Beatiful ideas. Poetic prose in action... Great, Bruno!
--Pedro
Enviado desde mi dispositivo Samsung
-------- Mensaje original --------
De: Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
Fecha: 3/3/17 19:08 (GMT+01:00)
Para: PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ <pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es>, fis
Webinar <fis@listas.unizar.es>
Asunto: Re: [Fis] WHY WE ARE HERE? ...AN UNPLEASANT ANSWER?!
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<mailto: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<mailto:pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es>
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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