[Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 108, Issue 5 - Kierkegaard, responsible free will and the meaning of the new transition in science

[Louis Kauffman]

Dear Stu,
My feeling (and I mean feeling) is that you are right Stu, but you choose rhetoric that leads you into mistakes.
The purpose of mathematical models is structural and sometimes deductive. We are concerned primarily with language where the words have meaning and definitions can be 
elicited. I suspect that you have been seduced by some notion that mathematics is only a deductive or computational enterprise, but it is much more than that at the level of the distinctions that it studies via the definitions and constructions that are made. The error that can then result is to throw away too much. And start making up words that in fact have no meaning such as “mind is quantum”, “mind entangles with the world”, “we collapse the wave function”, “we experience the single state as a qualia”. By the time you start talking this way, you have left the grounds of discourse with discrimination, for rhetoric for which some will applaud you and others will scorn you.
(Again I am probably over my quota and can send again next week.)
Best,
Lou

> On Jan 11, 2024, at 6:21 PM, Stuart Kauffman <stukauffman at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Gordana I completely agree. Moreover, the Third Transition claims to demonstrate that the evolving biosphere is a non-deducible propagating construction, not a deduction, not a COMPUTATION at all. The grounds to think human mind is a computation are being erased. We do not create meaning by deducing, we create it as living organisms acting in the world. “Meaning” is to ME, acting and doing in my world, for all living creatures. 
> 
> Andrea Roli and I wrote a further paper, “What is Consciousness?", published in the Linnean Society recently, 2023 Vol 139.  We jury rig. Non - embodied Universal Turing Machines are algorithmic and cannot jury rig. Embodied UTM in robots can jury rig a bit, but far too slowly, we think.  We suggest mind is quantum, it entangles with the world, we collapse the superposition wave function, and we experience the single state as a qualia. 
> 
> And Kirkegard was exactly correct as are you.
> 
> Stu
> 
>> On Jan 11, 2024, at 4:07 PM, Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic <gordana.dodig-crnkovic at mdu.se> wrote:
>> 
>>  
>> On 9 January 2024 at 18:32 (below) Stuart wrote:
>> ”(...) responsible free will? Glad to argue for this. Gordana?”
>>  
>> "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards"
>> Søren Kierkegaard, Journalen JJ:167 (1843), Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, Søren Kierkegaard Research Center, Copenhagen, 1997--, volume 18, page 306.
>>  
>> Life cannot be understood forwards since we cannot know all possible consequences of our present decisions. Despite this, ethical practice has found pragmatic solutions. For example, a popular ethics topic today is AI, a technology that is developing incredibly quickly. We have no idea what will come next year. Yet, people have started thinking about future scenarios, challenges, possible pitfalls, etc. Societies want to prepare even under uncertainty. We do this all the time.
>>  
>> Ethics is a distributed intelligent learning adaptive system.
>>  
>> The question of predicting a system's future behavior also relates to research. The paper "A third transition in science?" relates both to the methodology of prediction and the direction of the new transition in science, a post-Newtonian paradigm.
>> The current paradigm shift is occurring in the material sciences—physics, chemistry, biology—as well as in other forms of knowledge production and meaning creation. 
>>  
>> At the foundation of information, there is the concept of 'meaning'.
>> This meaning is tightly bound to values, but that is a subject for a new discussion.
>>  
>> Gordana
>>  
>>  
>> From: Fis <fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es <mailto:fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es>> on behalf of Stuart Kauffman <stukauffman at gmail.com <mailto:stukauffman at gmail.com>>
>> Date: Tuesday, 9 January 2024 at 18:32
>> To: Louis Kauffman <loukau at gmail.com <mailto:loukau at gmail.com>>, 0 <stukauffman at gmail.com <mailto:stukauffman at gmail.com>>
>> Cc: fis <fis at listas.unizar.es <mailto:fis at listas.unizar.es>>, Andrea Roli <andrea.roli at unibo.it <mailto:andrea.roli at unibo.it>>
>> Subject: Re: [Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 108, Issue 5
>>  
>>  
>> Lou how splendid!  I fully agree and perhaps even more. Wheeler’s wonderful 20 questions is, as you say, OUR joint conscious construction of what will become. What becomes did not yet exist.
>>  
>> The clearest physical example is exactly the evolving biosphere. Whatever the Actual biosphere is now, it enables an un-prestatable Adjacent Possible into which it literally physically constructs itself. What is Actual now must be stable enough to enable what can next arise. The same thing occurs in the evolving global economy. Goods and services that now exist enable the coming into existence of new, non-prestatable, non-deducible complements and substitutes, screws and screwdrivers - screws and nails.
>>  
>> We do not know what is “in” the Adjacent Possible of the biosphere. We do not know the sample space of the process, so can have no probability measure nor even define “random”.
>>  
>> It is critical to our discussions to get beyond formal deductions. Evolving life is an evolving physical, in part, construction.
>>  
>> Beyond the way the biosphere physically constructs itself without appeal to MIND and consciousness, we also are conscious, choose and act. Ask any Venture Capitalists and entrepreneurs. They cannot deduce - compute “The risk”.
>> As Soren Kirkegord roughly said, We live our lives forward into mystery.
>>  
>> Uhoh, responsible free will? Glad to argue for this. Gordana?
>>  
>> Stu
>>  
>>> On Jan 8, 2024, at 8:38 AM, Louis Kauffman <loukau at gmail.com <mailto: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 of Twenty Questions (Davies, P.C.W and Brown, J. R. (1986)): “ Then my turn came .... I was locked out an unbelievably long time. On finally being readmitted, I found a smile on everyone’s face, a sign of a joke or a plot. I nevertheless started my attempt to find the word. ‘Is it an animal?’ ‘No.’ Is it a mineral?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Is it green?’ ‘No.’ ‘Is it white?’ ‘Yes.’ These answers came quickly. Then the questions took longer in the answering. All I wanted from my friends was a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Yet the 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 to me that there had been no word in the room. They had agreed not to agree on a word. Each one questioned could answer as he pleased – with one requirement that he should have a word in mind compatible 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 for me ... What is the symbolism of the story? The world, we once believed, exists out there independent of any act of observation. ... I, entering the room, thought the room contained a definite 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 up with a different word ... However, the power I had in bringing the particular word cloud into being was partial only. A major part of the selection lay in the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ replies of the colleagues around the room ... In the game, no word is a word until that word is promoted to reality by the choice of questions asked and answers given.” Wheeler’s allegorical fable was intended to illuminate the conditions of the quantum physicist. In quantum physics no phenomenon is an actual phenomenon until it is observed and agreed upon by all the physics colleagues. The story just as well illustrates the world of social interaction.
>>> 87. My thesis is that all attempts to find stable knowledge of the world are attempts to find theories accompanied by eigenforms in the actual reflexivity of the world into which one is thrown. The world itself is affected by the actions of its participants at all levels. One finds out about the nature of the world by acting upon it. The distinctions one makes change and create the world. The world makes 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 stable knowledge is equivalent to the production of eigenforms. In this case we have only to look at what we do and see that whenever “something is the case” then there is an orchestration of actions that leaves the something invariant, making that something into an eigenform for those actions. The eigenform thesis is not itself a matter of empirical science. It is a matter of definition, albeit circular definition. 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 maintained by actions. The action could be as simple as opening your eyes and looking at the cloudy sky. With that action, the cloudy sky comes to be for you. I do not assert that this is the usual scientific explanation of cloudy sky. But if you want to work with such things then it is usually even more transparent. The sharp spectral lines of Helium are the result of setting up a very particular experiment that produces them. The experiment, its equipment, the scientists and all that is needed to perform 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 are interrelated and find connections among them, to engage in meta-scientific activity. This can reveal how theories, seemingly objective, actually affect the world through their very being, and how these actions on the world come to affect the theories themselves. In exploring the world, we find regularities. It is possible that these regularities are our own footprint. In the end we shall begin to understand 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 <mailto: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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