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

Wed Mar 1 13:32:43 CET 2017

David:

The nature of evolution is such that symmetries emerge and disappear 
(change).

Gyuri

http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Scie/ScieDarv.htm
http://epistemologia.zoomblog.com/archivo/2007/11/28/symmetry-breaking-in-a-philosophical-c.html 

Darvas, G. (1998) Laws of symmetry breaking, /Symmetry: Culture and 
Science/, 9, 2-4, 119-127 
http://journal-scs.symmetry.hu/content-pages/volume-9-numbers-2-4-pages-113-464-1998/ 
;
Darvas, G, (2015) The unreasonable effectiveness of symmetry in the 
sciences, /Symmetry: Culture and Science/, 26, 1, 39-82. 
http://journal-scs.symmetry.hu/content-pages/volume-26-number-1-pages-001-128-2015/ 
; http://journal-scs.symmetry.hu/purchase/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284341950_THE_UNREASONABLE_EFFECTIVENESS_OF_SYMMETRY_IN_THE_SCIENCES

On 2017.02.28. 19:01, Dave Kirkland wrote:
> Dear Arturo Tozzi and FISers
> Thank you for your _*very*_ interesting ideas. For me they raise more 
> questions:
> Why did the number of cosmic symmetries ever _*start*_ diminishing?
> Could the whole process be eternally cyclical?
> I like your respectful use of capital letters.
> My mind boggles.
> Best rgds
> David
>
> On 24 Feb 2017, at 15:24, tozziarturo at libero.it 
> <mailto:tozziarturo at libero.it> wrote:
>
>> 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/), “y/ou 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/
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Fis mailing list
>> Fis at listas.unizar.es <mailto:Fis at listas.unizar.es>
>> http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Fis mailing list
> Fis at listas.unizar.es
> http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listas.unizar.es/pipermail/fis/attachments/20170301/3607212c/attachment.html>