Biocosmology - Chris C King
.pdfX-Sender: shoup@boundary.org@mail.boundary.org
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 21:51:05 -0700
To: Chris King <king@math.auckland.ac.nz>
From: Richard Shoup <shoup@boundary.org>
Subject: Re: Brain-mind cosmology monograph
Interval Research Corporation, Palo Alto
Chris --
Since I can't select and copy text from the document, it is hard to refer to specific text, but here are some reactions (that I doubt will be very useful), for what they're worth. I'm not really clear on who the audience is for this, and what you plan to do with it next.
Beautiful diagrams! Many communicate well too. Unfortunately I fear many conservative readers will see the fancy graphics as a negative aspect, the sign of someone too concerned with appearance, and will miss your content or dismiss it out of hand.
Appreciation for the nature and position of the hypothesis and its unifying principles stands regardless of good presentation as such, which cannot subtract from a validly contestable hypothesis.
The main thesis that life forms are cosmological in origin is certainly a bold one, especially if it puts life and us back at the "center" of things. I have always thought of the progress of science as the continual letting go of the idea that we are special in some way.
Copernicus would be wry at seeing his liberation becoming a confinement. Some phases of discovery let go confining boundaries and others discover a unifying principle. The Lorenz transformations let go of the Newtonian constraint as we approach the velocity of light, while E = mc^2 expresses a unifying principle of mass-energy. Cosmological descriptions can do either. Copernicus is letting go of anthropocentrism. Biocosmology is a unifying interactive principle.
It certainly seems to be true that asymmetries tracing back to the beginning can be responsible for everything we see, since otherwise there would be only uniform noise. But the leap from there to life forms (as opposed to just lifeless complex structures, for example) is a pretty big one. Maybe structures of sufficient complexity always (or likely) involve self-referring parts, and thus what we call "life". What exactly do you consider life? This to me is the real question, and the answer is intimately connected to self-reference and paradox. I'll read on.
Defining life has become a recent issue of scientific debate(Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere 32 (4): 387-393, August 2002). There are obviously many different functional descriptions: replicating molecular system, or any other fully autonomous replicating system, dissipative non-equilibrium thermodynamic structure, electrically excitable membrane-enclosed reaction medium, complementary replication with sequencing and mutation, a system capable of evolution by mutation and selective advantage. If you are working from a Biocosmological position, you look for as many symmetrybreaking bifurcations as you can and then you get a descriptive complex of several properties we associate with life. The key point here is that the Biocosmological hypothesis suggests that 'life' is a unique complex system caused by non-linear properties of cosmic symmetry-breaking which results from an optimal sequence of interactive bifurcations. It thus has many or all of the biochemical features we currently associate with living systems, as noted in the last section of the prebiotic epoch.
I just can't believe that there is anything arbitrary about the universe. Surely this is the only way the universe could be. Otherwise there would be some choices, some arbitrariness that would have to have been resolved by some (outside?) means. Again our universe would be special in some sense (at least from our point of view), and could have been otherwise. I'm afraid I don't buy it.
But this has nothing to do with Biocosmology. Biocosmology doesn't say the symmetry-breaking is arbitrary - in fact, unless we have multiple universes and a selection principle operating between alternatives, which several physicists and cosmologists do consider, symmetry-breaking is likely to be optimal in both a dynamic and an anthropic sense.
Yes there is a hierarchy of structure leading to cells, etc, but I don't see that this deserves to be called fractal, that is, essentially self-similar. There is a somewhat different structure at each level. Same for other things you call fractal.
A fractal doesn't have to be 'essentially' self similar in a geometrical sense. It can be generated by a functional transformation giving variation. For example the different regions of the Mandelbrot set have different dynamics because the parameter is changing the definition of the iteration as we move the point of reference. The idea of fractality in the laws of nature holds good. A different structure on change of scale is still fractal if there is structure on a series of changes of scale. It is not my invention to model molecules in terms of fractal dynamics. It is an established modelling approach.
You summarize and explore many areas of science with which I am not familiar in detail, so I can't comment intelligently. My intuition says that you are making (or going along with) some pretty speculative thought about the origin of sexuality, the evolution of the cortex, etc, etc. "Consummating Cosmology: Sentient Consciousness as Interactive Culmination" is way over my threshold, for example.
Speculative, but consistent with a unifying cosmological interpretation. Speculative is legitimate if we are dealing with a hypothesis which is definable but hard, though not impossible, over time, to prove.
Sorry to be a wet blanket, but I have to say: I'm afraid I am still not at all convinced that "experience" cannot be correlated to brain states, or that there is anything special about so-called "consciousness". The so-called "hard problem" to me is a consequence of either too much or too little imagination on the part of its proponents. I'm not sure there is anything chaotic or fractal in the brain that is really important, but I just don't know enough.
Now this is deviating from a critique of the paper into a critique of the entire notion of the 'hard problem'. This idea of Chalmers is very widely accepted as a valid and key component of the philosophical side of consciousness research. It's not a fair critique of this paper to decry the hard problem itself and more of a comment on your own personal attitudes.
In reply: That's like saying the hard problem is accepted by everyone who accepts the hard problem. Your hypothesis is all about consciousness and its origins, and I'm saying I'm sorry but I don't buy the underlying problem you're trying to solve, and thus the assumptions that you employ in your arguments.
In comment: My point is thus conceded. You are actually rejecting the entire question the 'herd' problem poses/
Sorry to say I don't think quantum phenomena are necessary or crucial in brain functioning, and I don't see that consciousness has anything to do with non-computability. In short, I'm not buying the PenroseHameroff program at all. You also seem to be confusing super-exponential growth (and perhaps NP) with Turing non-computability.
This is another invalid critique of this work, because it is denying any role for quantum effects in consciousness altogether. This is a mechanist position close to AI or a computability approach, which is eliminative of any need for subjective consciousness. This conclusion is backed up by your own theories. The Biocosmology monograph does not utilize the processes of Hameroff and Penrose. I'm not worried about the 'halting problem' and didn't mention it as such. Super-exponential runaway is sufficient to strand a gazelle being pounced on by a tiger - 'np-complete' is lethal here without 'halting' as such.
In Reply: Right! I'm not a fan of "subjective consciousness" in the first place, so explaining it as a consequence of cosmology and symmetry breaking, etc isn't something I can follow.
In comment: My point fully conceded. You are taking an 'eliminativist' position that subjective consciousness doesn't exist.
Examination of yours and Tom's 'link theory' (http://www.boundary.org/theoretical.htm) confirms that it is a stochastic computational model based on automata consisting of logic gates which replicates logic and statistical inference. This is neither a quantum theory, nor a physical theory of how the brain works or might interact with subjective consciousness, although in one of your papers you discuss psi phenomena. If you claim yours and Etter's 'link theory' and Markov processes are at the core of QM perhaps you need to explain what you consider the source of randomness to be.
In reply: A very important point. I don't think there is any source of fundamental randomness at the core of QM! I can't prove it yet, but it looks to me like the apparent randomness is due to backwards influence from all the dependencies of an event.
In comment: This is exactly what transactions are doing - establishing the backwards influence from the
dependencies of an event!!
There is also a great deal of confusion among physicists over the apparent weirdness and violations of causality in the quantum realm. These are the result of clinging to the classical concepts of cause and effect in our thinking, and this is exactly what Tom Etter and I have been working on for several years with some success. "Transactional supercausality" and "probability multiverses" and sexual cosmology are just beyond me, I'm afraid.
I can understand you critiquing transactional supercausality, as part of the monograph, but probability multverses are an established idea stemming from Everett's many-worlds interpretation. Various forms of many-universes theory are a fundamental feature of thinking in many versions of QM. Certainly this is not a critique of the Biocosmology theory.
In reply: Sure, but I don't think most physicists take them seriously. Deutsch notwithstanding, it has been said that multiple universes are the ultimate cop-out, and I think this is appropriate.