banks and away it grew. This tree happened to produce fruit, Blue Marble planets! The thought being that from the Root Node (Big Bang) all events (child nodes) ultimately led to our planet (leaf node) and the life on it. For what purpose? I did this because I thought it would be interesting to code, is this Universe a product of curiosity / experimentation? Can the Programmer analogy be extended into reality? There is one major problem with this though. As far as the computer is concerned, I am God because I act external to its rules and can cause Root Nodes to come into existence and I code the rules of the Universe (how about that for a defintion of God? Progenitor of Universe Root Nodes and Rulemaker) BUT I myself am a child node of my parents! This can go further and further back to the first human, planet, star, galaxy, Big Bang. Everything that has a beginning must have been preceded by something else (the word beginning automatically implies finiteness with respect to the past time), so what preceeded the Big Bang? Well, if you say God, then this entity may also have parents! Is God an extremely advanced alien? Thus the nature of everything may be fractal, universes within universes, Gods creating universes which go on to evolve Gods that create their own universes, computer simulations within computer simulations, trees within trees, but if so where does it stop? It cannot stop except with an entity that has always existed. The uncreated, the spontaneous Root Node that did not require coding or execution. How the hell can this be? I don't like where this argument has gone because it has ended up with an incomprehensible situation, how can something have always existed? Out of what? What frame of reference? What rules? What a mindfudge!
