i'm not at all prideful, but i don't understand at all how you feel qualified to say "the universe doesn't work that way."
A couple of science degrees.
but i also don't want to fight with a random person on the internet about what my eyes and my own experience and my own brain see as a very reasonable, very compelling set of ideas. so.
Fair enough! I see no real reason to argue either. There's nothing per-se wrong with the ideas -- if you get spiritual succor or philosophical satisfaction from your worldview, that's fine. I've just been sensitized to these things and have to be an asshole when people claim that actual science supports them, which it seemed like you were doing.
Stoicism is based on an entirely false understanding of nature and man's place in it, and it's still great-- but. The universe just doesn't work that way. Sorry.
It's hard to take you serious when you shoot down other options and simply say "The universe just doesn't work that way." without sharing with us how the universe works... ;)
You sweep with a broad brush using words like "entirely". Absolutes are never true...
Ooh, good point. Okay. Now, my first "the universe doesn't work that way" was to madgeylou. Now, the appearance that the laws of nature are stacked in favour of growing complexity is one you might get, looking at the world. An undifferentiated cloud after the big bang clumped into galaxies, the galaxies are in clusters, the clusters are strung out across the cosmos like giant tangled pearl necklace. So we're at a complex point in history.
Here is the problem: eventually, all matter in those galaxies is slowly, oh-so-slowly losing angular momentum to
gravitational waves, and will spiral into the black holes which lie at the center of most galaxies (or existing black holes will congregate there) -- then we have a pile of black holes. Not as pretty, not as complex. Eventually, with no influx of matter, those black holes evaporate, and all that's left is cold photon soup, which eventually mixes and comes to some equilibrium temperature, absolutely the same everywhere. There is no complexity in this picture, and that's where the laws of nature say we're headed in a trillion years or so.
(Provided dark energy doesn't accelerate the expansion of the universe to a "big rip" scenario where the atoms are torn apart first. There's no complexity
there, though, either. )
As far as science is concerned, the universe works on unfeeling laws and doesn't really want or tend to anything. Which is why we have religions and philosophy, because most people do not find that terribly satisfying.
Now, as for Stoicism... the original stoics were creationists who felt every species was created (by Zeus) with a purpose-- and rational humans must have been created to use their rational brains Blind evolution stumbled onto these big brains over a million generations, and she left in a hell of a lot of irrational baggage that the tools of stoic philosophy helps one deal with. Even if you are a creationist, neuroscience and psychology do demonstrate that our creator either wasn't aiming for rational beings, or wanted us to have to really work at it to get that way. Stoic philosophy offers tools to let you do that, but... the more "practical" cosmological/scientific parts of their school of philosophy are pretty demonstrably wrong. It denies the existence of atoms, for heaven's sake.
Sorry for the incredibly long, OT post. But James started it. :P