reply to Burgin

(from James Barham)
-------------------------

Mark Burgin wrote:

"(1) Life emerged due both to material and information processes.

(2) There is no information where there is no life.

(1) and (2) imply:

(3) Life cannot emerge!"

The fallacy lies in (1). It is not correct to say that "life emerged
due to information processes." Rather, we should say "life emerged" and
the thing that emerged was an information process. In other words, life
CONSTITUTES an information process. That is just what life consists of,
that is the very thing that emerged with the origin of life.

If one believes that there was a time when there was no life, then it
must be admitted that life emerged. If one accepts my view that life
consists of a sui generis dynamics which constitutes information use (in
the form of low-energy triggers mediating nonlinear oscillators and the
circumstances supporting their dynamical stability), then the emergence
of information is no more mysterious than the emergence of life itself.
They are one and the same phenomenon.

Now, I do not pretend that emergence, in any form, is not a little
mysterious. Furthermore, I must admit that the emergence of life is even
more mysterious than other forms of emergence. But the only alternative
to emergence is universal, Laplacian reductionism, which I consider
absurd. Emergence has now become quite well integrated into parts of
physical theory (especially, effective field theory). In this
connection, one must side with the condensed-matter physicists against
the high-energy physicists.

So, within a general picture of a series of symmetry breakings from the
big bang forward, each of which gives rise to qualitatively novel states
of matter with new causal powers (cf. Walter Thirring's notion of the
"evolution of the laws of nature"), the emergence of life and
information becomes a little less mysterious. But the mystery will only
be throrougly dissipated when we have a real theory of the living state,
that is, a theory of information dynamics that can be properly
formalized, integrated into an expanded quantum field theory, and
empirically confirmed.

I don't know how far away that day is, but maybe not as far as we think
(see the work of Emilo Del Giudice, Giuseppe Vitiello, Mae-Wan Ho, and
others).

James
Received on Mon May 20 10:04:08 2002