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

Mon Feb 27 23:10:23 CET 2017

Very nice, dear Pedro,Otto

      From: Pedro C. Marijuan <pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es>
 To: 'fis' <fis at listas.unizar.es> 
 Sent: Monday, February 27, 2017 5:39 PM
 Subject: Re: [Fis] WHY WE ARE HERE? ...AN UNPLEASANT ANSWER?!

 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.

 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 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??

 Best wishes to all--Pedro 

 El 24/02/2017 a las 16:24, tozziarturo at 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.iacs at aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/-------------------------------------------------  
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