rosborne979 wrote:I wasn't suggesting that there is anything more required.
I simply find it interesting that there is an aspect to the Universe which is not matter or energy or space or time. And it is an aspect which we perceive.
Are there natural laws which govern "pattern" just as there are laws of physics for matter/energy and space/time?
Matter/Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed in form. Does the same law apply to "pattern"?
How is there anything
other than matter/energy constrained by space/time? Their representation in our brain is a physical pattern of neural network linkages, where changing physical arrangements of molecules create electrochemical potentials which can be activated to produce the energy pattern that reflects consciousness of the information.
The physical structure of spacetime (see "The Fabric of the Cosmos" by Roger Penrose) is the source of the "laws" that determine the movement and arrangement of the particles of mass/energy it contains (Mass tells spacetime how to curve, spacetime tells mass how to move). Models such as relativity, chaos theory, quantum mechanics and string theory are attempts to understand and explain these underlying laws, but I don't think any of them require additional laws or a non-material aspect for patterns to form or information to exist.
The laws may be quite different in other universes. The value of the constants that specify and control our universe may be the result of some overall law that governs the multiverse (if it exists), randomly determined in the big bang, or they may have evolved concurrently with spacetime.
Of course patterns can be destroyed. Just rearrange the matter/energy into a chaotic form instead of order. When a hard drive is wiped, the only copy of a book is burned, the last dodo is eaten or the tribe's oral historian dies, the information contained in their physical patterns is irretrievably gone.
There is no law that conserves patterns, and as long as entropy increases the universe is happy.
