Dear Stan and All,
Please let me start by repeating my idea that fluctuons are "its", that is,
energy in some form. If (mathematical) idealism is anti-realist, this is
certainly not what I would consider Conrad's theory to be. Stan comes to the
same conclusion, that fluctuons are its, but this suggests to him a
non-materialist conception of information. This is a first place where
something like another logic is needed that can incorporate the
material-energetic and non-material aspects of information.
Stan wrote:
>That these unmanifest communications are “not susceptible to being washed out
>by thermal >fluctuations”, I suppose follows from the definition of
>‘unmanifest’, but organisms seem to be >manifest. What are we reaching for
>here? Transcendence of material limitations as the world >goes sour on us?
This is a very pertinent comment, and I have also speculated that Conrad was
reaching for something like this, which is of course not the evidence for it we
would like. But we are looking for something beyond bits; no one is arguing
that they are vague; they are too crisp.
If the principle of scale hierarchy says that information flows are not
possible across scales, perhaps we need to take another look at that principle
;-). If there is no exchange between the unmanifest world and the manifest one,
and change, randomness, etc. are totally different in the unmanifest world,
this might tend to confirm it. However, I feel the differences between the two
are not only of scale.
Seems to me we are off to a good start,
Joseph
----- Original Message -----
From: Stanley N Salthe
To: fis@listas.unizar.es
Sent: Friday, September 24, 2010 11:26 PM
Subject: Re: [Fis] Revisiting the Fluctuon Model
Folks --
Comments upon Kirby’s & Brenner’s ‘Opening Remarks’
(1) I used Conrad’s early information-based work in developing my conception
of the scale/compositional hierarchy as applied to material systems. As a
materialist, I may have ‘mis-read’ his work. I think this now, upon glimpsing
this ‘fluctuon theory’, which is clearly not a materialist construct. Rather,
it seems to lie in the realm of mathematical idealism.
Admittedly, materialism may turn out to have been a ‘wrong turn’ in our
attempts to understand the universe. Information itself may not be a
materialist proposition! My own thinking is really ‘bit’ from ‘it’! Then,
fluctuons may really be ‘its’, and not ‘bits’! Surely ‘bits’ emerged into the
world with information theory, crisp as that is. I argue that any development
must go from vaguer to more definite, as with any embryo. Bits ain’t vague.
Or, tell me HOW they are vague. Fluctuons as limned here seem pretty vague to
me – perhaps because language cannot reach their mathematical crispness!
We do not yet have a fuzzy version of cosmology, I suppose.
“Vertical flows” directly “up and down” the scale hierarchy contradicts one
of the principles of that hierarchy in application, which requires transduction
of information in order to cross scales (example: a higher level constructs
statistical representations of lower level dynamics). That, of course would be
in the ‘manifest, material world’. And it is precisely ‘information flows’
that would be interdicted at scale changes.
“Percolation networks” to foster a “logical approach” to information flows
across hierarchically organized compartments may seem OK in math.
“Interaction” between manifest organisms and the “unmanifest vacuum” is
tantalizing, but… in information theory? “Fascinating and rich”, yes.
That these unmanifest communications are “not susceptible to being washed out
by thermal fluctuations”, I suppose follows from the definition of
‘unmanifest’, but organisms seem to be manifest. What are we reaching for
here? Transcendence of material limitations as the world goes sour on us?
STAN
Let me add that in my evening musings, I do entertain thoughts that might
well be more crisply informed by fluctuon theory!
On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 7:49 AM, Pedro C. Marijuan
<pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es> wrote:
(The previous message was truncated, sorry. I am sending it again. ---P.)
THE NATURE OF MICROPHYSICAL INFORMATION:
REVISITING THE FLUCTUON MODEL
Kevin G. Kirby
Department of Computer Science
Northern Kentucky University (US)
Joseph Brenner
International Center for Transdisciplinary Research
Paris (France)
1. OPENING REMARKS
(Kevin Kirby)
In the standard view, taken for granted so completely it is rarely
articulated, the fundamental physics of particles and fields is a mere
"platform" for life. Physics and biology are surely deeply different: the
extreme ends of the scales simply don't match up. For example, the notion that
somehow the incompatibility of general relativity with quantum physics has some
relevance for life seems nonsensical.
But is it? In a series of papers published throughout the 1990s, Michael
Conrad put together a theory in which life was, as he often put it, an image of
the underlying physics of the universe. The mere title of one of the final
papers in the series, and the title of the book he wanted to write, "Quantum
Gravity and Life," seems almost like a non sequitur. And indeed, the theory he
put forth was difficult. But the claim I would like to put forward is that
there are deep ideas here that -- even if the full details of the theory are
not correct or not well-defined-- help us reach a more satisfying theory of
information in the natural world.
Tragically, Conrad passed away in 2001, and was unable to complete his
book. Yet a very thorough description remains of his ideas in a series of
sixteen papers from 1989 through 1998. This work centered on what he called
fluctuon theory. The main exposition was in a series of papers "Fluctuons I,II,
III" published in Chaos, Solitons and Fractals during 1993-1996. For the
purposes of this discussion, two briefer papers can be recommended as providing
good summaries of his ideas here:
* Conrad, M., 1995, Multiscale synergy in biological information
processing. Optical Memory and Neural Networks 4(2), 89-98.
* Conrad, M., 1998, Quantum gravity and life, BioSystems 46, 29-39.
The fluctuon theory asserts that the universe is a kind of giant homeostat,
but one in which the ground state is always in flight. The universe slides in
and out of consistency. His starting point was the Dirac sea of negative
energy particles: his vacuum was a plenum. There was more than one sea. One
was of electrons and positrons, where photons are chains of such pairs. The
gluons of the strong nuclear force were to be chains in a quark/anti-quark sea.
Gravitons were chains that arose from all massive particles in these seas.
Viewed this way, these chains of virtual particles, disturbances in the sea
--which as a class he called "fluctuons" -- are responsible for all
fundamental forces. He described fluctuons as skipping along the energy surface
of the vacuum sea as analogous to a stone skipping along the surface of a pond.
This theory is daunting not because it is mathematically complex; in fact,
its mathematics mostly resembles elementary perturbation theory. It is daunting
because it is so discontinuous with the standard model of particles and fields.
For example, even though gluons play a role, there is no use of group theory
or symmetry principles.
What the fluctuon theory does have, however, is a mechanism for seeing the
"lifelike" in the "un-lifelike". Central to the theory is that there are
vertical flows, up and down, across microscopic, mesoscopic, and macroscopic
levels. In particular microscopic decorrelation and recorrelation processes
are amplified up the scale, and this is characteristic of life. These flows in
fact are information flows. (Information also plays a role in the fluctuon
theory through the notion of anti-entropy.)
How does logic connect to this? None of Conrad's work dealt with logic per
se. But the fluctuon theory allowed Conrad to talk systematically about
percolation networks, and the nested, hierarchical, compartmental structure of
interactions is one way a logical approach could take hold here. To what extent
can we see this as "ontological levels of reality"? In fact, could the dynamic
oppositions discussed by Joseph Brenner in his LiR theory be aligned with the
decorrelation/recorrelation concept in the fluctuon theory as it reaches across
scales?
Overall, within fluctuon theory "the interaction between the manifest
organism and its unmanifest vacuum sea image abets the evolution, persistence,
and maintenance of this unique complexity [of life]". This is a fascinating
and rich notion. What can we unfold from this notion now in 2010?
2. IMPLICATIONS FOR LOGICS IN REALITY
(Joseph Brenner)
In a Wheeler model of the universe, information as an abstract entity (bit)
is ontologically prior to any material-energetic entity (it). If, however,
energy or its effective quantum field or string equivalent is primitive, as I
believe, interpretations of information in terms of energy become much more
plausible. The physicist/biologist Michael Conrad proposed a cosmological model
in which energetic interactions are possible between our everyday ‘manifest’
world and the complex ‘unmanifest’ world constituted by vacuum conceived of as
a plenum of potentialities for particle-anti-particle pair production. This
would correspond to a De Sitter-type model of the universe.
The most fundamental manifest quantum entities (photons, electrons, quarks,
perhaps others) and their field equivalents are characterized by their
self-duality and/or wave-particle duality. In another domain involving a
minimum of two interacting entities, e.g., a hydrogen atom, non-separable
physical dualities provide the basis for further relations and interactions
resulting in thermodynamic change and evolution up to and including the
universe of ordinary matter-energy as a whole. Entities in which self-duality
is expressed are ‘timeless’ and undergo no change into others of the same kind
without massive external inputs of energy. It is an open question, however,
whether fluctuations in the quantum vacuum constitute changes of state in the
thermodynamic conception of change, that Hawking showed applied to black holes.
What Conrad achieved was a deeper level of explanation which provides for
the differentiation of the universe into vacuum and non-vacuum domains. Conrad
divides his scheme into 1) a model of the vacuum per se, the fluctuon model, in
which interactions between observable or manifest particles are mediated by
transient excitations of unmanifest vacuum fermions that propagate through the
sea of unmanifest fermions in a chain-like manner, and 2) a biomolecular model
that links the macrophysical actions of organisms via transduction and
amplification schemes to the microphysical dynamics of sub-cellular components
down to the most microphysical level of the indicated dynamics of the vacuum.
In the Conrad cosmological picture, the primordial energies of the manifest
universe evolve with differentiation into the electromagnetic and gravitational
forces, and the vacuum evolves to yield particles with charge-masking
properties into a state of mutual consistency.
Biological organisms can “unmask” the recursive, irreversible processes
that dominated the evolution of the early universe and real-time cognitive
capabilities (consciousness) derive from this unmasking. The hypothesis is that
the vacuum makes an indispensable contribution to the real-time capabilities of
biological systems. Unlike the discredited concept of consciousness mediated
directly by quantum entities, the unmanifest influences in this theory are not
sensitive to being washed out by thermal fluctuations due to the
self-correcting properties of inconsistencies in the cell between the manifest
and unmanifest structure.
From the standpoint of my extension of logic to real systems, Logic in
Reality, in which the Principle of Dynamic Opposition describes the alternating
contradictorial actualities and potentialities of real systems, Conrad’s
conceptions are extremely interesting. For example, at the cosmological level,
feedback processes in the neighborhood of black holes have an a-periodic
spiraling aspect, with many local collapses and reversals of collapse that
correspond exactly to the Principle of Dynamic Opposition in LIR, also avoiding
hypothetical singularities required in classical physics.
In order to evaluate the relevance of Conrad’s work to information science,
and in fact science in general, the most important question is whether there is
recent or current research in physics that directly addresses the existence of
the interactions postulated by Conrad. I hope that further contributions can
help to disentangle the fascinating interplay of philosophical, physical and
biological questions posed by Conrad’s work.
For completeness, let give my two, different references:
1993. The Fluctuon Model of Force, Life and Computation: A Constructive
Analysis. In Applied Mathematics and Computation 56 (2-3), pp. 203-259.
2000. Closure and Anticlosure in the Realm of Quantum Gravity: Why
Evolution Needs No Origin. In Closure. Emergent Organizations and Their
Dynamics, J. Chandler and G. van de Vijver (eds.). Annals of the New York
Academy of Sciences, 902, pp. 244-256.
----------------------------
--
-------------------------------------------------
Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Avda. Gómez Laguna, 25, Pl. 11ª
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Telf: 34 976 71 3526 (& 6818) Fax: 34 976 71 5554
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
-------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
fis@listas.unizar.es
https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
fis@listas.unizar.es
https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
fis@listas.unizar.es
https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
