[Fis] R: Re: WHY WE ARE HERE? ...AN UNPLEASANT ANSWER?!

[tozziarturo at libero.it]

Dear Prof. Ulanowicz, 
thanks for you nice words, and for the amazing material you sent me!
There is a 2005, seminal paper that seems to be the "smoking gun" confirming 
your hypothesis that life increases the entropy production.  
But the key, is rather strangely... the time! 

You can find a summary, more details and the proper references here: 
http://arturotozzi.webnode.it/products/a-link-between-time-reversal-asymmetry-
and-fainting-of-memories-/

Thanks again for your kind response!

P.S.: I go to read better your fantastic, already historical papers!


Arturo Tozzi
AA Professor Physics, University North Texas
Pediatrician ASL Na2Nord, Italy
Comput Intell Lab, University Manitoba
http://arturotozzi.webnode.it/ 



>----Messaggio originale----
>Da: "Robert E. Ulanowicz" <ulan at umces.edu>
>Data: 24/02/2017 18.48
>A: "tozziarturo at libero.it"<tozziarturo at libero.it>
>Ogg: Re: [Fis] WHY WE ARE HERE? ...AN UNPLEASANT ANSWER?!
>
>Dear Arturo!
>
>Most interesting thesis!
>
>Two paper of mine that touch on this subject:
>
><http://people.clas.ufl.edu/ulan/files/Prodent.pdf>
>
><http://people.clas.ufl.edu/ulan/files/Harmony.pdf>
>
>All the best,
>Bob
>
>> 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 TozziAA Professor Physics, University North TexasPediatrician ASL
>> Na2Nord, ItalyComput Intell Lab, University
>> Manitobahttp://arturotozzi.webnode.it/
>>
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