Dear Colleagues,Science & Ultimate Reality
In recent years much attention has been given to the possibility of unifying
the various forces of nature within a quantum mechanical framework and to
the formulation of a so-called "theory of everything." (See yesterday's
paper by Smolin.) The quest being carried on by modern physicists to
identify the fundamental building blocks of the physical world began with
the Greek Atomists. The philosophy that underpins it is reductionism: the
conviction that everything in nature may ultimately be understood by
reducing it to its elementary components. But reductionism in general, and
the philosophy of particle physicists in particular, has been criticized for
committing what Arthur Koestler called the fallacy of "nothing-buttery." The
problem is that a complete theory of the interactions of particles and
forces would tell us little, for example, about the origin of life or the
nature of consciousness. It may not even be of value in describing phenomena
as basic as fluid turbulence or the properties of bulk matter as mundane as
metals.
Many scientists recognize that new phenomena emerge and new principles may
be discerned at each level of complexity in physical systems that simply
cannot be reduced to the science of lower levels. To take a familiar
example, a person may be said to be living even though no atoms of their
bodies are living. A reductionist might claim that the phenomenon of "being
alive" is not really a fundamental or ultimately meaningful one, but merely
a convenient way of discussing a certain class of unusual and complicated
physical systems. But there is an alternative point of view that goes by the
name of emergence. An emergenticist would counter the reductionist by saying
that it is just as scientifically meaningful to talk about life processes
and the laws that describe them, as it is to talk about subatomic particles.
A growing body of expository literature, along with discoveries such as the
fractional quantum Hall effect, an electromagnetic phenomenon occurring at
extremely low temperatures, has sharpened the focus of debate between
reductionism and emergence. It is clear that emergence has relevance wider
than physical science. Other disciplines, particularly psychology,
sociology, philosophy and theology, are also vulnerable to reductionism. If
emergent phenomena are taken seriously, then it seems we must take seriously
not only life but also consciousness, social behavior, culture, purpose,
ethics and religion. For instance, philosophers and theologians debate the
vexed issue of whether right and wrong are just human conventions or whether
the universe has a moral dimension, perhaps itself an emergent property, but
nevertheless real.
George Ellis is a physicist and mathematician at the forefront of the school
that takes emergence seriously. A general relativist from the University of
Cape Town, he is also co-author (with Nancey Murphy) of On The Moral Nature
of the Universe, as well as being co-author (with Stephen Hawking) of The
Large Scale Structure of Space-Time. His paper moves the discussion of the
symposium beyond physical cosmology into the realm of observers and
ontology.
Paul Davies
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Title: True Complexity and the Associated Ontology
Author: George Ellis, Cape Town
Summary:
True complexity, with the emergence of higher levels of order and
meaning, occurs in modular hierarchical structures, because these form
the only viable ways of building up and utilising real complexity.
This is made possible by the existence of atomic structures that allow
complex bio-molecules such as RNA, DNA, and proteins with their
folding properties and lock-and-key recognition mechanisms, in turn
underlying membranes, cells (including neurons), and indeed the entire
bodily fabric and nervous system. This is the basis of life [1] and
the human brain [2]. The principles of hierarchy and modularity have
been investigated usefully in the context of computing [3], and
particularly in the discussion of object-oriented programming [4], and
it is helpful to see how these principles are embodied in physical and
biological structures. They enable simultaneous top-down and bottom-up
action, with responses based on stored information and past history.
This is the basis of the effectiveness of higher levels of emergent
order in terms of enabling higher-level phenomenological regularities
of behaviour, described in the language suitable to that level of the
hierarchy and underlying effective theories of behaviour at each
level.
However there is of necessity a major decentralisation of control from
the higher to the lower levels, incorporating many feedback control
loops both at each level and between levels, as is required in order
to handle requisite variety [5] and the associated information loads
[6]. The development of such complexity in living systems requires
both a historical Darwinian process of natural selection [1], which
develops and stores genetic information characterising the nature of
the biological family involved, and a developmental process which uses
positional information to control the reading of this genetic
information [7] . This sets the context where brain development takes
place on the basis of the principles of natural selection, which also
apply in utilising genetic information in each individual [8], as is
required both because the stored information is far too little to
control brain development by itself, and because this allows the
brain to optimally adapt to the local environment.
Given this complex structuring, one can ask firstly, what is real,
that is, what actually exists, and secondly, what kinds of causality
can occur in these structures? Developing previous work by Popper and
Eccles [9] and Penrose [10], the view put will be that (i) there is a
reality to each separate level of the physical system in this
hierarchical structure, (ii) there is a reality to human thoughts and
emotion, (iii) there is a reality to the possibility space that
determines what is and what is not possible (at the lower levels of
the hierarchy, this is characterised by inviolable physical laws,
whose ontological status is however unclear), (iv) there is a reality
to logical and mathematical structures (which relate in an unknown
way to physical laws). These claims are justified in terms of the
effectiveness of each kind of reality in influencing the physical
world; however different kinds of reality have different natures.
Whether the highest or the lowest level is `ultimate reality' is open
to debate, and can lead to metaphysical and theological speculation.
The key point about causality in this context is that simultaneous
multiple causality (inter-level and within each level) is always in
operation, and any attempt to characterise any partial cause as the
whole (as characterised by the phrase `nothing but') is a
fundamentally misleading position (indeed this is the essence of
fundamentalism). This is important for examlpe in terms of answering
claims that any of evolutionary biology, sociology, psychology, or
whatever are able to give *total* explanations of specific properties
of the mind. Rather they each provide partial and incomplete
explanations.
Finally, fundamental physics underlies and enables this complexity.
The basic question for physicists is what are the aspects of
fundamental physics that allow and enable this extraordinarily complex
hierarchical structure to exist, where the higher levels are quite
different than the lower levels [11]. The proposal by Schweber [12]
that the fundamental feature is the renormalization group is
inadequate to encapture the whole of this complexity (precisely
because fundamentally different kinds of structure and behaviour occur
at the different levels). Is it the general nature of quantum theory
(e.g. superposition, entanglement, and decoherence), or the specific
nature of quantum field theory and/or Yang-Mills gauge theory that is
they key, or is it rather the specific potentials and interactions of
the standard particle physics model and its associated symmetry
groups? To what extent is it dependent on specific constants such as
the fine structure constant, or specific particle properties
(existence of three families of quarks, electrons, and neutrinos for
example)? What feature of physics is the key to existence of truly
complex structures? Whatever it is, this must claim to be the `truly
fundamental' feature of physics.
References:
1: Neil A Campbell: Biology (Benjamin Cummings, 1990)
2: Alwyn Scott: Stairway to the Mind. (Copernicus - Springer, Berlin:
1995)
3: A S Tannebaum, Structured Computer Organisation (Prentice
Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1990)
4: Grady Booch: Object Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications
(Addison Wesley)
5: W Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics
6: Stafford Beer: Brain of the Firm (Wiley, New York. 1981).
7: Lewis Wolpert et al: Principles of Development. (Oxford University
Press, Oxford. 1998)
8: Gerald Edelman: Neural Darwinianism: The Theory of Neuronal Group
Selection,
9: Karl Popper and John C Eccles: The Self and its Brain: An Argument
for Interactionism (Springer, Berlin. 1977
10: Roger Penrose: The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1997)
11: Phil Anderson, `More is Different'. Science 177 (1972), 377
12: Sylvan Schweber: `Physics, Community, and the Crisis in Physical
Theory'. Physics Today, November 1993, 34.
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