A few years ago, theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman briefly considered going into the t-shirt business. The front of his t-shirt would read, "Consciousness: It Blows My Mind" and the back would be emblazoned with "Consciousness: Think About It." Instead, he wrote one of the great science books of the decade, Investigations--a many-faceted look at life and its origins that is radical, deep, difficult, amusing, frustrating, and intoxicating. With great respect for Schrodinger's What is Life, and Darwin's genius, Kauffman says that both fell short in trying to puzzle out life's complexity. He tries to answer those questions anew. These are the kind of questions some of us live for. One comes away from this book a true believer, convinced that the universe must be full of life, and freshly appreciative of this simple truth: "Life," he writes, "is doing something far richer than we may have dreamed, literally something incalculable."

What follows is the second in a series of interviews with deep thinkers on life and the universe. The first, with cosmologist Lee Smolin, was published this past December on Metanexus:Views (24 December 2001) and can be found at<http://www.metanexus.net/archives/message_fs.asp?ARCHIVEID=5115>. Kauffman and Smolin are friends and have written two theoretical papers together. Stuart Kauffman is one of the founding members of the Santa Fe Institute<http://www.santafe.edu> , a MacArthur 'genius award' recipient, author of several books (including At Home in the Universe), and currently chief scientific officer of Bios Group <http://www.biosgroup.com>, a Santa Fe-based software company he founded. BiosGroup draws parallels between the functioning of biospheres and econospheres, works closely with corporations and economists, and sometimes goes by the affectionate nicknames "Best Ideas of Stu,"; "Bad Ideas of Stu", and "Blame it on Stu!" Investigations is published by Oxford University Press.

Moreover, in yesterday's Metanexus: Views posting (Metanexus: Views 2002.02.17 or<http://www.metanexus.net/archives/message_fs.asp?ARCHIVEID=5597>,) you can read about Kauffman's contribution to the upcoming Science & Ultimate Reality Symposium from March 15-18, 2002 in Princeton celebrating John A. Wheeler's 90th year. In his essay, Kauffman brings together two of Wheeler's more prominent ideas--that of the participatory universe and the idea of "it from bit". To get more information or to register for the Science &
Ultimate Reality Symposium at Princeton, go to<http://www.templeton.org/ultimate_reality>. We hope to see many of you there. You can also subscribe to this list independently of VIEWS by going to <http://listserv.metanexus.net/metanexus/archives/wheeler.html

--Jill Neimark & Stacey Ake

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Subject: Consciousness: It Blows My Mind: An Interview with Stuart Kauffman From: Stuart Kauffman via Jill Neimark Email: <stu@biosgroup.com >

Q: In your book, Investigations, you come up with a new theory of the laws that give rise to the universe, life and the biosphere-as well as a new definition of life itself.

A: Let me caution you first that I'm not a physicist. I'm a biologist who talks and thinks about physics, but a lot of what I know about physics I know through Lee [Smolin]. Though I'm very proud of Investigations, I'm also deeply puzzled and slightly appalled by what I seem to have discovered. For instance, I seem to have arrived at a new and useful definition of life, but what do I do with it? I've driven myself crazy for five years now, because I kept opening these doors and with one or two exceptions I have no idea how to walk through them.

Q: Your new definition of life builds on one you offered in At Home in the Universe, where you suggested that, based on mathematical modeling, life could be generated from a collection of molecules catalyzing each others' formation, or what you call group autocatalysis. Now you worry that those molecules could cycle on indefinitely, never giving rise to life, unless something gives them a shove.

A: I now define life as an autonomous agent, a self-reproducing molecular system carrying out at least one thermodynamic work cycle. Work, or agency, is coextensive with life. I think I've given the minimal physical description of life. Of course I've been very sly in my description here. Physics is supposed to talk about happenings, not doings and actions. But we seem unable, no matter how hard we try, to reduce doings to happenings. The stunning and familiar, utterly astonishing feature about autonomous agents is that everyday they manipulate the universe around us. They act, they do. Make no mistake, we autonomous agents mutually construct and coevolve our biosphere

Q: And you think we could generate autonomous agents, or life, in the laboratory?

A: I'd be both terrified and fascinated if we could, and I think we'll find out soon. Do you know the theory of combinatorial chemistry-making millions or trillions of RNA protein and selecting out the ones that do what you want? We can test this. A lot of people are interested in this idea of mine, and they're starting to think about doing the experiment. My big worry is tar. On the computer it works like a charm, but in the lab these molecules crosslink a lot and they could form a sludge, and if we need fancy chemistry to produce life, I won't be happy.

Q: Can you talk about what you call life's incalculable creativity? There are fundamental laws that apparently allow life to emerge-and yet you point out that life is so creative that it can't be predicted according to these laws.

A: That is one of the oddest conclusions I've ever come to in my life, and it's very confusing, but I think I'm right. First you have to consider the concept of Darwinian pre-adaptation, the idea that a feature that was selected for one purpose turns out to be useful for a second purpose. Let's say you live in Los Angeles and you have a single Mendelian dominant mutant part that can pick up earthquake pre-tremors and you feel something funny and you say, "Oh my goodness, an earthquake," and leave the city. Millions die, but you become famous and mate with many people and have lots of kids.

Q: I guess for this to work out you'd have to be a guy.

A: Right, so let's make it me. I have this trait and now there are lots of little Stu's running around with earthquake sensors in their chest, and if earthquakes happen frequently that trait will be selected. That's how many major evolutionary steps have happened. Now my question is the following: Do you think you could ever say ahead of time what all possible Darwinian pre-adaptations are?

Q: Nope.

A: I've never found anybody who thinks you can. So what this says is-and I don't know if this is a mathematical or an empirical claim and therefore I don't know how to prove it-we can never say ahead of time what the relevant variables are in the evolution of the biosphere. This means the biosphere keeps inventing new functionalities and we can't say ahead of time what they are. That's a radical new kind of failure to predict. It's not quantum uncertainty, and it's not chaos theory. Still, it's the kind of uncertainty that seems central. Life keeps inventing things.

Q: What do physicists say when you tell them this?

A: The physicists are puzzled and stunned. What's critical in physics is that ahead of time you can say what all the possibilities are. But you cannot do that for the biosphere, you cannot plot it as a motion through a space of prestated possibilities, and that's radically different than the way the physicists taught us to do science. The biologists say, 'Well, of course you can't predict,' but they've been living with this forever and trying to do evolutionary theory.

Q: In a review of your book in The Guardian, Jon Turney writes, "Work is one of the ideas Kauffman badly wants to reinvent. It is a physicist's word that cloaks some of the deep problems in biology." I guess this is one of biology's deep problems.

A: We need a new family of concepts, ones we can apply to autonomous agents. Perhaps we need to let storytelling into science. Even with a bacterium, for instance, the story is, 'I swam up the glucose gradient to get dinner. How's the glucose, Martha?' Agency is central to life and stories are central to agency. Yet we don't really know how to do science with stories.

Q: Somehow you put work back in the equation?

A: The biosphere is working all the time. There are all sorts of ways that organisms couple to energy sources to build devices and extract work, then that work propagates to drive other processes that build constraints on that energy, which work to build more constraints. And that builds complex things like redwood trees. The biosphere has gotten really complex just by doing this. Something new comes into existence all the time. A biosphere is made up of mutually co-creating autonomous agents, and you need a work cycle to be an autonomous agent. Now, I don't know how hard it is to get that work cycle. Somehow I have the intuition that it's not so hard, but I realize in talking to you now, that's a place where I can go and do some science, I can model chemical reaction networks and ask how hard it is to get a motor. Nobody's ever worked on that and I think that's doable scientifically.

Q: You thought of it here first. But if it worked in the lab, I'd be really scared, and I don't even know why.

A: Because if we created life in the lab, then you'd want to know what happened to it, and whether it evolved or died out.

Q: That's true. One of the other neat ideas you discuss is what you call the "adjacent possible." You describe it as the place the autonomous agent, or the whole biosphere, is balanced-the place between collapse and the next outpouring of creative invention and novelty. Life apparently likes to live there.

A: Yes, I formalized this push into novelty as a math concept called an "adjacent possible." Biospheres enter their adjacent possible as rapidly as they can sustain it. So I suggested this as a possible fourth law of thermodynamics, this advancing into the adjacent possible as fast as you can. Of course, there are at the same time a continuum of large and small extinction events, and to explain these I stole from Per Bak's idea of self-organized criticality, that systems are organized in such a way that a particular input, small or large, can cause the system to collapse or evolve.

Q: At one point you describe life as Yeats' rough beast, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. What did you mean by that?

A: I was being poetic. Here's this wonderful image of something that has inevitability to it, a great rough beast. You don't get in the way of great rough beasts, this beast can slouch his way toward Bethlehem and by God he'll get there and be born as Jesus. It's the juxtaposition of something sort of dark and inevitable moving towards the brightness of the birth of the Lord. It reminds me of the phase transitions and complex chemical reaction graphs which in their inevitable way drive networks towards the emergence of life.

Q: That's very lovely. You also offer this other radical idea, that the laws of our universe can tune themselves. Apparently you worked some of that out with Lee Smolin. Aren't laws supposed to be constant and unchanging?

A: Who's to say a law is absolutely fixed? The Heisenberg uncertainty principle says there is uncertainty about position, momentum and other variables. Maybe there is also uncertainty about the laws of physics.

Here's how it might work. Imagine a stack of model universes, space-time universes stacked one above the other, and now imagine the laws of physics re slightly different in each member of this stack of universe-pancakes. Now comes the radical idea. In normal quantum mechanics we follow Feynman's 'sum over all histories.' In other words, at the quantum level you consider all possible pathways the photon or electron might take , and each is associated with an action and a phase. Among all possible pathways those that are nearly straight lines have nearly the same action nearly the same phase and just like waves in an ocean they will amplify one another and interfere constructively. That's called constructive interference along a near classical trajectory. But if a photon takes a wiggly funny pathway, then small changes in that pathway lead to big changes. Slightly different, funny wiggly pathways are like waves out of phase and interfere destructively and cancel each other out.

Now apply that idea to a set of laws. There are trajectories of particles with standard quantum uncertainty--and also uncertainty, and hence fluctuations, in the laws themselves. Small fluctuations in the laws may lead to small or large changes in action and phase along such trajectories. Thus, if the laws of physics are different in each universe, we can use Feynman's constructive and destructive interference to say that those trajectories which, under fluctuations in the laws, have only small changes in action and phase, will thereby select out just those laws. Constructive interference, when small changes in the laws have only a small impact on action and phase preferentially selects that set of laws from among the possible set of laws. So in a sense the universe, out of a space of possible laws, could choose its own laws. It encourages you to think there could be some historical process in our universe by which the laws themselves get tuned.

Q: How in the world, or universe, could you test that!

A: One way would be to use string theory. There are these Calabi Yau spaces that Brian Greene talks about in The Elegant Universe. As you move from one point to another in one Calabi Yau space, you change the laws of physics. You'd look for one or a set of Calabi Yau spaces where small motions in the space have the minimum impact on trajectories and action. That would show constructive interference, and that would hopefully be where you find the laws that apply to our universe. If anybody ever did that it would be utterly stunning. It's mathematically intractable with current techniques as far as I know.

Q: If life inevitably emerges from the cosmos, and life is always creative, then is creativity a true "free lunch"? Is it essential to a universe, or simply a lucky accident?

A: Ask the question this way: Suppose there are multiple planets on which ecosystems exist-and let's hope that life on those different planets is radically different, which would be the most interesting. So now we need general biology, and we get to ask are there general properties of biospheres anywhere in the universe? The general properties we'll find are precisely the ones that have a chance of being "inevitable" and therefore those properties are not gratuitous. That means the universe is creative.

Q: Thank God. I was worried there for a minute.

A: We're doing it right now. We're creating a story in your online magazine and we don't know what we're going to say next.

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Published   2002.02.19