[Fis] Context and Layers of Emergence

[Katherine Peil]

Dear Lou and Jason (et al),
Ah Lou, I hear so much emotional wisdom in your posts, likely the esthetic overlap of between the Platonic beauty of maths and the universal preference for positive emotion (good feelings) – which is all about mindful self-development (i.e. learning and the construction of internal and external context). Indeed, the innate resonant delight of play puts the fun in biological function!  If you have a general big-picture synthesis – (Lou Kauffman for Dummies) I’d love to see it.

Ah Jason! Lovely to meet you, and invitation accepted! I find immediate use for your Layers-of-Emergence model in helping flesh out my Tao Story. Indeed, context – both internal and external - is key! (As is stress! But it comes in two types: Eustress and Distress – binary emotional valence.) Please do send me anything you’ve written so I can cite you properly.

In the meantime, I’d like to playfully take some scientific liberty with your model (making it a bit of a mash-up incorporating Lou’s core points, my emotion science, quantum physics, and Levin’s computational Bowtie architecture) and propose extending it thusly:

Layer 3: Mindful Perception (Mind-Self Identity): Instantiated by brains with ever-increasing mental complexity, agentic creative freedom and social connectivity; Iterative learning yields evolving mental models of personal and social self-hood and the everythingness of the objective environment; Involves personal history, cognitive - predictive – processing, symbolic and linguistic representations, motivational desire, and creative imagination; Includes all learned schemata and sociocultural knowledge; Informed by complex feelings).

Layer 2 : Bodily Sensation (Body-Self Identity); Self-hood as whole body, the universal embodied control “hardware” of every animate living creature. Instantiated on cell membranes early on in evolution, and always relative to local environment. As a non-equilibrium, complex adaptive system, body-self includes a stimulus-response “software”, for mediating ongoing interactive exchanges of energy and resources between its internal and external environments. This software includes core subjective, stimulus-response awareness, Pavlovian learning potential, and minimal self-regulatory agency. This self-regulatory machinery is observable at level of single cells, maintaining metabolism and homeostasis, ushering autopoiesis, instantiating the enactive mind, and delivering basal intelligence (Levin).
In multicellular organisms, body-self is organized internally via circular operational and informational closures between self-similar nested holons – differentiated body-self identities (cell types, tissues, organs) with distinct biological functions, which collectively sustain the whole. This is the holonic “Kantian Whole” identity structure (Kauffman), with circular organizational, operational and informational closure that orchestrates top-down constraint and bottom-up flexibility, via binary signaling processes. The common binary code is likely born of bioelectric signals that span the interactive interface between wave and particle aspects of matter, the “quantum fringe” that translates, transduces (or unites) patterning processes across micro and macro scales. While details of how that actually works remain unknown, the identity distinctions, communicative, and representational informational processes are evident in genetic, epigenetic and immune regulation, as well as embryogenesis and metamorphosis.

Layer 1: Classically Physical Context (In-formative, transformative, “computational”, objectively observable patterning processes that happen lawfully and deterministically due to electroweak and gravitational forces. Such machine-like occurrences reflect symmetries, energetic optimums, collective relational interactions, and decohering actualization events that manifest contextual distinctions in time, space and self (as foreground distinctions against any background substrate); Such contextualizing patterns undergird the standard model of particle physics, the dynamic, relational part~whole nature of identity, the electro-chemical behavior of atoms, and all life processes; They offer agentic definitions of energy as “the capacity to do work” and work as “the release, or realization, of energy within a few degrees of freedom” (Kauffman). Such agentic work involves computational information processing, with Either~Or binary logic, and Bayesian probability).

Layer 0: No-thingness (No context; Unified Background, Quantum Vacuum; wherein patterning processes occur in a fluid medium of quantum potentia, with quasi-particles and virtual particles popping in and out of “existence” proper. There is no time, nor space. Context is open, active and dynamic, yet with patterning processes that carry would-be could-be identity distinctions. In computational terms, this background constitutes a transformative layer, a translational kernel, with very thin information capacity, yet with some essential common interpretive core (Levin). This foundational informational core represents self~not self identity distinctions, and the deep identity dance between parts and wholes. (e.g. Whether virtual particles will become bosons or fermions, whether fermions become distinct electrons, up-quarks or down-quarks - color quarks or charm quarks, etc.)

Layer -1 (negative 1): Quantum Context (Deterministic actions and pattern forming processes, reflecting conservation laws, relational (Rovelli) and transactional (Kastner), collectives, coherent part~whole identity relations, local adjacencies, and historical trajectories within a fluid, unified non-local medium of pure potentiality (Heisenberg, Kauffman). Such patterns are born of features unique to quantum levels of scale: Indeterminacy, nonlocality, superposition, complementarity; uncertainty relations, entanglement, coherence, phase relations, contextuality of measurement choices, observer dependency, degrees of freedom in angular momentum (Kochen); Involves a Both~And logic, symmetry breaking among alternatives, and offers predictive probably. (Modeled mathematically by Hilbert space; emphasizing iterative cycles, permutations, sorting and ordering principles? Other maths?)

Layer -2 (negative 2):  Quantum Sensation (Identity constructs with immanent preferences and semantic feels of deterministic optimums and desirable self-states; Preferences following least action paths, adopting holonic self-similar geometries, coherent harmonic phase relations, and for preserving pure quantum information and actualizing identity potentials (Faggin); Involves semantic information and creative, agentic symmetry breaking that projectively manifests distinctions in the domain of time and space and self.

Layer – 3 (negative ): Quantum Perception (The in-formative substrate for Faggin’s eternal – yet everchanging identity structures he calls as “seities” (both fields and states associated with pure quantum information). Quantum aspects of self, link to religious ideas of transcendent “eternal” souls as beings, but adding the Not-Yet-Self element of constantly becoming. The unified nonlocal totality, The One, the “unmanifest” Unified Self (aka “God”) that is everlasting, but ever becoming, ever self-reflecting, ever self-actualizing, in infinitely many diverse and uniquely personal ways.  (Math models include: Hoffman’s amplituhedron and decorative permutations? All the cool beautiful maths of string theory?)

Then Flip it this model on its side, and you have of my Tao Story  (the process of the creative flow, that honors the agent in the machine), which also incorporates Levin’s universal bowtie architecture, layers of compression and decompression of information on each side that are central to the deterministic computational aspects. Image attached, if Pedro can “twinkle” one last visual image. (Jason’s layers are noted in red. And all three of my additions, -1,-2,-3, would dwell in Domain 0).

[A diagram of a time flow  Description automatically generated with medium confidence]

Please correct me where I may be mistaken about your meanings. As you may recall from my previous offerings, the method in my madness is to ground all this science in direct experience – the agent at the interface between both halves of “the machine”. Many thanks for your prompting all for these playful inspirations.
With kindred affection to you all,
Kate Kauffman



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