<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;">Lou how splendid! I fully agree and perhaps even more. Wheeler’s wonderful 20 questions is, as you say, OUR joint <i>conscious </i>construction of what will become. What becomes did not yet exist. <div><br></div><div>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. </div><div><br></div><div>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”.</div><div><br></div><div>It is critical to our discussions to get beyond formal deductions. Evolving life is an evolving physical, in part, construction. </div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>Uhoh, responsible free will? Glad to argue for this. Gordana? </div><div><br></div><div>Stu</div><div><div><br></div><div><div><blockquote type="cite"><div>On Jan 8, 2024, at 8:38 AM, Louis Kauffman <loukau@gmail.com> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;"><div>Dear Stu,</div>The constituents of your Kantian wholes still obey the laws of physics. I am made of atoms and molecules. <div>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.</div><div>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.</div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>Ah, but you ask Why can Physics have constraining laws? Ha! </div><div>Note that in the Feynman Path Integral version of QM the “particle” does whatever it likes.</div><div>The laws arise from the phase relationships of the particles that arrive at a given “place” in conjunction with assumed properties of “observers”. </div><div>Wheeler in his book on Gravity (Misner, Thorne and Wheeler) speaks eloquently about “Law without Law”.</div><div>I suggest you read John Wheeler who, in my opinion has the best answer to this question in terms of his </div><div>Parable of the Game of Twenty Questions. </div><div>I can send you my paper related to that but it will be too long for this email. </div><div>Excerpt included below.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">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 </span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: TimesNewRomanPS; font-style: italic;">cloud</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">. I knew I was allowed only one chance at the final word. I ventured it:
‘Is it </span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: TimesNewRomanPS; font-style: italic;">cloud</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">?’ ‘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.</span></div><div>
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<div class="column"><p><span style="font-size: 10.000000pt; font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'">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 </span><span style="font-size: 10.000000pt; font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPS'; font-style: italic">out there
</span><span style="font-size: 10.000000pt; font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'">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 </span><span style="font-size: 10.000000pt; font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPS'; font-style: italic">cloud </span><span style="font-size: 10.000000pt; font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'">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.
</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 10.000000pt; font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'">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.
</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 10.000000pt; font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'">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.</span></p><div>(LK in Constructivist Foundations, Vol. 11, No. 3)</div><p><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT; font-size: 10pt;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT; font-size: 10pt;">Best,</span></p><div>Lou</div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div></div></div></div></div><br><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"><div><div class="page" title="Page 14"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div><span style="font-size: 10.000000pt; font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPSMT'"> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div>
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</div></div><div><br></div><div><br><div><blockquote type="cite"><div>On Jan 7, 2024, at 7:27 AM, Stuart Kauffman <<a href="mailto:stukauffman@gmail.com">stukauffman@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div style="overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><div><br></div><div>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 <i>selection on the whole, which is downward causation</i> 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. </div><div><br></div><div>But even if Andrea and I are right about evolving life, why can PHYSICS have entailing laws?</div><div><br></div><div>All very odd.</div><div><br></div><div>Stu</div><div><br></div></div></div></blockquote></div><br></div></div></div></blockquote></div><br></div></div></body></html>