[Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 108, Issue 5

Mon Jan 8 18:31:51 CET 2024

What's striking to me is the co-evolution  both of species and the planetary biosphere. Of course within the context of physical laws.
For example the Ecocene thermal maximum 55 milllon years ago unleashed by volcanism and release of  enormous amounts of carbon dioxide increased global temperature from 5 to 8 degrees C, this melted all the ice, flooded the coasts, turned the arctic ocean into a semi-tropical warm sea with lots of fresh water.
This was also perfect habitat for azolla that created enormous mats of plants that died and sank to the ocean bottoms sequestering huge amounts of carbon and took a leading role in reducing an estimated 3000 ppm of carbon-dioxide over 800,000 years and returned the climate to temperate "normal" levels. The evolutionary response of the biosphere tending toward life conditions favorable for life.
Life takes advantage of all physical mechanisms including chaos and strange attractors that ,for example, apparently rests in our unconscious and the very fast response of our mind  that emerges as conscious thought and memory, as well as the more familiar amazingly quick coordinated response of birds in flight.
Life's abilities are engines of emergence in response to changed  circumstances. These are in part cooperative group and habitat expression as well as the trading of genes and integration of species to provide expanded abilities, most famously  mitochondria an independent organism become part of  human cells and as key to  energy in mammals.
Life and life's survival rests upon emergence as a central characteristic and virtue. Humanity is not only a  planet wrecker but now is becoming an integral and conscious participant in global sustainability individually and by some billions of us. That's the magic of emergence. It is an evolutionary force that can act socially and at local and planetary scale.Something new under the sun.
Roy
Roy

    On Monday, January 8, 2024 at 10:38:53 AM EST, Louis Kauffman <loukau at gmail.com> wrote:  

 Dear Stu,The constituents of your Kantian wholes still obey the laws of physics. I am made of atoms and molecules. In studying mathematics the structures obey the axioms I have chosen to study, but they are not so constrained by them that they do not have surprising behaviour.The prime numbers obey the Peano axioms but that does not make them staid and predictable, quite the contrary. Novelty arises in relation to constraints.Look at the molecular biology. We are pretty damn sure the the molecules in the cell obey physical law all the way down to quantum mechanics. And those molecules have evolved into the dance of life. How those evolutions occurred is your fantastic study AND all that occurred as far as we can tell with no violation of physical law.
I see that every even number not equal to 2 is the sum of two odd primes (in many ways!) I also see that whenever this happens it happens within the rules of arithmetic. The rules of arithmetic do not deny this phenomenon, but it may well be that they neither predict it or make it possible for it to be deduced from them. That is the way things are. Constraints are part and parcel of creativity.
Ah, but you ask Why can Physics have constraining laws? Ha! Note that in the Feynman Path Integral version of QM the “particle” does whatever it likes.The laws arise from the phase relationships of the particles that arrive at a given “place” in conjunction with assumed properties of “observers”. Wheeler in his book on Gravity (Misner, Thorne and Wheeler) speaks eloquently about “Law without Law”.I suggest you read John Wheeler who, in my opinion has the best answer to this question in terms of his Parable of the Game of Twenty Questions.  I can send you my paper related to that but it will be too long for this email. Excerpt included below.

86. Here is a remarkable story told by the physicist John Archibald Wheeler about a Game ofTwenty Questions (Davies, P.C.W and Brown, J. R. (1986)): “ Then my turn came .... I was lockedout an unbelievably long time. On finally being readmitted, I found a smile on everyone’s face, asign of a joke or a plot. I nevertheless started my attempt to find the word. ‘Is it an animal?’ ‘No.’ Isit a mineral?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Is it green?’ ‘No.’ ‘Is it white?’ ‘Yes.’ These answers came quickly. Then thequestions took longer in the answering. All I wanted from my friends was a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Yetthe one queried would think and think before responding. Finally I felt I was getting hot on the trail,that the word might be cloud. I knew I was allowed only one chance at the final word. I ventured it:‘Is it cloud?’ ‘Yes,’ came the reply, and everyone in the room burst out laughing. They explained tome that there had been no word in the room. They had agreed not to agree on a word. Each onequestioned could answer as he pleased – with one requirement that he should have a word in mindcompatible with his own response and all that had gone before. Otherwise, if I challenged, he lost.   
This surprise version of Twenty Questions was therefore as difficult for my colleagues as it was forme ... What is the symbolism of the story? The world, we once believed, exists out thereindependent of any act of observation. ... I, entering the room, thought the room contained adefinite word. In actuality, the word was developed step by step through the questions I raised ...Had I asked different questions or the same questions in a different order I would have ended upwith a different word ... However, the power I had in bringing the particular word cloud into beingwas partial only. A major part of the selection lay in the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ replies of the colleaguesaround the room ... In the game, no word is a word until that word is promoted to reality by thechoice of questions asked and answers given.” Wheeler’s allegorical fable was intended toilluminate the conditions of the quantum physicist. In quantum physics no phenomenon is an actualphenomenon until it is observed and agreed upon by all the physics colleagues. The story just as wellillustrates the world of social interaction.

87. My thesis is that all attempts to find stable knowledge of the world are attempts to find theoriesaccompanied by eigenforms in the actual reflexivity of the world into which one is thrown. Theworld itself is affected by the actions of its participants at all levels. One finds out about the natureof the world by acting upon it. The distinctions one makes change and create the world. The worldmakes those possibilities for distinctions available in terms of our actions. Given this point of view,one can ask, as one should of a theory, whether there is empirical evidence for this idea that stableknowledge is equivalent to the production of eigenforms. In this case we have only to look at whatwe do and see that whenever “something is the case” then there is an orchestration of actions thatleaves the something invariant, making that something into an eigenform for those actions. Theeigenform thesis is not itself a matter of empirical science. It is a matter of definition, albeit circulardefinition. Another point of view is that the empirical evidence is all around you. Examine any thing.How does it come to be for you? Investigate the question and you will find that thing is maintainedby actions. The action could be as simple as opening your eyes and looking at the cloudy sky. Withthat action, the cloudy sky comes to be for you. I do not assert that this is the usual scientificexplanation of cloudy sky. But if you want to work with such things then it is usually even moretransparent. The sharp spectral lines of Helium are the result of setting up a very particularexperiment that produces them. The experiment, its equipment, the scientists and all that is needed toperform it is the transformation whose eigenform is the spectrum of Helium.

88. It is a fruitful beginning to look at present scientific endeavors and to see how they areinterrelated and find connections among them, to engage in meta-scientific activity. This can revealhow theories, seemingly objective, actually affect the world through their very being, and how theseactions on the world come to affect the theories themselves. In exploring the world, we findregularities. It is possible that these regularities are our own footprint. In the end we shall begin tounderstand the mystery of the eigenforms that we have created, constructed and found.
(LK in Constructivist Foundations, Vol. 11, No. 3)
This is of course related to Wheeler’s “It from Bit”. Each question gives a bit of information. The whole pattern of questioning gives the resulting world of “everything that is the case”. The striking thing in the parable is the lack of causality, and the philosophical question: How much comes just from our demand for consistency? And you will note to what great lengths we go as (mathematical) scientists to preserve consistency even in the face of acausality.

Best,
Lou

On Jan 7, 2024, at 7:27 AM, Stuart Kauffman <stukauffman at gmail.com> wrote:

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 of 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

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