Dear Pedro and Colleague,
On 27 Feb 2017, at 17:39, Pedro C. Marijuan wrote:
Dear Arturo and colleagues,
Very interesting piece, indeed. It has strongly reminded me Teilhard
de Chardin's views on the Omega Point of cosmic maximal complexity--
although this was for him not a pessimistic outcome but a brilliant
and up-beating prospect for all humankind. His eclectic views were
bitterly rejected by most of the scientific and religious
establishment of his time (no wonder that particularly by
evolutionary biologists); but the arrival of Internet, as well as
today's multi-level selection approaches, and the works of some
quantum information scientists (Tipler, Deutsch) have vindicated his
brave, Quixotic figure. Late Popes of the Catholic Church (Benedict
XVI) have also vindicated his whole intellectual legacy.
My favorite de Chardin's proposition is, from memory:
"We are not human beings having spiritual experiences, we are
spiritual beings having human experiences.
That is close to the theology of the neopytagorean Moderatus of Gades,
and close to the neoplatonist Plotinus, Porphyry, ... And they are
formally close to the "theology" of the universal numbers. (and even
intuitively so assuming the computationalist hypothesis in cognitive
science, through sequence of thought experiences).
It reminds me also of Shrî Aurobindo, when he said:
"What, you ask, was the beginning of it all?
And it is this ...
Existence that multiplied itself
For sheer delight of being
And plunged into numberless trillions of forms
So that it might
Find
Itself
Innumerably"
Tipler and Deutsch defend Everett "many-worlds", but computationalism
per se shows that very elementary arithmetic determines a web of
dreams, from which the physical reality is a sort of limiting
projection. Everett quantum mechanics (the usual minus the wave packet
reduction) confirms somehow the internal (canonical) web of dreams
interpretation of arithmetic.
I have some minor problems with the present essay, but substituting
some of the excessively teleological "purposive" terms about life
(perhaps all of them?), and using instead a more austere description
of organizational facts.... who knows! If life contains a unitary
principle, I think it is more subtle, and cannot be expressed in
unilateral physical terms
Provably so if we assume mechanism. Contrarily to a widely spread
opinion: mechanism is not compatible with even quite weak form of
materialism, or physicalism.
such as maximum entropy production, symmetry restoration, free
energy maximization, etc. Well, symmetry and information have more
clout and hidden complexity, so I express not a rejection but some
uneasiness regarding too direct "orthogenetic" views on biological
and social evolution.
My further suggestion --could it be a good idea that you change
Monod's style "unpleasantness" (Oh, we the accidental discover that
we are alone in the cosmos!) and point towards some of Teilhard's
and Vernadsky's noosphere and the Omega Point? You would have
several curious items to choose...
More opinions??
God created the natural numbers, and saw that it was good.
Then she said: add yourself, and saw that is was good.
Then she said: multiply yourself. And then ... she said: oops, ... and
lose control.
Like the complexity of the prime numbers distribution already
illustrates, the logicians know that classical logic + addition of
integers + multiplication of integers leads to the Church-Turing
Universality of the reality under concern, "generating *all* universal
numbers, and they know that the universal machines, or universal
numbers put a lot of mess in Plato Heaven. The price of universality
is loss of controllability, and the appearances of realms defying all
complete theories.
The physical reality is the border of the arithmetical reality "seen
from inside (by the universal numbers)". The breaking of symmetries
are in the universal mind, like the symmetries themselves. The
universal mind is the mind common to all universal numbers.
("universal" always taken in the Church-Turing-Kleene-Post-Markov
sense).
The "god" of the machine (the relatively locally finite being) seems
to be like a universal baby playing hide and seek with itself.
I doubt we are alone in the probable apparent Cosmos that we can
observe, but we are not alone in Arithmetic, provably so if you assume
Digital Mechanism (a thesis equivalent with the belief that
consciousness is invariant for some recursive permutations).
Best wishes to you, and all,
Bruno
Best wishes to all--Pedro
El 24/02/2017 a las 16:24, tozziart...@libero.it escribió:
Dear FISers,
hi!
A possible novel discussion (if you like it, of course!):
A SYMMETRY-BASED ACCOUNT OF LIFE AND EVOLUTION
After the Big Bang, a gradual increase in thermodynamic entropy is
occurring in our Universe (Ellwanger, 2012). Because of the
relationships between entropy and symmetries (Roldán et al., 2014),
the number of cosmic symmetries, the highest possible at the very
start, is declining as time passes. Here the evolution of living
beings comes into play. Life is a space-limited increase of energy
and complexity, and therefore of symmetries. The evolution
proceeds towards more complex systems (Chaisson, 2010), until more
advanced forms of life able to artificially increase the symmetries
of the world. Indeed, the human brains’ cognitive abilities not
just think objects and events more complex than the physical ones
existing in Nature, but build highly symmetric crafts too. For
example, human beings can watch a rough stone, imagine an amygdala
and build it from the same stone. Humankind is able, through its
ability to manipulate tools and technology, to produce objects (and
ideas, i.e., equations) with complexity levels higher than the
objects and systems encompassed in the pre-existing physical
world. Therefore, human beings are naturally built by evolution in
order to increase the number of environmental
symmetries. This is in touch with recent claims, suggesting that
the brain is equipped with a number of functional and anatomical
dimensions higher than the 3D environment (Peters et al., 2017).
Intentionality, typical of the living beings and in particular of
the human mind, may be seen as a mechanism able to increase
symmetries. As Dante Alighieri stated (Hell, XXVI, 118-120), “you
were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge”.
In touch with Spencer’s (1860) and Tyler’s (1881) claims, it looks
like evolutionary mechanisms tend to achieve increases in
environmental complexity, and therefore symmetries (Tozzi and
Peters, 2017). Life is produced in our Universe in order to
restore the initial lost symmetries. At the beginning of life,
increases in symmetries are just local, e.g., they are
related to the environmental niches where the living beings are
placed. However, in long timescales, they might be extended to the
whole Universe. For example, Homo sapiens, in just 250.000 years,
has been able to build the Large Hadron Collider, where artificial
physical processes make an effort to approximate the initial
symmetric state of the Universe. Therefore, life is a sort of
gauge field (Sengupta et al., 2016), e.g., a combination of forces
and fields that try to counterbalance and restore, in very long
timescales, the original cosmic symmetries, lost after the Big
Bang. Due to physical issues, the “homeostatic” cosmic gauge field
must be continuous, e.g., life must stand, proliferate and increase
in complexity over very long timescales. This is the reason why
every living being has an innate tendency towards self-preservation
and proliferation. With the death, continuity is broken. This
talks in favor of intelligent life scattered everywhere in the
Universe: if a few species get extinct, others might continue to
proliferate and evolve in remote planets, in order to pursue the
goal of the final symmetric restoration. In touch with long
timescales’ requirements, it must be kept into account that life
has been set up after a long gestation: a childbearing which
encompasses the cosmic birth of fermions, then atoms, then stars
able to produce the more sophisticated matter (metals) required for
molecular life.
A symmetry-based framework gives rise to two opposite feelings, by
our standpoint of human beings. On one side, we achieve the final
answer to long-standing questions: “why are we here?”, “Why does
the evolution act in such a way?”, an answer that reliefs our most
important concerns and gives us a sense; on the other side,
however, this framework does not give us any hope: we are just
micro-systems programmed in order to contribute to restore a
partially “broken” macro-system. And, in case we succeed in
restoring, through our mathematical abstract thoughts and
craftsmanship, the initial symmetries, we are nevertheless doomed
to die: indeed, the environment equipped with the starting
symmetries does not allow the presence of life.
REFERENCES
1) Chaisson EJ. 2010. Energy Rate Density as a Complexity
Metric and Evolutionary Driver. Complexity, v 16, p 27, 2011; DOI:
10.1002/cplx.20323.
2) Ellwanger U. 2012. From the Universe to the Elementary
Particles. A First Introduction to Cosmology and the Fundamental
Interactions. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. ISBN
978-3-642-24374-5.
3) Peters JF, Ramanna S, Tozzi A, Inan E. 2017. Frontiers
Hum Neurosci. BOLD-independent computational entropy assesses
functional donut-like structures in brain fMRI image. doi: 10.3389/
fnhum.2017.00038.
4) Sengupta B, Tozzi A, Coray GK, Douglas PK, Friston KJ.
2016. Towards a Neuronal Gauge Theory. PLOS Biology 14 (3):
e1002400. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002400.
5) Spencer H. 1860. System of Synthetic Philosophy.
6) Roldán E, Martínez IA, Parrondo JMR, Petrov D. 2014.
Universal features in the energetics of symmetry breaking. Nat.
Phys. 10, 457–461.
7) Tozzi A, Peters JF. 2017. Towards Topological Mechanisms
Underlying Experience Acquisition and Transmission in the Human
Brain. J.F. Integr. psych. behav. doi:10.1007/s12124-017-9380-z
8) Tyler EB. 1881. Anthropology: an Introduction to the
Study of Man and Civilization.
Arturo Tozzi
AA Professor Physics, University North Texas
Pediatrician ASL Na2Nord, Italy
Comput Intell Lab, University Manitoba
http://arturotozzi.webnode.it/
--
-------------------------------------------------
Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta 0
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
-------------------------------------------------
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