We cannot attribute any form of outside agency or predetermination in natural systems. The only form of determinancy that we can validly recognize as causal to the original organization of nature and to the continuing development of this organization, is through the meta-systemic organization and interaction of systems in relation to other systems. Such attribution of independent agency or predetermination to natural systems of any kind or order is considered to be a projection of human motive and human intention in the explanation of events and their origins. Natural order, unlike human-made order, is generally speaking "self-organizing" in an open meta-systemic context.

It follows logically that if we are to contemplate the original sense of order or disorder of the primordial state of physical reality, the origins of the universe, we must consider the possibilities of whether any system could have existed in an original sense, and what factors or events may have occurred that would eventuate in the organization of reality as we encounter it now.

There is a paradox about natural order, and that is it appears to rest upon a basic state of random disorder. The fact that everything appears in the long run to pass from a state of order to disorder does not preclude by itself the reverse possibility that ordered states may have arisen stochastically from disordered states. The likelihood of a system going from a state of disorder to one of increasing order, everything else being equal, appears highly unlikely. The only way we can consider this as arising is if the system that increased in order internally did so at the expense of a larger system that constituted a critical part of the environment of the ordered system.

It is difficult to understand how living systems for instance could have arisen from nothing, from a non-living state of nature. Science not only demands that we accept this as so, but attempts to show us how this could be so. Of course, if construed from a purely systems standpoint, there might not seem anything unusual about the organization of biological systems from a physical substrate. The emergent properties demonstrated by living systems might be understood as just that--as synergistic properties associated with the holistic organization of systems that, upon a basic level, are purely physical in character.

If we can imagine a thousand pennies being tossed every second at the same time, and their face-up value read instantly with each toss, we can predict at random that most like about half of the pennies will land tails up and the other half heads up. This is pretty much the basic state of a disorganized natural world. Now the likelihood that 2/3rds or 3/4 of the coins will all land with the same face value at the same toss decreases substantially, and the likelihood that all thousand coins, or nearly all thousand, all land with the same face-up value is even far more remote. The occasion for the spontaneous, stochastic organization of living systems from a non-living substrate is comparable to landing nearly all heads-up or tail-up coins among the entire population of pennies simultaneously. The coins could toss every second for thousands and thousands of years and still never arrive at this state of affairs. 

For life, it appears to have concatenated one time in our remote earth history, and never again. It is possible that it may have arisen multiple times in multiple places during a very brief window of our remote geological history, when conditions on earth were so complex and ripe for these kinds of events to occur. But this window, by geological standards, must have been a very brief epoch--perhaps only a few years, or a best a few thousand years in duration. Once life emerged, it appears to have done so in a fairly resilient and robust manner, such that until now, it has survived, adapted and evolved into a multiplicity of forms and possibilities. This evolution itself is nothing less than remarkable, as it again appears in fundamental ways to violate our preconceptions about the organization of natural systems--namely that systems go from a state of order to one of increasing disorder. The evolution of living forms, particularly the taxon cycle, appears to have produced increasingly complex and sophisticated living systems, and to have passed from a phase in which all of life was probably a single set of unicellular organisms, to what it is today, that is distributed between several major Kingdoms and many, many differentiated sub-groupings. This appears to mark the rise of increasingly ordered systems from systems that were originally less well organized.

It can therefore only be by a similar manner that we can explain the rise of physical systems in the universe, as the occurrence of a system of order in a background of natural disorder, however long or brief this may have been and however widespread or local a point in time and place we must consider. In terms of the rise of the universe, we have the notion of a genuine butterfly effect, and we can put forward on the basis of this the theory that the universe arose to its current states and distribution of matter an energy by a series of events now extremely remote in time and space, the long-term consequence has been the rise of increasingly organized natural systems from a background of random pattern. We cannot know how many butterflies may have originally occurred, and perhaps this number is curiously enough infinitely large as well. It would have been tantamount to a bias in our penny example, introduced at some early stage of the tossing events, that resulted in more pennies coming up heads than tails, and with each subsequent toss, the pennies biased in favor of the heads becoming increasingly biased in favor of the heads. In other words, we must hypothesize a certain structure of dependence of early events that influenced the outcome of subsequent event structures. 

If we adopt this kind of analogy, we might wonder what kind of early cyclical bias may have tipped the balance in favor of the kind of universe we have, versus some alternative form. For instance, though it theoretically can occur, we appear to find no real anti-matter in the known universe on a scale comparable to what we find matter, and in matter we find a uneven distribution between positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons. In other words, we do not find negatively charged protons, as least not as we have observed them, though we have found positively charged electrons, or positrons. We observe that most anti-particles do not stick around in the universe very long, and we must speculate whether the entire universe may not be asymmetrically lopsided in favor of the distribution of matter versus anti-matter.

This of course is probably an overly simplistic view of the fundamental structure and dynamics of the universe, but it is a good analogy for illustrating the natural organization of physical systems in reality. If at some early stage in its evolution the likelihood of matter or anti-matter were even distributed on a random basis, then something must have occurred that would have tipped the balance in favor of matter over anti-matter. Some set of events or general conditions must have occurred that favored the selection of matter over alternative states of anti-matter. Indeed it is very likely that the same universe, or universal state, could not be both matter and anti-matter at the same time unless the universe is more isotropic cosmologically in the grand sense than we are aware off. States of matter and anti-matter would be mutually destructive of one another in the same space-time manifold.

There is a fundamental sense in the natural organization of reality that we can refer to chaos as the grand design of natural systems, and that all order is based upon and derived from disorder. This makes the analogy of the collective coin toss a fitting model of how natural order can occur stochastically, even if and when the odds always tend to favor random events. In nature, order appears to be a subset of disorder. Non-random formations appear to arise out of a very large number of simultaneous random possibilities. The difference between the random pattern or background noise of physical reality and the non-random structures that arise appear to be one based upon the occurrence of dependency relationships. We can attribute to the endurance and developmental differentiation of non-random pattern in the Universe at all levels of the stratification of natural systems, to the development of interdependent relationships that tended to bias the outcomes of otherwise inherently random event structures. Thus, the kind of imperfect determinancy that we come to associate with natural systems, becomes in due course the butterfly effect of natural chaos. If we can attribute a fundamental sense of indeterminancy of systems of natural order, we can at the same time discover a profound sense of order to apparently, complexly disordered systems. Order and disorder appear like primordial Greek divinities, engaged in a kind of dialectical play in the fashioning of the natural world, with natural change being the consequence of their cosmological dance. We are their offspring.

Returning to the question of cosmology, there must have been a state and time in early stages of the universe (how early could this be if the universe proves to be eternal and infinite in time and space?) when protons were produced in fairly prodigious quantities, without the kinds of pathways that we can hypothesize that they might be produced today. During this period of time, for whatever sets of unknown reasons, these protons, produced in vast quantities, began coalescing into more organized states of matter. Protons thus produced generated large amounts of radiation, and this radiation in turn may have collided to produce, for instance, electrons and positrons. If protons were produced, we can hypothesize that anti-protons were also produced simultaneously, but for whatever reason did not appear to survive or build up to the massive quantities that we find protons. It is possible that protons that appear to be almost perfectly stable and hence long-lived as fundamental particles, are in this characteristic precisely opposite to anti-protons in that they may be extremely unstable and short-lived fundamental entities, virtually disappearing at the moment of their creation. I suspect that we might find in the universe today the production of massive quantities of protons wherever we find massive amounts of radiation of a very short wave-length being produced from a single source or area at the same time. If anti-protons do not survive that production process, then they must either become a part of that radiation emitted or else dissolve into some even more fundamental states of nature, or possibly some combination of both. 

It thus appears sensible that the chance development of stable configurations like protons, "practically, permanently perfect in almost every way," resulted in the biases of change events in the structure of the universe, and thus the rise of new interdependent systems that became no longer strictly subject to the laws of disorder. But I do not see protons as fundamental, self-constituent structures, which they are from a general systems standpoint, but rather as componential entities that are composed of yet more fundamental event structures, but this is a subject for future reference.

General Systems Essays, Vol. II