Seems to be necessary - on personal and universal levels.
We’ve always needed order to make sense of stuff. Where does the tiger hide? Which berries are edible? What causes this and that? Because information never stops, we’ve had to organize it into manageable chunks - to reduce it to categories, collections, rules, laws, theories, algorithms, etc.. We had to invent the forest to avoid being overwhelmed by the trees.
As creatures who contemplate death, we also try to make sense out of that.
At the universal level, the constituent stuff of the external world (assuming a sane world exists outside of our heads) requires rules in order to get along. Unregulated stuff would bump into other stuff and make a mess. It would be chaotic, whimsical stuff.
Assumptions
Some question whether order is real, or an artifact, imposed on physical reality by human need. This series (although perhaps an example of imposed order) assumes that order is a necessary quality of a sane universe existing outside our heads. Others ask the opposite question - is order something more real than physical reality? (It’s the question asked by Plato when he talked about perfect forms - the “trees” vs “treeness” thing.) This article doesn’t truck with such semantic nonsense - but the notion of system-level order might come close.
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