Dear Colleagues,Science & Ultimate Reality
Human beings have a deep fascination with the origin of things. Without a
miracle, how can something come to exist that did not exist before? The
ancient Greek philosophers were sharply divided on the issue. One school,
represented by Heraclitus, maintained that everything in the world was
naturally in a constant state of flux. The other, associated with
Parmenides, insisted that true change is impossible, since nothing can
become what it is not. This ancient tension between being and becoming did
not remain confined to philosophy. It came to pervade science too, and still
provokes heated debate on matters concerning the arrow of time, chaos theory
and the psychological perception of a temporal flux.
The Greek Atomists thought they had the answer to the being-becoming
dichotomy. The universe, they said, consists of nothing but atoms moving in
the void. All change is simply the rearrangement of atoms. The atoms
represented being, their motion becoming. Thus began the long tradition of
physical reductionism, in which true novelty is defined away. In the
reductionist's universe, there can never be anything genuinely new.
Apparently new systems or phenomena - such as living organisms or
consciousness - are regarded as simple repackaging of already-existing
components.
The philosophy of emergence, by contrast, takes change and novelty
seriously. Emergenticists suppose that genuinely new things can emerge in
the universe, and bring with them qualities that simply did not exist
before. Such a transformation may seem mysterious, and it often is. That is
why some non-scientists home in on the origin of things to seek a breakdown
of science - a gap into which they might slip divine intervention. The list
of enigmatic leaps begins with the big bang origin of the universe, and goes
on to include the origin of life and the origin of consciousness. These are
all tough transitions for scientists to explain. (Curiously, I think the
origin of the universe, which might be considered the most challenging, is
the easiest to explain.) In some cases it seems as if the new systems spring
abruptly and unexpectedly from the precursor state. Cosmologists think (at
least they used to) that the big bang was the sudden spontaneous appearance
of spacetime from nothing, a transformation that took little more than a
Planck time. The origin of life might have been an equally amazing and
sudden 'phase transition,' or there again it might have involved a long
sequence of transitional states extended over millions of years. Nobody
knows. And as for the emergence of consciousness, this remains deeply
problematic.
Undaunted, Marcelo Gleiser boldly takes on the Big Three origins - Cosmos,
Life and Mind - from the viewpoint of emergence. His discussion ranges from
quantum field theory to Kauffman's autonomous agents. A summary of his paper
follows.
Paul Davies
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Title: Emergent Coherent Behavior and the Problem of the Three Origins:
Cosmos, Life, and Mind
Author: Marcelo Gleiser
Summary:
Some of the great challenges of modern science deal with what I refer to as
the "problem of the 3 origins: Cosmos, Life, and Mind". It is certainly
clear that each of these problems has a set of issues that are pertinent to
it alone. For example, while (as St. Augustine knew well) the question of
the origin of the universe is deeply related to the origin of time, or,
perhaps more appropriately, to the transition from a directionless Euclidean
quantum time to a classical cosmological time with its arrow pointing
resolutely forward, the origin of life -- the transition from complex
organic molecules to animated matter, capable of replication and of doing
work -- and that of "mind," broadly understood, are phenomena that occur
within a well-defined time axis.
Nevertheless, it is possible to talk collectively of these 3 origins as
being emergent phenomena. One may think of the universe we live in as one
successful cosmoid among countless others that pop in and out of existence
within a multiverse that contains them all. Of course, successful here is a
completely anthropic concept, as it usually implies in a
cosmoid that lives sufficiently long to allow for the growing
complexification of material structure, which culminates in people. One may
also thing of life as an emergent phenomenon, promulgated by coherent
spatio-temporal structures maintained out of thermodynamic equilibrium due
to interactions with their environment. The question here is how these
structures emerge, e.g., the emergence of Kauffman's "autonomous agents".
Finally, one may think of mind as an emergent property of a collection of
neurons, which somehow conspire to work coherently in order to create
thought. Quite possibly, the dimensionality of the configuration space
containing these emergent phenomena grows from cosmos (from simple
minisuperspace models with one degree of freedom) to life to mind.
My plan for this chapter is to start by reviewing these 3 questions, keeping
their common "emergent" aspect active throughout the presentation. I will
then move on to a more technical discussion of how coherent spatio-temporal
structures emerge in nonlinear field theories. The aim here is to use them
as a demonstration of how stochasticity and nonlinearity can give rise to
ordered, localized coherent behavior. The canonical example is the thermal
or quantum nucleation of kink-antikink pairs in 1d field theory; these are
localized spatially-coherent structures, which emerge during the stochastic
evolution of the system. Critical bubbles during strong first-order
(discontinuous) phase transitions, which appear in myriad applications,
including quantum cosmology (an euclidean instanton is a 4d bubble with O(4)
symmetry), are examples in larger numbers of dimensions.
However, these structures do not have much to do with time, as they are
static solutions to the equations of motion. In order to model the emergence
of spatio-temporal coherent structures, we need time-dependent localized
configurations. I will demonstrate the existence of such solutions -- called
"oscillons" -- in simple field theories, and discuss the necessary
conditions for their existence. They not only display a remarkable coherent
behavior in space and time, but are also incredibly robust, appearing as
attractors in field-configuration space under a wide range of initial
conditions. Furthermore, these coherent configurations act as an effective
bottleneck for equipartition, thus keeping the system out of equilibrium
much longer. They are certainly far from being a realistic model for the
emergence of life or mind, but they display quite clearly how long-lived
coherent spatio-temporal structures can emerge out of stochastic conditions,
a step in the right direction.
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