Wandering Towards a Goal: The Key Role of Biomolecules by George F. R. Ellis

Thanks for your comments, George. Hope you have time to check out my essay and furnish your own valuable thoughts.

Jim

"The key difference between physics and biology is function or purpose. There is no purpose in the existence of the Moon or an electron or in a collision of two gas particles.".

george, i would be interested to hear how you arrive at this conclusion. are you in effect saying that particles or larger objects cannot *by definition* have either aims or intentions? if so i would be interested to know why you would believe that to be the case.

george, hi,

in reading your essay i was encouraged that you also noted, as i do in my essay, that randomness in neural structures is very important. i was wondering if you had any further thoughts on its significance.

Dr Ellis,

I hate to add one more comment on this thread, considering that you must be exhausted by now reviewing and replying to all of them.

Your essay is no doubt a very solid one, well argued and well developed from your proposed abstract. I think though that it is better situated in the context of discussion about the distinction between inanimate objects and animate objects because your silver lining is the physics of life. I argue that the distinction between the two is not life but a form of life and one does not have to resort to religion to sustain this view. In the hierarchy of ontologies starting with quarks, particles, to atoms, ... all the way to galaxies and galaxy groups, what we call living structures is only a small fraction of "objects" just prior to cosmic or space-borne objects. The idea that there is more life and more teleology to a human being or even a single eukaryotic cell than there is to a planet, a star or a galaxy is a blatant anthropomorhic notion that is no less absurd than yesteryear view that human-inhabited planet earth is the center of the Universe. The structure that are beyond biota in the universe are better conceived as garnering structural, ontological organization and a level of teleology that are beyond what an infinitesimal biotic object that is only part of their own structure may ever conceive.

What happens to humans on planet earth with all their great aims and intentions, if only one day, the sun-star shut off its rays? What happens if it does so for a whole earth-year? In my sense, we are too dependent on the environment to give ourselves the freedom of separating what is "meaning" to us, which scope is a function of the environment, from what is meaning in the environment. Our "meaningfulness" is only part of that of the environment, and if our meaningfulness and apparent self-determination makes us living entities, we then are only a lifeform among other lifeforms. In this context, there is no "emergence" of life but only a "distinction" in lifeforms to be debated. There is indeed a big distinction between a piece of rock at the foot of a mountain, as an inanimate object, and another seemingly inanimate or "devoid-of-intelligence" object as say a comet, if one can ever ascertain meaning in terms of nature and cumulation of phenomenologies associated with existent objects across the entire spectrum of universal ontologies.

Let me conclude by saying that I would have been happier with your essay, as well developed as it is, if it dwelt more on the mathematics of cognition than the physics of life, just to remain closer to assigned topic.

Congrats and good luck.

Joseph

George -

Thanks for another first-class essay. Your strategy of choosing specific cases to illustrate each type of logic and their linkages works well, and lets you pull a remarkable variety of phenomena into a coherent picture.

Clearly you're right that "there's no purpose in the existence of the Moon." But in focusing on the deterministic aspect of physics in Section 2, you bypass an issue I tried to focus on in my essay, which deals with the broader category of "meaning" rather than "purpose". There are certainly many kinds of meaningful - i.e. physically measurable - information in physics. These are all related to each other deterministically, in the classical regime, but QM tells us that measurement processes themselves are in some way involved in bringing about this determinacy. As you've suggested, there's some kind of "top-down realization" involved here, as there is in the logic of life.

Without proposing any new theory, I've tried to show that three very different realms of meaning - in physics, biology and human interaction - can all be conceived in terms of recursive processes built up through natural (accidental) selection. I suggest that "measurement" and "human consciousness" have been hard to conceptualize for the same reason "life" is - because they all involve many different, interdependent functions. Nonetheless, as your essay nicely demonstrates, we have a very clear (if hardly complete) understanding of the relation of deterministic physics to living things. So far we have no such clarity about the basis of classical physics in QM, or about the basis of human intersubjectivity in biology. My goal is not to "solve" these problems, but to explain why they've been so difficult to approach, and suggest a picture in which these three remarkably different informational technologies are understandable in principle. I'd very much appreciate your perspective on this.

Thanks again for setting an example of beautifully clear-headed thinking. It's very badly needed here, since there's such a strong pull toward reducing everything in Nature to a single ultimately simple process.

Conrad

Dear George Ellis,

I am a great admirer of your work and am honored to participate in a contest with someone as distinguished as yourself. Apologies for the simplicity of my question but when you say:

"Physics underlies adaptive selection in that it allows the relevant biological mechanisms to work; but adaptive selection is not a physical law. It is an emergent biological process."

Do we mean to imply that biology and thinking being emergent are not just non-fundamental but non-deterministic and that we are in some sense therefore free?

I would be honored if you checked out my own much more literary entry in this contest "From Athena to AI."

Best of luck,

Rick Searle

Dear Prof. Ellis,

First off, what I understood was that the main call of the contest is for a mathematical formulation of human aims and intention, and that in its defect (if one is unable to hit this hard target) one may entertain other approximations such as the one you invoked >> How did physical systems that pursue the goal of reproduction arise from an a-biological world

Dear Prof. Ellis,

First off, what I understood was that the main call of the contest is for a mathematical formulation of human aims and intention, and that in its defect (if one is unable to hit this hard target) one may entertain other approximations such as the one you invoked >> How did physical systems that pursue the goal of reproduction arise from an a-biological world

Dear Prof. Ellis,

First off, what I understood was that the main call of the contest is for a mathematical formulation of human aims and intention, and that in its defect (if one is unable to hit this hard target) one may entertain other approximations such as the one you invoked "How did physical systems that pursue the goal of reproduction arise from an a-biological world "and others. I understand that the contest organizers gives us latitudes to the target because they want to have a live contest with as many participants as possible. Otherwise, why even formulate the first subject, because they are all clearly different topics. In that sense your essay hits the second target in my appreciation.

Now, what most proponents of life as an emergent property of nature do not realize is how grandiosely anthropomorphic this notion is. It simply proposes that everything in nature beyond biota is purposeless and devoid of meaning in and of themselves and that their only purpose is to offer to humans context and means for them to be purposeful and meaningful themselves. It is this kind of idea, eminently self-serving, so prevalent in the Middle Age that viewed the live burning of the poor Galileo. Don't be quick to blame it on religious intolerance. Blame it on anthropomorphic mental attitudes and self-centrism that have not died at all thru the centuries, but made it very strongly into our scientific theories, old and modern, as ever.

You say: "I have no idea how you are defining life, nor how you impute teleology to a star or galaxy." I am sure you don't, because your proposition is a reductionist anthropomorphic idea, very much the like of the decried Anthropic Principle. As Lee Smolin had put it, "If we don't understand the values the fundamental constants take in our universe, just presume our universe is a member of an infinite and unobservable ensemble of universes, each with randomly chosen parameters. Our universe has the values it does because those make it hospitable to life." I extend these comments by saying that if you and modern science understood the fundamental components of life, from a Functional descriptor as well as the covariant entities at play, you would know that there exists a fundamental physical life constant, in the same gauge company as the other fundamental physical constants, which sets every ontology in nature ultimately as a lifeform and that the difference between one and the other is not a value in quality but in Quantity. In that unified view, nothing in nature is more VALUABLE than other, WE ARE ALL AN ESSENTIAL PART OF NATURE AND EACH WITH THE SAME WEIGHT at a fundamental level.

To justify the concept of emergent life, you write this seemingly absolute truth: "There was no life 13 billion years ago. It emerged after then." So YOU say, but you were not there then as a live witness and could not be, because I can offer the vision that the Universe has not started from a point in the distant past, but from the infinites because it has ALWAYS been there. Your vision is no more assertive than mine because mine, far from suffering from a Hierarchy Problem, and a Cosmological Constant Problem, and an Anthropic Principle Problem, and now a Supersymmetry Problem, and so many more, can compute a large swath of the fundamental physical constants of nature from upheld principles.

I think that it is time for us all, the science people, to show reservations in our views, to stop contending absolute truths of ours, and being intellectually tolerant, because we and our science will all do better in the Global Culture with a bit more prudence and wisdom. That all said, I am not saying at all that your essay is worthless, just that it has to be re-contextualized.

Joseph

George,

A good essay - with interesting content, as usual for your writings

(and I also became well acquainted, in this contest's case, with how hard it was to fit a comprehensive narrative about fundamental issues into only 9 pages!)

From your essay, and the comment threads, I envision we probably have roughly similar views on our inherent ability to actually make decisions and the freedom to act on those choices (i.e. macro level entities not being fully constrained in their behaviour by the unitary evolution of the wavefunction for their constituent quantum particles)...

I have long argued for objective wavefunction collapse (perhaps related to information content thresholds) to be developed as an integral part of quantum formalism - and that for complex entities like us to have free will (and intentionality) is not compatible with a fully deterministic underlying dynamics (e.g. of the Schrodinger equation) to apply at all levels and for all time.

Though so many other physicists seem to feel that standard quantum mechanics can be applied to macroscopic bodies (a la the Many Worlds interpretation etc), which I find hard to credit.

Since you deal here with the emergence of purpose, at higher levels of complexity, I take it you are open to the likelihood of objective collapse being real?

Regards,

David C.

In view of the question raised in the contest, "how can... intention" you've displayed a wonderful command of scientific procedure and knowledge. But the problem with science is that it sometimes unwittingly exceeds scientific boundaries. Purpose and Intention literally transcend the physical and biological interactions they build upon, and if science fails to appreciate its own disciplinary limits it will either deny Purpose and Intention or sneak them in with a

There is no intentionality in the scientific description of metabolism, or neurology. Every molecular, every electro-chemical interaction, is considered discrete and purposeless. And there is no conceivable bridge from purposeless to purposeful.

To your conception of biological logic:

IF x is evident THEN do y ELSE do z

consider the leap that would have to be made to evolve to:

IF x could be THEN maybe y1 should be ELSE maybe y2 or y3 or y4 should be OR maybe nothing else could be better than UN-x anyway.

Physical and biological systems are positive. Could, should, and maybe are negatives, they are not about WHAT IS, they transcend and negate reality, and that basic but wondrous fact is beyond the strict scientific consideration of the IS.

Intentionality depends on all the processes you analyze, but it eludes scientific explanation.

I believe my essay will appear soon, and help show that science and philosophy are interdependent but separate and legitimate pursuits.

Sorry -- I thought I was logged in. And in my first paragraph I bracketed "presto!", which was interpreted as a (meaningless) HTML tag. I wanted to write "... with a presto!"