Could the Laws of Physics Be Self-Defining?

[apeiron]

To keep this thread on track - because I think it is a fundamental cosmological question whose time has come - I will hit the refresh button.

The question was about how a universe (or even multiverse) might emerge through some sort of self-organisation out of pure possibility, a chaos of geometry of some kind, a quantum foaminess of some infinite description.

To make a start on such an approach, we need some appropriate intellectual tools. We need some maths we can apply. Some causal model. Some kind of logic of self-organisation. Some wider metaphysical hand-waving description that can ground all these things. We need the general SO package that can be applied to a particular proposed example of SO.

It just so happens that SO systems is what I've been studying - both ancient and modern views on their modelling. So I have a personal take on what the best package is, and also a reasonable knowledge of the variety of approaches that are out there.

The vagueness/dichotomies/hierarchies story is a distillation of the core causal logic that can be used to model SO in general. It will seem a very alien logic to anyone only used to thinking in standard mechanical and atomistic terms when modelling reality. Indeed, it will seem to exactly contradict conventional logic on most key points. Which is actually OK because this systems approach can be developed as a formally dichotomous model of causality - it is the antithesis to the usual thesis. And furthermore, all logics are UN-real because they stand outside the complex, entangled realities they are used to describe. This is why we call them reductions - they leave out as much as possible to deal only in essentials.

OK, this is getting off track. I just wanted to make it clear that a logic/causality of SO may be very different from how people are used to thinking about systems.

To bring the discussion back into people's comfort zones, we could talk about all this in terms of phase transitions - as in Ising spin glasses and magnetisation of iron bars.

Vagueness would be like a state of poised criticality. The hot iron bar and its chaotically disoriented dipoles slowly approaching its critical point of cooling.

Then there is a dichotomisation. A global magnetic field emerges which is constraining. All the local dipoles line up - to construct that global magnetic field of constraint. You get order out of chaos (paid for by the export of heat in this closed system example, but paid for by the expansion of spacetime - the creation of the heat sink - in the "open system" example of a big bang.)

The phase transition of magnetic bar is not actually an ideal example of the full SO logic I am talking about, only an introduction. It is not properly a dichotomy and does not lead to an SO hierarchy. But it is still a start, a mental image, that can begin the understanding.

 

[apeiron]

I'm trying to understand your position . What does construction add to your metaphysics if it is acknowledged to not be able to accurately represent basic reality?

The metaphysics ends up demanding that causality be dichotomised. Just having either construction or constraint would be the sound of one hand clapping. Reality emerges as the result of the sum over all possible interactions. And you need these two very general versions of causality to have causality in interaction with itself, so to speak.

And again, modelling is unreal - for the usual dichotomous reasons. If reality is real, then the modelling must be unreal (in some useful interactive way).

Only the unreal could "accurately" model the real - otherwise it would still be entangled in the system it hopes to describe.

This is the standard observer problem we find in QM. It is impossible for the observer actually to stand outside the system. But the best model is the one that manages to simulate such an impossible stance.

The same goes for anthropology or any other science. How do we observe a tribe in an "objective" fashion? Our relationship with reality is subjective, yet we must find a way to fake objectivity.

How many different ways can I describe the modelling relation? This should be very familiar and basic epistemology (even if the vagueness/dichotomy/hierarchy model of causality is way out on the fringe of things).

 

[ConradDJ]

The question was about how a universe (or even multiverse) might emerge through some sort of self-organisation out of pure possibility, a chaos of geometry of some kind, a quantum foaminess of some infinite description.

To make a start on such an approach, we need some appropriate intellectual tools. We need some maths we can apply. Some causal model. Some kind of logic of self-organisation.

This is the standard observer problem we find in QM. It is impossible for the observer actually to stand outside the system. But the best model is the one that manages to simulate such an impossible stance.

To try to clarify the specific scenario I’m suggesting – it’s not so much a process of self-organization as one of self-selection. If you take a point of view “outside the system” and model this objectively, all you have is the original chaos, where all possible events occur at random, with no restrictions, and there is no definable information. I’m not supposing anything happens to change this.

The point is that there could exist within this chaos a very small subset of events that happened to be connected with each other in certain ways, such that from a point of view inside this web of connections, some kinds of information could be defined. From a point of view inside this set, events would appear to be lawful and determinate, to some extent; it might appear to unfold in a structured space and time. But this appearance is merely the result of self-selection, not any assumed physical process. From an objective standpoint, the events in this system are just as random and unconstrained as all the rest. They merely happen by accident to fall into a pattern which is able to define itself – i.e. which provides a context of definition for all its own information.

I think this is very far-fetched. Logically there’s no reason to believe such a system could exist. But my point is, we know such systems do exist, because we actually live in one. The structure of physical interaction we experience manifestly does provide an interactional context of definition for all its own information. That is, for every observable parameter in physics, there is a context of interaction in terms of which that parameter can be defined and measured, through other observables. This is so obvious and so necessary to the possibility of any experience that we take it for granted... but it seems to me it's not at all a trivial feature of the structure of physics.

So my argument is, we don’t need to assume anything about processes of self-organization happening ex nihilo. We don’t need to assume anything, because physics gives us a vast amount of detailed information about what an actual self-determining system looks like.

But I agree that we lack appropriate intellectual tools. We’re used to defining information in terms of the intrinsic properties of things-in-themselves, or in terms of the structure of systems seen “from outside”, or in terms of abstract logic. We don’t yet have tools for the analysis of observable information, i.e. information defined in terms of other observables.

So thanks for the links to Salthe – I’m definitely interested in the various approaches to the structure of the world “from inside”. I wish he were clearer up front about his principles, though! This is (as you say) pretty opaque.

 

[apeiron]

I was using self-organisation and self-selection interchangeably. But you would be right that there would be differences.

However I don't really get your point about how a subset of processes could be internally ordered, yet externally still seem random.

My own presumption is that the self-organisation/selection would draw everything that exists into coherent organisation.

But minor issue. More important is that SO approaches to cosmology are flourishing now. There may be some convergence that narrows down the theories usefully.

Have you caught this thread for example?

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=331348

 

[ConradDJ]

I don't really get your point about how a subset of processes could be internally ordered, yet externally still seem random.

The idea is that an "external" view would not have access to the selection criteria that define the set, since they refer only to interactions within the set. All the reference-frames that define its order are internal to the set.

Think of the many-worlds interpretation -- there each observer sees only his own world, but an "external" observer (if there could be such a thing) would "see" a superposition of all worlds, where everything happens. That would presumably be indistinguishable from the lawless chaos I began with, even though each of the MWI worlds is assumed to "obey laws" and be intrinsically well-defined.

The difference between my scenario and MWI is that I don't think there's any reason to believe that all these different worlds proposed by MWI would all be observable -- would all "work" to define themselves by providing contexts that define all their own information. MWI just makes the usual assumption that whatever "really happens" in any given world is observable. But there's only one world that we have reason to believe actually "works" to support observable information.

My suggestion is that the coherent reality and lawfulness of the world we observe come from the criteria of observability this system happens to develop for itself. Events that don't "obey" the "laws" (i.e. the self-selection criteria that happen to pick out this set) remain invisible, in that they can't have any specific observable character, or any definite effect on the things that are observable. They constitute a background of "virtual" events.

The idea of a set that defines its own selection criteria is bizarre enough that's it's not easy to bring it into focus, in the abstract. I'm going to try to come at this from another point of view in a separate thread... trying to clarify the kind of structure that would make information "observable".

 

[apeiron]

My suggestion is that the coherent reality and lawfulness of the world we observe come from the criteria of observability this system happens to develop for itself. Events that don't "obey" the "laws" (i.e. the self-selection criteria that happen to pick out this set) remain invisible, in that they can't have any specific observable character, or any definite effect on the things that are observable. They constitute a background of "virtual" events.

I agree with this approach. It might help to clarify your ideas to make a vague/crisp distinction here (which is sort of like virtual/real).

Vagueness is a way of talking about pure potential - a something that is an everythingness because all would still be possible, but is also equally an infinite nothingness as nothing has actually yet - crisply - happened.

So we can also call it a virtual sea, a quantum foam. But metaphysically speaking, it is a more general way of talking about such a potential. Vaguness is an idea that can be applied to any kind of system, not just physical ones.

And then you can start to talk about the logic of vagueness - the principles under which a potential can self-organise. This is what CS Peirce set the ball rolling on. Smolin for one has recently started citing Peirce (but only in a superficial way).

The point really is that the way you are thinking about these things is the way a fair few people think about self-organising systems. And it really helps to find the right jargon.

I know what you mean by the dichotomy, virtual-real. But the idea has unhelpful connotations because only the real is "real", and the virtual is somehow sullied by its fake pretence to exist. It is a junior partner in the story that we would like to discard.

But vague-crisp is a better terminology because it has a long philosophical history, and there is no implication that one is more real than the other. The vague is just the undeveloped potential and the crisp is what has managed to SO into some more definite existence (or persistence).

 

[baywax]

Now it seems that when we look deep into the quantum realm – for example, when we extrapolate back toward the very beginning of the universe, or when we describe the quantum vacuum of “virtual events” – we have something that approximates this sort of chaos where “anything goes.” So maybe it makes sense to think of the basis of things as an infinite plenum of unstructured happening, where any sort of event can occur.

The question is – could there happen to exist, within this original chaos, some sort of system that defined its own rules? Suppose for example there happened to be a web of the kind of events we call “interactions” – i.e. “relational events”, events that happen between other events. The “rule” defined by this system would just be that every event in the web has to link two other events within the system. A rule like this would be entirely “de facto” – it doesn’t make anything happen, it just selects the set of events that happen to “obey” it.

The only part of these ideas that is objectively correct is that fact that the physical laws are a result of "natural selection". There is no system nor being or other "intelligence" doing the arrangements... no conductor and no professor deciding how and when things should take place or if they should survive to continue to support this universe.

Just as life is a result of natural selection, so are the natural laws. The thing that is most titillating is that there must have spawned certain processes that didn't make it as part of the universal, natural laws. I would speculate that they must have been very chaotic or... "unhelpful" indeed.

It is hard to stay away from anthropomorphizing when talking about the universe's complex web of support-mechanisms. But that's all they are... naturally selected mechanisms. They only survive today because they provided undaunted support for all the other mechanisms holding this universe together. We really need to take a lesson from the cooperation shown between natural laws. Thank you.

 

[oldman]

The only part of these ideas that is objectively correct is that fact that the physical laws are a result of "natural selection". ...when talking about the universe's complex web of support-mechanisms. But that's all they are... naturally selected mechanisms. They only survive today because they provided undaunted support for all the other mechanisms holding this universe together...

I think you're probably right, Baywax. I'm surprised that no mention has been made here of an essential feature of natural selection --- the happenstance stumbling by nature upon processes that promote themselves, like the self-replicating property of DNA or the erosion caused by flowing water, which accentuates channelling and more erosion --- autocatalysis, I believe it's called.

 

[ConradDJ]

Just as life is a result of natural selection, so are the natural laws... the universe's complex web of support-mechanisms. But that's all they are... naturally selected mechanisms. They only survive today because they provided undaunted support for all the other mechanisms holding this universe together. We really need to take a lesson from the cooperation shown between natural laws.

I'm surprised that no mention has been made here of an essential feature of natural selection --- the happenstance stumbling by nature upon processes that promote themselves, like the self-replicating property of DNA or the erosion caused by flowing water, which accentuates channelling and more erosion --- autocatalysis, I believe it's called.

These comments make sense, thank you. I agree that the key issue is understanding in what sense all the different kinds of laws and invariants of physics support each other – define and determine each other. I’ve posted some thoughts related to this question in a separate thread:

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=332292"

As to self-promoting processes – this happens in many very different ways. Some happen very easily – erosion for example – and others, perhaps like the accidental emergence of self-replicating systems, may be extremely unlikely, even if the physical conditions that make it possible are there.

I think we may be able to identify processes like this at the basis of physics too... but the question is, starting from what? What are the basic conditions nature has to work with, in the beginning, that would make possible some sort of self-promoting process? What I want to avoid is making arbitrary assumptions about what the “initial conditions” were and what sort of “processes” would naturally arise.

In the past, metaphysics has been very fruitful with ideas about what “must be the case” at the basis of things, developed out of “pure reason”. But I think we’re mostly suspicious of that kind of thinking, nowadays, though it does keep getting reinvented.

On the other hand, I think quantum theory points to a kind of beginning ex nihilo that would hardly have been imaginable earlier – a “nothing” that consists of random lawless happening rather than absolute emptiness. (A “pure vacuum” sort of nothingness is in QM a very highly determinate state, and therefore can’t be taken for granted at a fundamental level.)

If that makes sense, it points us toward looking for “processes” – if that’s even the right word, when we can’t take for granted a well-defined space/time-continuum – that can define themselves, make themselves “meaningful” in some way – and so set up the conditions in which nature could “stumble upon” more structured processes.

Here I was just trying to make this starting-point plausible, by pointing out that the world we actually observe must in principle be a self-defining system, just by virtue of the fact that it’s observable. Once we believe that such systems can exist, we can start trying to understand their structure, and imagine what the most primitive information-processes may have been like – what would be analogous in base-level physics to erosion-channels, planetary orbits and other types of order that arise naturally once the basic structure of physical law is established.

 

[apeiron]

As to self-promoting processes – this happens in many very different ways. Some happen very easily – erosion for example – and others, perhaps like the accidental emergence of self-replicating systems, may be extremely unlikely, even if the physical conditions that make it possible are there. .

It would be important here to distinguish between evolution and development as forms of SO. Evolution is complex, development simple. So development is more likely to be the deep cosmological level story.

As an aside, here is another SO story fired in my direction this morning. The paper itself does not impress, but it does give some useful refs and context for SO approaches.

http://evodevouniverse.com/EDU2008Papers/HeylighenSOTimeCausalityEDU2008.pdf

 

[oldman]

It would be important here to distinguish between evolution and development as forms of SO. Evolution is complex, development simple. ...

Could you amplify this distinction, please, perhaps with examples of both processes? I had thought such a distinction was merely qualitative, with evolution being a process that includes both sudden (puctuated?) change and continuous development. But one hears a lot about evodevo these days, so I guess that I'm missing an important distinction. I need educating.

 

[baywax]

Could you amplify this distinction, please, perhaps with examples of both processes? I had thought such a distinction was merely qualitative, with evolution being a process that includes both sudden (puctuated?) change and continuous development. But one hears a lot about evodevo these days, so I guess that I'm missing an important distinction. I need educating.

Its hard to distinguish evolution from de-evolution since both result in new forms of mechanisms. I would go as far to say that entropy is a function or precursor to another process the same way we see decay give way to new forms of life or types of structures.

We tend to view a process as an end rather than a gradient of a progression of events.

Thanks for the vote of confidence oldman I've mentioned the idea of natural selection as it applies to astrophysics and laws of nature in other threads but I have a feeling the idea smacks of metaphor and allegory. I don't blame anyone for being cautious around these methods of communication. However, I personally don't see natural selection as a metaphor when its used to describe the development of the physical laws and the formation of matter etc... over time.

 

[apeiron]

Could you amplify this distinction, please, perhaps with examples of both processes? I had thought such a distinction was merely qualitative, with evolution being a process that includes both sudden (puctuated?) change and continuous development. But one hears a lot about evodevo these days, so I guess that I'm missing an important distinction. I need educating.

Development is "pure" self organisation. There is a bag of materials. A beaker of chemistry. Someone has set up some initial conditions (the local substances) within some global boundary constraints (the global form or organisation). And then this system runs down its gradient of development. A reaction proceeds to its equilbrium.

Evolution is then a system that can take some degree of control over the initial conditions/boundary constraints. It is a system with the memory mechanisms (the "semiotic" or symbolic stuff like DNA, membranes, words, neurons) to harness naturally occurring developmental gradients.

So with life for example, a bag of chemistry is literally create within a cell's membrane. The chemistry will find its equilibrium. Then the cell can throw in some enzymes in a timely fashion to tilt the equilibrium to some new developmental balance.

The information that is stored in these memory devices like DNA is derived by "natural selection".

You are probably thinking of evolution in the Darwinian sense of the evolution of a species, so natural selection seems the core idea. But I'm talking about more generalised notions of development and evolution which stress the SO aspect. It makes SO basic. It anchors the discussion to the second law and dissipative structures - the abiotic. Then allows you to define the "living and mindful" - the biotic - in terms of a capacity to evolve. A capacity to harness development through semiotic mechanisms like words and DNA.

Natural selection has got all the limelight because it was a quick way to knock intelligent designers out of the picture. But the cutting edge of theoretical biology for a long time now has been getting to grips with the deeper principles of SO. Selection was only the tip of the iceberg, intellectually.

A lot of books have been written about this stuff - Oyama's Ontogeny of information, Salthe's Development and Evolution, being two of the better ones.

As you say, the distinction seems qualitative. But I myself have been working on quantitative issues. Such as the argument that developmental processes have a natural powerlaw statistics (scale free, critical, tsallis, etc, due to their freely expanding design) while evolutionary processes have constrained gaussian statistics. Variety is for example one of the things a system has to bring under control - in the way height and other characteristics are anchored to a mean - so as to allow natural selection to work. The randomness that seeds a species Darwinian "development" has to be constrained to a single scale for selection to work with maximal efficiency.

This new evo-devo thing has nothing to do with the old sterile punctuated equilibrium debate. That was one of those contrived academic reputation making issues.

Well actually there is a connection. If we are saying that all evolutionary mechanism arises within a developmental context (you need an entropy gradient first for an entropy degrading system to arise) then the biosphere as a whole should show the statistics of "a development". So it should be no surprise if its is marked by scalefree or fractal statistics. You would expect powerlaw patterns of species creation and extinction. Intermitency rather than smoothness.

 

[oldman]

...I personally don't see natural selection as a metaphor when its used to describe the development of the physical laws and the formation of matter etc... over time.

I agree. As far as the mysteries of how the universe started (if it ever did) complete with matter, energy and 31 ruling constants, I think it is rash to adopt natural selection as a metaphor. We are just too ignorant to do anything other than speculate about how all this stuff --- which physicists so valiantly try to quantitatively describe --- got here in the first place. I'm quite sceptical about Smolin's "Cosmic Darwinism" .

But once things got going, evolution does seems to me to be the "name of the game", although I've got into trouble once before in this forum by generalising about evolution (in the 2008 thread How does evolution work).

 

[oldman]

...quantitative issues. Such as the argument that developmental processes have a natural powerlaw statistics (scale free, critical, tsallis, etc, due to their freely expanding design) while evolutionary processes have constrained gaussian statistics. Variety is for example one of the things a system has to bring under control - in the way height and other characteristics are anchored to a mean - so as to allow natural selection to work. The randomness that seeds a species Darwinian "development" has to be constrained to a single scale for selection to work with maximal efficiency... all evolutionary mechanism arises within a developmental context (you need an entropy gradient first for an entropy degrading system to arise) then the biosphere as a whole should show the statistics of "a development". So it should be no surprise if its is marked by scalefree or fractal statistics. You would expect powerlaw patterns of species creation and extinction. Intermitency rather than smoothness.

Thutch, Apeiron (as Marcus says: "that means thanks very much") for clarifying the current situation for me.

I find it interesting that both you and Baywax mention "gradients" in an evolutionary context --- Baywax: "a process (as) a gradient of a progression of events" and yourself: " entropy gradient (needed) ... for an entropy degrading system to arise". You also mention the importance of "scale".

In physics much is made of the common "gauge symmetrical" character of its field theories (ED, QED, QCD and GR). In the oldest example (Maxwells ED) this shows up as an unobservable but convenient-to-formulate-with variable (potential) whose gradient is associated with measurable stuff (forces). And in GR scale (a property of coordinates) is redundant in the same sense. "Gradients" and "scale" just coincidentally important in evolution?

Just a passsing thought.

 

[tauon]

@OP

That is similar with something I've been pondering about for a while (if I understood what you're saying correctly), which can be compressed in one sentence as:

"Order is just a particular case of Chaos"

This particular paradigm is an interesting aspiration at explaining why is there something rather than nothing.

But to try and spin it differently:
The basic premise in your formulation is that there is indeed a property, a being called "rule/law" that appeared arbitrarily in the great soup of chaos, then this rule caused self-selection and and a mesh of simulacrum from which the universe as we perceive it emerged.

However, consider this approach (I'll try to keep this very short):

There are no objective laws of physics, no rules by which the universe operates, however loose or restrictive. It is We who created the laws of physics. We do not discover the order in the universe, we create order in the universe: Mind creates the universe. It is not an objective rule that creates self-selection, but Mind that selects it's version of the universe.

I suppose if your first formulation would be similar with the Many-Worlds interpretation of QM than this one is a pseudo-solipsist derivative of the so called Many-Minds interpretation of QM.

 

[apeiron]

"Gradients" and "scale" just coincidentally important in evolution?

A gradient is simply a potential that can become something actual. So it is another way of alluding to "second laws". First laws state what exists, and second laws spell out the direction for change.

You will note how development is the downhill gradient of entropification, so is again the basic gradient. Evolution is its antithesis, an uphill ascent towards negentropy or complex organisation. So evolution can only be found nested in development - [devo [evo]]. Perhaps a crucial issue for cosmic darwinism approaches?

 

[ConradDJ]

"Order is just a particular case of Chaos"

Very nice.

The basic premise in your formulation is that there is indeed a property, a being called "rule/law" that appeared arbitrarily in the great soup of chaos, then this rule caused self-selection and and a mesh of simulacrum from which the universe as we perceive it emerged.

No, that's not it. There's nothing that causes self-selection, in this scenario.

It's just that in this vast mess of connected and unconnected happening, there might happen to exist interconnected subsets of events that could define themselves as distinct sets -- could define selection criteria that distinguish their own membership. Even if it's only the "rule" that they all connect with each other.

If sets like that happen to exist... then they exist, that's all. But within such a set -- only for the events that make up that set -- there is a "rule" that they all happen to "obey". Then within that set, given the context of that rule, there could be a subset that happens to define a further, more specific "rule"... and so on. At some point these rules might include rules of partial ordering that correspond to time-sequences among events... but the self-selection process originally is not something that happens in an absolute overall time.

The idea of self-definition or self-selection is merely that these sets have no "rules" or structures that are not actually definable ("observable") from within the set, on the basis of the set's own rules and structures.

Essentially my logic is this: all the rules and structure in the world we observe, can be defined observationally -- that is, in terms of other observable rules and structures of this same system. So it manifestly is a "self-defining" system, in a specific sense. And if such structures can exist, then a scenario like the one I'm trying to describe, makes sense. We don't have to posit anything more than a "great soup" where anything is allowed. No absolute "being" or principle has to be introduced.

I'm sorry I have such trouble stating this notion clearly. That could be a sign that it just makes no sense... or, that we're just not used to thinking about systems of this kind.

If it does make sense, a further step would be to think about what a complicated self-defining system would look like. Presumably it would contain many different layers of structure, some of which are extremely simple in their definition, and others that require many previous layers of structure to define themselves. Then we could compare that with the kinds of physical structure in the universe we observe.

 

[ConradDJ]

Development is "pure" self organisation. There is a bag of materials. A beaker of chemistry. Someone has set up some initial conditions (the local substances) within some global boundary constraints (the global form or organisation). And then this system runs down its gradient of development. A reaction proceeds to its equilbrium.

Evolution is then a system that can take some degree of control over the initial conditions/boundary constraints. It is a system with the memory mechanisms (the "semiotic" or symbolic stuff like DNA, membranes, words, neurons) to harness naturally occurring developmental gradients.

Aperion -- Thanks once again for your lucid summary. I don't have much time this morning, but I want to pursue this issue -- I'll take a look at Oldman's thread on "How Does Evolution Work", since that's a question I've been thinking about. And Oyama's book looks very interesting.

Meanwhile, do you have some sort of typology of different kinds of "development" or of "self-organizing systems"? That might help me bring the idea into focus.

 

[apeiron]

Meanwhile, do you have some sort of typology of different kinds of "development" or of "self-organizing systems"? That might help me bring the idea into focus.

If you are starting from scratch, then Stuart Kauffman's books would be good both because they are simply written yet also present a great variety of detailed models.

You would be right that the same basic phenomenon has a great many names.

Autocorrelation, percolation, criticality, scalefree networks, renormalisation, non-extensive entropy, far from equilibrium thermodynamics, edge of chaos, fractal geometry, phase transitions, spontaneous symmetry breaking, Ising spin glass, dissipative structures, turbulence, constructal theory...

Actually Bejan's work could be a good place to start...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructal_theory
http://www.constructal.org/en/theory/presentation.html

 

[tauon]

I'm sorry I have such trouble stating this notion clearly. That could be a sign that it just makes no sense... or, that we're just not used to thinking about systems of this kind.

I think it's rather the latter.
This is definitely something familiarly unfamiliar. Nothing less than an oxymoron suffices in describing our context of discussion really. :)

No, that's not it. There's nothing that causes self-selection, in this scenario.

It's just that in this vast mess of connected and unconnected happening, there might happen to exist interconnected subsets of events that could define themselves as distinct sets -- could define selection criteria that distinguish their own membership. Even if it's only the "rule" that they all connect with each other.

If sets like that happen to exist... then they exist, that's all. But within such a set -- only for the events that make up that set -- there is a "rule" that they all happen to "obey". Then within that set, given the context of that rule, there could be a subset that happens to define a further, more specific "rule"... and so on. At some point these rules might include rules of partial ordering that correspond to time-sequences among events... but the self-selection process originally is not something that happens in an absolute overall time.

Hmmm, I'll try to make up an analogous example to make sure I fully understand where you're coming from with this...

...

Ok, going back to the "soup". this soup of chaos is made of infinitely many components, whatever those may be; but for the sake of brevity let's oversimplify it and say these components are cubes of different colours. Now in this soup of coloured cubes there just so happens that the red cubes, besides being red also attach to each other if they "meet".
So we have the self-defined set of red cubes (nothing "exterior" to the set defines/forms/constricts it, there is no exterior rule by which a particular set is a set... the set exists solely because it's objects have one or more "natural" intrinsic proprieties?) and a mechanism of self-selection (in itself, and emergent propriety "resulting" from the state that the set is self-defined...?).

A "consequence" of these 2 basic states, is a new background intrinsically separate from the first background (chaos) yet very much a part of it. Some objects from this set might have intrinsic qualities that would "create" another new background and so on, until the pattern is in itself more and more complex, yet just as much an indistinguishable part of the first primordial(?) background.

Am I on the right track here? :)

 

[ConradDJ]

this soup of chaos is made of infinitely many components, whatever those may be; but for the sake of brevity let's oversimplify it and say these components are cubes of different colours.

tauon -- Thanks for hanging in with me on this!

Rather than think of the basic "components" as things with certain intrinsic properties, I tend to think of them as momentary events, that have no definable characteristics in themselves. I want to assume as little about them as I can. Maybe most of them just happen all by themselves, and don't even connect to any other events -- they're not even "interactions". But only those that do happen to be interactions, can participate in an interaction-web like the one we observe in our universe. Only those that happen to connect two other events -- events which also happen to connect two other events, and so on... can participate.

So far we don't even have a distinction between "things" and their "connections" -- just events that link other events to other events, moment-to-moment.

Of those random events that happen to participate in such a web, there might then be a subset -- a web with a more specific topology... which would provide a context of definition for a still more specifically-structured subset of random events.

I appreciated the paper Apeiron mentioned above (#45)...
http://evodevouniverse.com/EDU2008Papers/HeylighenSOTimeCausalityEDU2008.pdf"

...because the author (Francis Heylighen) begins in a very similar way. And he heads in a direction I've explored also: he proposes that the initial interaction-web would consist in two basic kinds of patterns -- (a) infinitely many strings of interactions that loop back on themselves, and (b) infinitely many strings that don't. These patterns aren't exclusive -- they all exist in superposition, so to speak. Any given event might happen to participate in many loops, and also in many non-looping strings of events.

He points out that the non-looping part of the interaction-web can be seen as a "partial ordering" of the events -- in other words, we begin to have something like a time-sequence, though there's not yet any structure that would define an "arrow of time", a direction from past to future.

I would point out also that the other part of the web -- consisting of all the looping event-strings -- might be identified with another aspect the structure we find in QM. In the Feynman (path-integral) picture, every interaction happens in an infinite number of ways -- but nearly all of those alternatives "cancel each other out" through phase interference, and end up making no statistical contribution to the actual interaction we observe. In terms of web-topology, each of these "virtual" interactions connects with an interaction of opposite "phase" to form a closed loop... in effect, undoing itself, fading into the quantum vacuum of unobserved events.

But to emphasize again -- "in reality" -- from the point of view of an omniscient observer standing outside the web -- there is nothing that defines some of these strings of events as more "real" than others. Nothing happens to the looping part of the original web -- but it may be that at a higher level, only interaction-structures made of the non-looping strings can trade information with other such structures. The "virtual" event loops are all still "there", but don't participate in the higher-level communications-structure.

 

[ConradDJ]

You would be right that the same basic phenomenon has a great many names.

Autocorrelation, percolation, criticality, scalefree networks, renormalisation, non-extensive entropy, far from equilibrium thermodynamics, edge of chaos, fractal geometry, phase transitions, spontaneous symmetry breaking, Ising spin glass, dissipative structures, turbulence, constructal theory...

Well, that's just the question, for me -- do all these things really refer to "the same basic phenomenon"? Certainly there are many interconnections. But it would seem to be an article of faith that there's a single kind of process at work here.

I wanted to say -- I have a hard time getting a clear picture of this "basic phenomenon" of development, where in contrast, I have a very clear idea of the process of evolution.

But, when I looked at Oldman's thread on How Does Evolution Work --https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=212403"

-- I found lots of confusion, even when "evolution" was taken purely in a biological sense. So it seems it's not at all easy to work out a clear concept of evolution either... or to explain just what it is about biological evolution that makes it so uniquely creative.

So I'll work on Oldman's question and see what I can come up with. And in the meantime, refrain from disparaging your concept of development!

Thanks again -- Conrad

 

[apeiron]

But, when I looked at Oldman's thread on How Does Evolution Work --https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=212403"

-- I found lots of confusion, even when "evolution" was taken purely in a biological sense. rad

Yes, the thread constantly confuses evolution and development.

Development is the running down of an entropy gradient. A nakedly self-organising action.

Evolution is about mechanism that can harness developmental potentials. You do not have just one entropy degrading or dissipative system but instead a variety of systems in competition. And the most effective or best adapted degrader wins.

And it does require a "machinery" - a negentropy. A structure that does not get degraded as it degrades.

 

[baywax]

And it does require a "machinery" - a negentropy. A structure that does not get degraded as it degrades.

Sort of like how energy can neither be created nor destroyed?

 

[apeiron]

Sort of like how energy can neither be created nor destroyed?

No, I meant like DNA, membranes and other cellular structures that can continually repair themselves. The stuff that organises the degrading action.

 

[oldman]

Yes, the thread constantly confuses evolution and development.

Development is the running down of an entropy gradient. A nakedly self-organising action.

Evolution is about mechanism that can harness developmental potentials. You do not have just one entropy degrading or dissipative system but instead a variety of systems in competition. And the most effective or best adapted degrader wins.

And it does require a "machinery" - a negentropy. A structure that does not get degraded as it degrades.

I think that there is still a lot of confusion between evolution and development perhaps because folk have a tendency to talk in generalities, rather than specifics. In my experience an absence of examples and a plethora of profundities betrays confusion.

Let me ramble on about this a bit longer. I'm still confused.

There is a kind of change that incorporates one or more clever tricks, either happenstance or invented. An example is the chance interactions between crowded atoms that first created a molecule, perhaps template shaped, that made it easier for another like it to form. Such a replication trick has great "developmental potential", later realized by natural selection. Is this the kind of machinery that involves negentropy you were thinking of and that should be labeled as "evolution"? And should its later history be described as development? or further evolution?

It seems to me that self-replication is the one absolutely necessary feature of what we call biological evolution. But it doesn't tell a sufficiently complete story, say including how DNA may have emerged from a class of template-shaped molecules (was this just by "nakedly self-organising action"? or were mechanisms and negentropy also important here, so that we should talk of DNA evolving from simpler stuff?

Perhaps we just don't know how DNA came to be.

Then there are our own clever invented tricks. Like the (now ancient) trick of storing instructions for a computer as binary numbers together with similarly formatted data that is to be manipulated. Again, great emergent consequences! Here commercial competition mimics natural selection. Are we to call this the evolution of computers, or their development?

 

[apeiron]

An example is the chance interactions between crowded atoms that first created a molecule, perhaps template shaped, that made it easier for another like it to form. Such a replication trick has great "developmental potential", later realized by natural selection. Is this the kind of machinery that involves negentropy you were thinking of and that should be labeled as "evolution"? And should its later history be described as development? or further evolution?

In your example, molecules would indeed be locally negentropic. And were paid for by the entropy of latent heat that would have been released in the bond forming. But this is just development.

It seems to me that self-replication is the one absolutely necessary feature of what we call biological evolution. But it doesn't tell a sufficiently complete story, say including how DNA may have emerged from a class of template-shaped molecules (was this just by "nakedly self-organising action"? or were mechanisms and negentropy also important here, so that we should talk of DNA evolving from simpler stuff?

DNA would have developed then evolved. Nucleic acids can arise spontaneously. But the machinery of DNA - with all its repair mechanisms, its replication mechanisms, etc, is quite a package refined over time.

Then there are our own clever invented tricks. Like the (now ancient) trick of storing instructions for a computer as binary numbers together with similarly formatted data that is to be manipulated. Again, great emergent consequences! Here commercial competition mimics natural selection. Are we to call this the evolution of computers, or their development?

Computers are an example of pure mechanism. They have no development or SO inherently. And would you say they evolve or that their human designers are driven by competition?

 

[baywax]

No, I meant like DNA, membranes and other cellular structures that can continually repair themselves. The stuff that organises the degrading action.

I see. The repairs usually involve cell death and the growth (mitosis) of new tissues/structures. This is where mutations can take place (the crap shoot of mitosis) after repeated cell deaths and new growths. These mutations can result in new, beneficial selections or in malignant growths such as cancer and the death of the organism. So, in this case, it is the mechanism of decay/ that organizes the degraded (not living) organism back into the ecosystem.

 

[apeiron]

I see. The repairs usually involve cell death and the growth (mitosis) of new tissues/structures. This is where mutations can take place (the crap shoot of mitosis) after repeated cell deaths and new growths. These mutations can result in new, beneficial selections or in malignant growths such as cancer and the death of the organism. So, in this case, it is the mechanism of decay/ that organizes the degraded (not living) organism back into the ecosystem.

These are some curious statements.

Repairs maintain the structure. Keep the system on track. Cell division in the body is not about evolution except perhaps in specialised senses. Such as synaptic competition during brain development.

Cancer would be an example of "development" in the general entropic sense I was suggesting. Cancer is simply explosive unregulated cell growth. The mutations that cause cancer are about essential bits of the usual regulatory machinery "falling off". Remember the role normally played by fail-safe mechanisms - apoptosis.

 

[baywax]

These are some curious statements.

Repairs maintain the structure. Keep the system on track. Cell division in the body is not about evolution except perhaps in specialised senses. Such as synaptic competition during brain development.

Cancer would be an example of "development" in the general entropic sense I was suggesting. Cancer is simply explosive unregulated cell growth. The mutations that cause cancer are about essential bits of the usual regulatory machinery "falling off". Remember the role normally played by fail-safe mechanisms - apoptosis.

For sure apoptosis. Its the mutation that shuts down the P52 gene that can arise (1 in 7 chance) during mitosis. Your right though...I'm probably wrong to assume that beneficial mutations can arise out of mitosis and be carried into next generation. Although I hadn't heard about synaptic competition being something that can continue in a species. (edited)

 

[tauon]

tauon -- Thanks for hanging in with me on this!

Rather than think of the basic "components" as things with certain intrinsic properties, I tend to think of them as momentary events, that have no definable characteristics in themselves. I want to assume as little about them as I can. Maybe most of them just happen all by themselves, and don't even connect to any other events -- they're not even "interactions". But only those that do happen to be interactions, can participate in an interaction-web like the one we observe in our universe. Only those that happen to connect two other events -- events which also happen to connect two other events, and so on... can participate.

So far we don't even have a distinction between "things" and their "connections" -- just events that link other events to other events, moment-to-moment.

Of those random events that happen to participate in such a web, there might then be a subset -- a web with a more specific topology... which would provide a context of definition for a still more specifically-structured subset of random events.

and I thank you for having the patience to explain me your idea. :)
but moving on (now that I have at least a basic understanding of what you're saying), I think you mentioned in a previous post what a complicated self-defining system would look like or how could we describe it... that may be quite difficult as the matter is ubiquitously non-intuitive, and there's little chance of formalizing it without a para-consistent mathematical system... sadly none of today's mathematics can formulate such a background and structure, which I think is quite creative and original and definitely worth more attention.

 

[baywax]

and I thank you for having the patience to explain me your idea. :)
but moving on (now that I have at least a basic understanding of what you're saying), I think you mentioned in a previous post what a complicated self-defining system would look like or how could we describe it... that may be quite difficult as the matter is ubiquitously non-intuitive, and there's little chance of formalizing it without a para-consistent mathematical system... sadly none of today's mathematics can formulate such a background and structure, which I think is quite creative and original and definitely worth more attention.

This may be something.

You can't have zero without a comparative like 1 or -1. From here you can begin to see the web of relation and support in most things.

Doris Day had it when she sang... "You can't have one without the other".

 

[ConradDJ]

I think you mentioned in a previous post what a complicated self-defining system would look like or how could we describe it... that may be quite difficult as the matter is ubiquitously non-intuitive, and there's little chance of formalizing it without a para-consistent mathematical system...

Thanks, tauon. This is from the OP --

The question is – could there happen to exist, within this original chaos, some sort of system that defined its own rules? Suppose for example there happened to be a web of the kind of events we call “interactions”... The “rule” defined by this system would just be that every event in the web has to link two other events within the system.

So now we have a subset of events that is not entirely unstructured... The question then becomes – could there happen to exist with this some web that defines a further level of structure for itself, building on the original rule?... within which there might happen to exist webs with a further level of definition – and so on.

So if our universe were a very complicated self-defining system, presumably it would consist of distinct levels of structure -- each level requiring a more complex context of definition than the previous levels.

To me one of the most striking things about physics is that the basic structures are in fact all so different in how they're defined.

Gravitation, for example, is in a way extremely simple and general, affecting all matter and even energy in the same way. But to define it at all, you need to refer to distances in space and time, because the spacetime metric is what's essential to this structure.

On the other hand, the basic structure of the electromagnetic field is simpler, in that it doesn't define a metric or require one for its own definition. So it seems as though the relationship between electrostatic and magnetic forces reflects a more primitive level of "geometry" -- a structure relating different directions in 3-dimensional space -- that might have defined itself prior to the emergence of the gravitational metric.

And there are other kinds of structure in QM that don't refer to spacetime geometry at all -- I'm thinking of quantum "phase" relationships, defined as relations between angles in an abstract space.

If we could somehow order all the different kinds of regularities we see in physical interaction, into a hierarchy, where each level depended for its definition only on the regularities established at lower levels... that would validate this approach.

I think of this as a kind of "archaelogy" of physics, trying to identify various aspects of the structure of physics we observe as representing more primitive "fossil" layers of self-definition.

Whether some new mathematics would be needed for this, I have no idea. My guess would be -- if this approach ever actually works -- that once we see the structural hierarchy put in the right order, it will seem pretty obvious. Right now it's not at all obvious -- as you put it nicely, "the matter is ubiquitously non-intuitive".

 

[baywax]

Thanks, tauon. This is from the OP --



So if our universe were a very complicated self-defining system, presumably it would consist of distinct levels of structure -- each level requiring a more complex context of definition than the previous levels.

To me one of the most striking things about physics is that the basic structures are in fact all so different in how they're defined.

Gravitation, for example, is in a way extremely simple and general, affecting all matter and even energy in the same way. But to define it at all, you need to refer to distances in space and time, because the spacetime metric is what's essential to this structure.

On the other hand, the basic structure of the electromagnetic field is simpler, in that it doesn't define a metric or require one for its own definition. So it seems as though the relationship between electrostatic and magnetic forces reflects a more primitive level of "geometry" -- a structure relating different directions in 3-dimensional space -- that might have defined itself prior to the emergence of the gravitational metric.

And there are other kinds of structure in QM that don't refer to spacetime geometry at all -- I'm thinking of quantum "phase" relationships, defined as relations between angles in an abstract space.

If we could somehow order all the different kinds of regularities we see in physical interaction, into a hierarchy, where each level depended for its definition only on the regularities established at lower levels... that would validate this approach.

I think of this as a kind of "archaelogy" of physics, trying to identify various aspects of the structure of physics we observe as representing more primitive "fossil" layers of self-definition.

Whether some new mathematics would be needed for this, I have no idea. My guess would be -- if this approach ever actually works -- that once we see the structural hierarchy put in the right order, it will seem pretty obvious. Right now it's not at all obvious -- as you put it nicely, "the matter is ubiquitously non-intuitive".

Excellent ideas here ConradDJ.

I spent 12 years as an archaeologist and through most of those years I thought there was a hierarchy to the evolution of cultures and of species etc... however, it has become increasingly clear that there are leaps and bounds in culture and invention then, in accordance with environmental or political rule... the advances can be and are lost to the elements until "discovered" again.

Whether this sort of convoluted evolution applies to the development of the physical laws or natural laws of the universe or not is questionable but, I imagine there were fits and starts to the development of gravity, electro-magnatism, static charge and the e-vent of energy itself.

How would one go about excavating and organizing any of the evidence of these developments?