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

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 Conrad

thanks for the kind remarks.

> 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.

Yes, agreed. It is a profound principle for creating order.

> 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.

Yes indeed. They can't be reduced to a few simple functions. They can be reduced to a great many simple functions interacting in very complex ways. It is the nature of those emergent networks of interactions (which can only be described at a higher level than that of their constituent entities) that enables complex emergence.

> So far we have no such clarity about the basis of classical physics in QM, or about the basis of human intersubjectivity in biology.

I agree again in both cases. Both are unsolved.

> 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.

I'll take a look.

George

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!"

Dear George,

No, no intended spamming. Just that my post was being truncated due to a quotation symbol that created a parsing problem with the software in use here. Removed it and 3rd attempt successful. So let's leave behind the animosity here. But just like you told Robert Bennett that you are not going to write another essay, I am not either. So I'll be as brief as I can.

The list of factors that you mentioned to define life do not have defining value for the living in my view, they are about phenomenology, not ontology, and I don't care who came up with them. And even if you look beyond the terms, one can see that they are replicates of phenomenology that occur beyond the biosphere.

Organization in one or more building blocks can never have a defining value for anything. There are hydrogen atoms out there in empty space as singlets, and there are cumulations of hydrogen atoms in duplets (molecules) forming hydrogen gas out there in the cosmos and on planets. You sure would not agree that they are living entities on that basis.

Metabolism is a mechanism that is fundamentally driven by motion and activity, both for intake, which the author does not emphasize, and catabolism. The keyword here is autonomous motion. If the Brownian motion of smoke particles, driven by random kinetic motion of molecules, is not autonomous motion, then I don't know what is. Even one level down, the non-deterministic motion of the electron in an orbital shell is to be considered autonomous motion. That is why Schrodinger, I believe, used to think that the electron must be like an amorphous object (i.e. Amoeba) in response to perpetual sudden changes in momenta, and Einstein was no less than appalled by the behavior of this entity, stating that "he cannot imagine the electron hopping like a BUG".

Reproduction is in essence the ability to replicate oneself. The other terms of the definition constitute specificities on how the realization of replication is mediated. Keyword here: self -replication. I remind this author that a crystal put in the proper chemical environment will GROW by REPRODUCTION of its lattice unit. So much there too for GROWTH and ANABOLISM as defining factors of life.

Homeostasis is a process of maintaining constant thermal equilibrium developed by necessity in living entities, while beyond biota this process is autogenic as far as population of same or different objects in interaction. One can view systemic homeostasis as the modality of thermal equilibrium throughout the population of cells represented by biotic entities, necessary because the physics of juxtaposed cells or cell materials do not facilitate timely autogenic thermal equilibrium across the entire individual.

Adaptation and response to stimuli are epi-phenomena that are sub-functions of the above, which I will not discuss in the interest of keeping this short.

Here is the thing. If you want to define life, you have to go back to ontogeny, the merger of a mobile male gamete and a static female ovule as the fundamental karyotic duet of the life orchestra. It is an act of emulation of primal phylogenetic gestation whereby the mobile propagating male gamete plays the role of the space wavefunction and the static female karyotic box plays the role of mass. What ensues in the developmental life of the fertilized egg or female karyotic box (pre- and post-birth) is a re-enactment of the fundamental order of covariance between the two universal primal ontological tenets as it occurs in (abstract) phylogenetic space. Both real and emulated phylogenesis are realized under the regency of the most fundamental physical function, which I have called the Grand Eigenfunction, and its derivates. Very importantly, the choice of the word Kariot cannot be overstated, since the physical symmetry of the Karyotic building block is borne out of symmetry breaking not from the molecular gauge group but from the lattice or material gauge group as I have called it. And that is how the fundamental physical life constant arises as an invariant coupling quantity characterizing covariance between real karyotic coordinate space and karyotic mass. You see, at the fundamental level, life is not so much about what macromolecules do than it is about the directives that they receive from the higher karyotic gauge group.

My vision is not at all in hiding and my attitude in physics is not to play the prevalent game everywhere of zero-sum physics. You can read my contest paper and see how I have put the Quanto-Geometric Theory at work in elucidating in no equivocal terms the physics of human cognition. If you don't want to read my book "Quanto-Geometry", you can freely access my other papers on Research Gate and Academia.edu for solid primers. But you probably won't, and that is fine.

Sorry to force on you another long read (My! Looks like I've written another essay!!!), but you left me no choice. And shall I say that I believe exchange and dialogue are better than confrontation and discord, even in physics!

Joseph

George,

I think "function" rather than "purpose" or "intention" is a crucial difference. My heart is functioning while my mind is intending this reply. "Intention" implies a component of un-caused willfulness, which of course many scientists would deny.

> I don't think I claimed to have explained intentionality

Well, the question is "How can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intention"

I suspect we're going to disagree on a number of points. But thanks for responding.

Hi George

Three points:

1. You say, "Life collects and analyses information in order to use it to plan and execute future purposeful actions in the light of memory."

This is a viewed that would be shared by most. But there is no known transition that explains the naturalisation of the process that turns raw physical interaction into physical interaction where some 'commodity of nature', typically referred to by the term 'information', gets 'carried' and thereby collected and analysed. What is the device of nature that turns the physics of interaction into the commodity of information in the first place? It is all very well saying that a certain mechanism of life can operate as a logic gate, but what determines the comparative meanings or values of the variables upon which the logic gates operate? How does a protein "read" genetic information? by which I mean, how does the meaning and value of one parameter become measurable against another?

2. You say "I am taking for granted that living systems are open non-equlibrium systems".

This is a curious thing to take for granted for the following reason. Surely 'a system' that is stable is acting, in virtue of that stability, as if it is in equilibrium i.e., it is not seeking an alternative state. Irrespective of the nature of its dynamic constituents, it is 'a stable system' and as such is an expression of a state in equilibrium. If we are to say that a stable system is not an expression of a state in equilibrium, then we must concede, that there is no such system in existence. There is no known system in existence that does not consist of constituent components. So, living systems are stable and, in any given instance that they are stable, they are in a state of equilibrium.

3. Also, you say, "There is no purpose in the existence of the Moon or an electron or in a collision of two gas particles." (also quoting Hartwell, Hopfield, Leibler and Murray 1999) The existence of, for example, an electron or a star is dependent on a complex series of interactions, each ensuring system stability--their stability is an expression of a state in equilibrium. One might say the reason why an electron or star exist is because they are stable. Can we not say of any stable physical system that their purpose is to maintain a state of equilibrium, because when, through interaction, stability is challenged, any given physical system will always adjust. In adjusting, they reacquire an equilibrium state once more, which may give rise either to renewed system stability or to system deformation. Perhaps human awareness is about the acquisition and continual maintenance of a conceptual stabilities whose states of equilibria are constantly challenged through experience, dialogue and thought.