[Fis] Fwd: Re: WHY WE ARE HERE? ...AN UNPLEASANT ANSWER?! From Jerry Chandler
Pedro C. Marijuan
pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
Thu Mar 9 16:18:19 CET 2017
-------- Mensaje reenviado --------
Asunto: Re: [Fis] WHY WE ARE HERE? ...AN UNPLEASANT ANSWER?!
Fecha: Mon, 6 Mar 2017 21:36:55 -0600
De: Jerry LR Chandler <jerry_lr_chandler at icloud.com>
Para: fis Webinar <fis at listas.unizar.es>
CC: Pedro Marijuan <pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es>, Bruno Marchal
<marchal at ulb.ac.be>
Bruno, List:
de Chardin has also cast a long and durable shadow over my mind for
decades for decades. His writings both provides some guidance on the
form of time and opens rich questions that bring fruit.
While I appreciate the flow of concepts emerging from Bruno’s
“poetry”, its guidance appears to exclude chemistry and biology.
Thus, Bruno’s associations are not so clear to me. So, I will be a
“spoil sport” and look toward a more “life-friendly” flow of both
symbols and numbers with only a tad of poetry.
> On Mar 3, 2017, at 11:51 AM, Bruno Marchal <marchal at ulb.ac.be
> <mailto:marchal at ulb.ac.be>> wrote:
>>
>
> 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).
The tensions between the computational natures of discrete and the
“continuous” numbers haunts any attempt to make mathematical sense out
of scientific hypotheses. I am uncertain as to the logical implication
of the “computationalist’s hypothesis" in this context.
Is the reference grounded in Curry’s combinatorial logic or otherwise?
> 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"
>>
>> 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.
The connotations of the term “mechanism” varies widely from discipline
to discipline.
The sense of “mechanism” in chemistry infers an electrical path among
the discrete paths of illations that “glue” the parts into a whole. By
sublation, this same sense is used in molecular biology and the
biomedical sciences.
Bruno, could you expand on your usage in this context? How do the
senses of “computationism" and “mechanism” refer to the material world,
if at all?
>
>> 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.
Would it be more accurate to that “"God" created the internal creativity
of the atomic numbers."
>
> Then she said: add yourself, and saw that is was good.
>
> Then she said: multiply yourself. And then ... she said: oops, ... and
> lose control.
The addition of the atomic numbers has bounds because it is not linked
to the concept of variables. How does one see the internal controls
without the geometry associated with variables? (In the absence of a
Cartesian co-ordinate system?)
>
> 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 perplexity of the atomic numbers creates its internal co-ordination
without an apparent source of “universality” or “universal numbers”.
The ampliative logic of electrical bindings appears to create
irregular self-regulation without a concept of mechanical control. Can a
vision of "Plato’s heaven” take root and grow without universal numbers?
In Curry combinatorial logic sufficient?
>
> 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).
>
If I suppose that the dynamics of the associations of atomic numbers are
internally motivated (that is, metabolism, a.k.a., organic mathematics),
What within Life pre-supposes invariance?
What within Life pre-supposes a stationarity such that recursive
permutations are meaningful arithmetically?
Does Organic Mathematics reach it’s zenith in the genesis of physical
and mathematical poetry?
Just some fleeting thoughts on the phenomenology of life during a long
winter's night in the cold Northland.
Cheers
Jerry
> Best wishes to you, and all,
>
> Bruno
>
>
>
>>
>> Best wishes to all--Pedro
>>
>> El 24/02/2017 a las 16:24,tozziarturo at libero.itescribió:
>>>
>>> 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/
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> -------------------------------------------------
>> 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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>
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ <http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/>
>
>
>
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