[Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 108, Issue 5
Pedro C. Marijuán
pedroc.marijuan at gmail.com
Mon Jan 8 13:58:51 CET 2024
Dear List,
Interesting reference made by Terry to "it from bit". Although quite
relevant works have been done in this direction (Wheeler, Deutsch,
Lerner, Dean...), it is not what I mean regarding the different realms
that emerge from life. So to speak, I leave the "it" for physicists, and
the "bit" for "computerists". The information flows that make coherent
wholes out from the multiplicity of cycles involved in the living, are
not "Shannonian" either. Some parties (also in this list) have proposed
interesting quantum field hypothesis on how to integrate that
meta-trans-multi cyclicity. It is something that deserves some attention
by mathematicians--I dare say.
The new informational vision that could be connected with the "adjacent
possible" has not been built yet. Presently, there might be sort of a
bias in the adjacency temporal scales considered--evolution, ecology,
economics, technology... But exploring the adjacent possible could also
be a concern for far shorter time spans, for physiology ("cellular
signaling systems"), for neuroscience and ethology (instant behavioral
choices), for psychology and sociology (emotions, social moods, social
discord and collapse, etc.etc.)
When during two generations people have been talking about the gap
between natural science and humanities (Lord Snow), it could also mean
the divide between physicalism and the lack of a coherent sense for the
informationally grounded realms (social domains, arts, culture...).
By the way, Stuart, if 40.000 pixels are enough to capture Picasso's
content, would you pay 100 million bucks for one of those bit packages?
You cannot capture in bits the whole socio-cultural-biographic frames
embedded in the masterpiece.
Best--Pedro
El 07/01/2024 a las 23:42, Gordana Dodig Crnkovic escribió:
>
> Dear colleagues,
>
> Allow me to propose one more facet of life that adds to the central
> theme of Kantian Wholes: *autonomous agency*. Living organisms are
> "agential" materials, as Michael Levin puts it. They possess
> cognition, have agendas, and act purposefully.
>
> This is how agency is explained by Stu in [1], and similarly in [2]:
>
> "It is a stunning fact that the universe has given rise to entities
> that daily modify the universe to suit their own ends. We call this
> capacity 'agency' — the ability to act on one's own behalf."
>
> But then one may ask: what must a physical system be such that it can
> act on its own behalf?
>
> We propose a tentative five-part definition of a minimal molecular
> autonomous agent: such a system
>
> 1. should be capable of reproduction with heritable variation,
> 2. should perform at least one work cycle and have boundaries such
> that it
> 3. can be naturally individuated,
> 4. should engage in self-propagating work and constraint
> construction, and
> 5. should be able to choose between at least two alternatives.
>
> (I reformatted the sentence into the numbered list).
>
> References:
>
> [1] Kauffman, S., Clayton, P. On emergence, agency, and organization.
> Biol Philos 21, 501–521 (2006).
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-005-9003-9__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!TX498wljC4O-aWzYOp8J8Zkhdgss3X1jfwHwc54puXOigDfaAz-UqiOraasOx24vWzwDlSOJLGU2cvzCyD1mib0kEgJR$
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-005-9003-9__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!WWIS2V8aSgvKYkrQRr725ec79RyfScFLmMNE8IsOuQH_2QEXOgrmSFAoTpy10_NrZIogCIJL_U0gt3mM7rtKVyxvUWJfKGhM$>
>
>
> [2] Kauffman, S.A. The origins of order: Self-organization and
> selection in evolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
>
> To the above definition of agency of a minimal molecular autonomous
> agent, I would propose to add *information processing* which enables
> *learning* and adaptation.
>
> It appears to me that points 1, 3, 4, and 5 above derive from the
> information processing capacity of these systems.
>
> Goal-directedness, or agency, can be seen as based on information
> processing, which is enabled by memory and the mechanism of
> anticipation that is contingent on memory.
>
> Evolutionarily, all cognitive (agential) mechanisms derive from
> material characteristics. As an illustration, see a very short account
> in the video The Biophysics of a Brainless Animal
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImKFUHJdcLE__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!WWIS2V8aSgvKYkrQRr725ec79RyfScFLmMNE8IsOuQH_2QEXOgrmSFAoTpy10_NrZIogCIJL_U0gt3mM7rtKVyxvUQM960NL$>.
> More extended explanation can be found at:
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1VAIwcn7z8__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!TX498wljC4O-aWzYOp8J8Zkhdgss3X1jfwHwc54puXOigDfaAz-UqiOraasOx24vWzwDlSOJLGU2cvzCyD1miVTO0BNN$
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1VAIwcn7z8__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!WWIS2V8aSgvKYkrQRr725ec79RyfScFLmMNE8IsOuQH_2QEXOgrmSFAoTpy10_NrZIogCIJL_U0gt3mM7rtKVyxvUS9S__8A$>Manu
> Prakash: The physics of biology, which addresses several of Stu’s
> questions.
>
> Gordana
>
> *From: *Fis <fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es> on behalf of Stuart
> Kauffman <stukauffman at gmail.com>
> *Date: *Sunday, 7 January 2024 at 16:28
> *To: *Louis Kauffman <loukau at gmail.com>, 0 <stukauffman at gmail.com>
> *Cc: *"fis at listas.unizar.es" <fis at listas.unizar.es>, Andrea Roli
> <andrea.roli at unibo.it>
> *Subject: *Re: [Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 108, Issue 5
>
> Thank you Lou. I agree. Creativity is not deduction. Given what you
> write, Andrea and I claim to have shown that no laws at all entail the
> evolution of the biosphere which is a non-deducible, propagating,
> construction. Assume this is correct. But physics DOES HAVE LAWS THAT
> ENTAIL. So if Andrea and Stu are right and physics with laws is right,
> why can physics have entailing laws but not the evolving biosphere?One
> answer is that living organisms really are Kantian Wholes with
> Catalytic and Constraint closure, that can evolve new boundary
> conditions creating novel phase spaces, that can evolve and create
> ever-new phase spaces by /selection on the whole, which is downward
> causation/ for those feature that survive and propagate best in the
> current context - and there is no prior description of what the
> current context will become.
>
> But even if Andrea and I are right about evolving life, why can
> PHYSICS have entailing laws?
>
> All very odd.
>
> Stu
>
> On Jan 7, 2024, at 2:00 AM, Louis Kauffman <loukau at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear Stu,
>
> Think about physical laws.
>
> Good principles like F = ma, Newton’s Law of Gravity, and all
> that. Laws of E&M, Schrodinger equation, Dirac equation,
> Einstein’s modern geometric understanding of Gravity.
>
> Some questions and thoughts.
>
> 1. Newton did not deduce the law of gravity. He guessed it and
> discovered that it explained Kepler’s Laws that were derived from
> observation. This made Newton’s guess very firm. There is no way
> to predict Newton’s Law of Gravity. In fact it is not even correct
> when one takes Einstein’s wider point of view. Einstein guessed
> that there should be a differential geometric law of gravity. He
> was lucky, the tensor expression in curvature that he sought was
> nearly unique and so in this case the mathematical constraints
> helped him find a physical law.
>
> 2. Once laws are given (or guessed) then some predictions are
> possible.
>
> Clerk Maxwell guessed the laws of EM via Faraday’s experiments and
> Faraday’s field concepts. But then
>
> Maxwell saw that in his theory the EM field could propagate like a
> wave and its velocity was the velocity of light! Who would have
> thought it? And this allowed Maxwell to further
>
> guess (yes guess but some say ‘predict’) that light is an EM wave.
> Huge consequence for the physics and technology after that up
> through the present day. But this is being done by inventive
> discovery not by logical deduction.
>
> 3. No one could predict the structure of atoms or the later
> understood nuclear structure in terms of quarks. This is
> discovered and verified and there are theories but there is no
> theory that predicts atoms. Once we know something about atoms we
> can understand how certain molecules could behave, but no one can
> predict the emergence and stability of
>
> big molecules like DNA or their reproductive properties.
>
> 4. Physics is a big guesswork patchwork that uses mathematics and
> has some predictive abilities. But the main lines of its structure
> are guessed, discovered, invented, verified.
>
> The logic comes last.
>
> Mathematics is the same. It is a structural enterprise and we
> cannot predict where it will go and what will be proved. We knock
> around and invent or discover structures and sometimes get them
> into deductive frameworks. Lots of ‘obvious’ things are not (yet)
> proved.
>
> Best,
>
> Lou
>
> On Jan 6, 2024, at 3:49 PM, Stuart Kauffman
> <stukauffman at gmail.com <mailto:stukauffman at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> HI Pedro and All,
>
> Thank you Pedro, perhaps we /are /at THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION.
> We begin to confront the vast, unprestatable, non-deducible
> becoming of the evolving biosphere. YET…yet, physics works
> also. We really can compute planetary orbits. If the biosphere
> is “governed by no laws” why do laws work so well in Physics?
>
> And there is something very odd about, “Information”. Consider
> the information content of a Picasso painting. Cast it into
> 10,000 pixels, each reflecting a wavelength specified by 4
> bits. So 40,000 bits suffice and that 40,000 bits can be sent
> by email all over the world to be printed out on physically
> different systems using different procedures and perhaps
> pigments to create a good copy of the Picasso. It seems
> information is not embodied but becomes physical to print, or
> to erase a bit in the 40,000 record.
>
> Now think of a living cell, a Kantian Whole with Catalytic and
> Constraint Closure. There IS NO SEPARATE “description” of this
> reproducing system. It cannot be copied. The living cell
> /constructed/ itself, it did not create a description of
> itself sent to a distance assembly point.
>
> Also in Boltzmann entropy can stay constant or increase. In
> Shannon, in parallel, information can be transmitted without
> or with loss. BUT..there is no creation of new information.
> That is due to the Newtonian Paradigm where the phase space of
> all the possibilities are stated beforehand. (In Shannon, the
> entropy of the source.) But in the evolution of the biosphere,
> co-evolving organisms are creating ever-new ways to get to
> co-exist for a while. This is the unprestable and
> non-deducible creation of new information. The emerging
> evolving increasing complexity of the biosphere is not via a
> channel transmitting information from some exogenous source.
> Andrea Roli and I are working on this. And this becoming is
> NOT AI, which is algorithmic.
>
> Hm….
>
> Stu
>
> On Jan 5, 2024, at 2:20 PM, fis-request at listas.unizar.es
> <mailto:fis-request at listas.unizar.es> wrote:
>
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> Today's Topics:
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> 1. Re: New Year Lecture - Stuart Kauffman (Terrence W
> Deacon)
> 2. Re: Fis Digest, Vol 108, Issue 4 (Krassimir Markov)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 5 Jan 2024 08:47:37 -0800
> From: Terrence W Deacon <deacon at berkeley.edu>
> To: Pedro C. Mariju?n <pedroc.marijuan at gmail.com>
> Cc: fis at listas.unizar.es, Skauffman <stukaufman at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Fis] New Year Lecture - Stuart Kauffman
> Message-ID:
> <CAOJbPRLC40bnKjupETxqd_tDLXziDZdwVTvXHVauFwcdwytxuA at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Beware of the cryptic Cartesianism of opposing
> informationalism to
> physicalism (as in "it from bit").
> By accepting this framing, we risk falling for the old
> idealism vs
> materialism trap, just in a new form.
>
>
> On Fri, Jan 5, 2024 at 3:59?AM Pedro C. Mariju?n
> <pedroc.marijuan at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Dear Stuart and FIS colleagues,
>
> We are honored that you impart the FIS New Year
> Lecture this time. In this
> list, quite a few members share the impression that we
> are involved in a
> historical transition in science. Maybe, as you and
> Andrea Roli state, it
> could be the Third Great Transition. That it revolves
> around putting into
> question the predominance of physicalist views was
> coincidentally discussed
> in a previous discussion session, when two pioneers of
> AI research (Yixin
> Zhong from China and Eric Werner from Oxford) were
> arguing for a paradigm
> change away for physicalism. Now you are providing
> strong arguments from
> the biological self-construction and evolutionary
> points of view. An
> important point is the argument on Kantian wholes,
> from the closure of
> auto-catalitic sets. It could also be considered as
> the organizational
> reliance on "cycles". In biological systems there is a
> towering presence of
> cycles: from elementary reaction cycles, to enzyme
> work-cycles, to regional
> reaction cycles, gene expression cycles (your Boolean
> networks!!), to
> genetic macro-cycles... to the cell's entire life
> cycle. And an even larger
> story could be told about cycles in complex organisms...
>
> To put the argument in a nutshell: bye to physicalism
> (as a fundamental
> meta-scientific vision). Yes, but what would
> substitute for it?
> I dare say "informationalism". You mention the
> biosphere and the global
> economy, and even our cultures. Aren't all them based
> on the circulation of
> "information flows" (in vastly different forms, of
> course)??
> Let us think, for instance, on the enormous disarray
> created by the new
> social networks in our societies... we do not much
> understand the
> psychological changes derived for the intertwining of
> natural vs artifical
> info flows in our societies.
>
> I am just reading Joseph's just arrived comments,
> philosophically and
> formally oriented. Fine. I would ad that we are
> lacking a vast
> informational view that can help us to understand that
> strange world put
> into action 3,000 million years ago, full of emergent
> realms. So, filling
> in the gap that physicalim is unable to fill in
> consistently.
>
> Best regards to all,
> --Pedro
>
> *PS. If anyone has doubts about the messages
> effectively distributed in
> the list, go please to the instantaneous archive:
> http://listas.unizar.es/pipermail/fis/
> <http://listas.unizar.es/pipermail/fis/%3E*
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> El 04/01/2024 a las 23:54, Stuart Kauffman escribi?:
>
> Hello to All,
>
>
>
> I am truly grateful to have this opportunity to
> discuss with you the
> recent Stuart Kauffman and Andrea Roli paper, ?A Third
> Transition In
> Science?? J. Roy. Soc. Interface, 4/ 14 2023. I
> attach a link below. It?s
> eventual publication in a fine journal after almost
> two years has its own
> wry history.
>
>
>
> Andrea and I think we are correct, but we may be
> wrong. More, I only
> slightly begin to understand what our results, if
> correct, mean.
>
>
>
> I had thought that the First Transition in science was
> Newton?s invention
> of Classical Physics in 1689 A.D. And I thought the
> Second Transition was
> the reluctant discovery of quantum mechanics between
> 1900 and 1927 A.D.
>
>
>
> I begin to suspect I was wrong. The First Transition
> in science was in
> 1299A.D. when the first mechanical clock was invented
> and installed at the
> Wallingford Abby. It was installed because the monks
> were often late for
> prayers. Within less than a century, Europe was dotted
> by chuch towers with
> ever - more impressive mechanical clocks. Modern
> people in 1379 A.D. must
> have begun to wonder if the World itself was some
> amazing clockwork
> machine. Then Copernicus, 1543 A.D., then Kepler,
> Galileo and Newton.
>
>
>
> This, then, was the Second Transition in Science. Yes,
> yes, yes! The
> World is a vast clockwork machine. No room for God?s
> miracles ? the Deistic
> God of the Enlightenment. No room for mind ? Descartes
> lost his Res
> cogitans to Newton?s Res extensa. No Free Will.
>
>
>
> With Planck, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger cam a loss of
> determinism, but
> still within the Newtonian Paradigm. And no mind and
> no responsible Free
> Will.
>
>
>
> If Andrea and I are correct, this Third Transition
> demonstrates for the
> first time since 1299AD, 725 years later, that the
> evolving biosphere is
> not a clockwork machines. Evolving life is not a
> machine at all.
>
>
>
> Are the two of us correct? If so, what does this Third
> Transition
> portend? These issues now lies before us.
>
>
>
> Merci a tous,
>
>
> Stu Kauffman
>
>
> A Third Transition in Science? Link
>
>
>
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