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

Fri Mar 3 18:51:50 CET 2017

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, 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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