Vedr.: reply to Burgin

S�ren Brier Wrote:

Dear Edwina and Mark

I think we agree on the evolutionary story. The problem is what sort of ontological frame work is necessary to be able to understand the emergence of form, life, mind and consciousness.

Most scientist to day agree that matter and energy is not enough and therefore accept information as a basic concept of organization and interaction through form. But a physical defined information concept does not help us to understand life and consciousness. Here we need self-organization, feeling, meaning and sign. In the Fuschl meeting in April where among other John Collier and Allan Combs participated the conclusions pertaining to this were:
1. Nature contains multilevel, multidimensional hierarchies of inter-related clusters forming a metaheterarchy (a heterogeneous general hierarchy).
2. Levels emerge through similar processes, leading to self-similarity across levels, constituting general translevel principles. These principles can be placed into a Peircean perspective, where potentialities (firstness) on causally manifested as constraints and forces (secondness), and meaning is created on every level by integrating manifestation with potentiality into regularities and patterns (thirdness). This process is continuing in a recursive manner from level to level. The new emergent level then acts as potential for the development of the next level.
3. Emergent process laws that are peculiar to each level, allowing components to function together, stabilize levels. This yields the dynamical integration that individuates each level. In the special case in which this integration involves active organizational processes we have autonomy, which is, roughly speaking, a partially open form of autopoiesis. Closure is thus important in the creation of living systems. But the degree of closure necessary is still under discussion.
4. Levels can form and dissolve when their dynamical parameters are near critical points, as when nucleons form and dissolve in a "quark soup". Stabilization requires that the system move further from the critical point.
5. In hierarchies there is a filtering of lower level effects rising from the bottom at each new emergent level. But there is also a binding from the top, and the exclusion of alternative possibilities once one path of emergence has stabilized (Downward causation).
6. Across levels, various forms of causation (efficient, formal and final) are more or less explicit (manifest). This leads to more or less explicit manifestations of information and meaning at the various levels, but the basic forms of causation can be seen at all levels. Material causation is grounded in the Quantum zero energy fields. But for each level the next lower level acts as its material basis.
7. Meaning is generated through the whole heterachy especially through systems relation to a larger natural context. Meaning is most manifest in systems based on concentrations in the informational dimensions. ...
8. The autonomous systems are related to various notions of meaningful functionality that in turn are connected to various types of causality: efficient, formal, final. The most full-blown version of meaning involves finality. The same principles govern relations in this specialized hierarchy as in the metaheterarchy.

S�ren Brier, +45 3528 2689

http://www.flec.kvl.dk/personalprofile.asp?id=sbr&p=engelsk

Ed. of Cybernetics & Human Knowing

http://www.imprint-academic.com/C&HK

>>> jamesbarham@supernet.com 20-05-02 10:02 >>>

(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 Tue May 21 12:01:46 2002