A conversation with Tushar Singla on our annual pilgrimage to Thakkaran Farms — “What is life worth when all my preferences are already encoded inside me, you and I like girls not because we choose it but because it is coded inside us, its the code”.

Context

Back in Barcelona in December 2018 during the scouting course at MBP school I studied team formation of this well known face — Pep Guardiola.

Guardiola is regarded as one of the best football managers of all time. Perhaps more articles, blogs and podcasts have been made to understand his game formations than any other manager ever before. As a novice coach, three years back I spent a lot of time watching a lot of games and making an effort to infer his genius.

MBP taught me an interesting method to better achieve this - break a complex system into smaller systems to infer what the system is trying to achieve. For example a scout can break down systems(behaviours)of a Football team into various sections. For example

a) By Zone

Behaviors in first third/middle third/final third of a game in both offense & defense

b) By Phase of play

Behaviors when a team has the ball, when they lose it, when they recover it back

By going deeper, a scout is able to better infer patterns that a coach might have trained upon. In Guardiola’s team one obvious inference is they often foul immediately after losing the ball to prevent counterattack. The beauty of a Guardiola’s team for an analyst is in inferring several such systems which makes us marvel at his incredible mind.

NOW, the key question- when you see an repeatable pattern (system), what is the probability that the pattern is appearing game after game and season after season by random chance? or is the pattern coached? Do Football players organize themselves or do they need a coach? Keep the answers to yourself, we’ll come to it later.

Do systems originate out of thin air and assemble themselves or someone creates them?

Defining Systems

So what exactly is a system? Three definitions straight out of google are as follows

A set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network; a complex whole. A set of principles or procedures according to which something is done; an organized scheme or method. A set of detailed methods, procedures and routines created to carry out a specific activity, perform a duty, or solve a problem

Simply put, a system MUST contain a) the objective of the system; and b) how to achieve that objective. Lets combine these both and call it Information.

A system doesn’t exist without information. This is without exception.

A land full of steel, rubber and glass won’t randomly convert itself into a Mercedes no matter how much time you give it. A car manufacturing unit gives precise instruction to machines and workers on how to assemble and produce that gorgeous unaffordable car. Without input of Information in form of instructions a manufacturing unit would be useless.

Defining Information

A computer system has code, a manufacturing unit has procedures and a football team has coached behaviors. What is common between all of them?

Some intelligent mind put the rules down( Information) and created Systems.

There can be no systems which aren’t created by someone’s mind. Please try to think of any exceptions to this rule and find it.

Is machine learning an exception? No, machine learning algorithms learn from data sets to adapt and make new rules, BUT the objective of what to go after is decided by the creator of the program. An algorithm designed to find best stocks won’t go searching for best football players on its own.

Evolution- Putting it all together

Nanomotor

For few seconds, lets marvel at this piece of nanoengineering. This is a motor of size 45nanometers. To give you a perspective a human hair is around 75,000 nanometers. This small motor makes 100000 rotations per minute.(An full sized car at average speed makes 700 rotations per minute).

Is this motor a system? Yes. It has a function which is achieved by several parts moving together. So is it reasonable to infer that this machine was created by some set of rules which someone coded? or could this motor have assembled itself on its own? (remember the Mercedes example).

This highly complex and efficient motor is actually found in Archaea- the very first living cell on planet Earth. Yes there is a code which directs the motor on how to assemble itself and the manner in which it is going to function. This code is called DNA.

Remember Archaea is the least complex living cell that we know of.

As we’ve inferred above Information doesn’t exist without some intelligent mind creating it. DNA is Information. As Information cannot be generated by thin air without application of a conscious mind, hence DNA also couldn’t have been generated without application of an intelligent mind. GOD!

Life couldn’t have originated just from chemistry; chemistry doesn’t generate Information, chemistry doesn’t have a goal and chemistry isn’t self serving, but biology is. Anything without Information cannot ‘evolve’ itself into a System with Information.

Every living system has the DNA . DNA contains the code that directs the living system on how to reproduce, its primary objective. Darwin’s natural selection acts like an machine learning algorithm to constantly evolve the DNA to adapt the living system to its surroundings. But who put the Darwinian natural selection algorithm inside the first DNA code? An Intelligent Being. GOD?

Argument in a nutshell- A system cannot exist without information. Information cannot exist without an intelligent being creating it. Similarly, a living system could not have originated without information, who put in place this information inside the first living cells?