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

Dear George,

Thanks for your detailed reply. From what you say and from your "Philosophy of cosmology" paper, we seem to agree that the mutation issue is important, but we don't agree about how multiple theoretically possible outcomes could turn into actual outcomes. I maintain that physical structure is built on what amounts to rules/laws; and so reality resolves multiple theoretically possible physical outcomes by in effect creating new, one-off local rules; and that models of systems show that rules can't emerge from complexity. I too am very interested in the issue of what a model can tell you about reality, but I have a different take on it: I maintain that, unlike models, the actual universe is an isolated system that must therefore generate/create its own rules; and that the particles ("little parts" of the universe) are the generators and carriers of fundamental-level rules.

Re "Of course mutation is necessary. That won't get you a entity that fulfils a specific purpose unless it is then selected for": I think that an entity doesn't need to fulfil a purpose in order to exist - an entity only needs to fit into a niche, or create a niche. The subjective experience of all sorts of information (consciousness) via interaction with the rest of reality (not necessarily people or animals) is what is fulfilling about life: purpose is not necessary.

Re "Organisms exist to reproduce": I know that that is a quote, and not your assertion, but one might wonder about the many people who do not or cannot reproduce, or people who are past reproduction age: why do they still bother to exist?

My opinion about aim or purpose is that, like everything, it develops from existing proto-aspects of reality, but only single- or multi-celled organisms have the molecules, structure and molecular interactions to have significant capital "P" Purposes. So, an electron could have proto-purpose (proto-consciousness), but the moon or a computer does not have the structure, the molecules or the interactions to have purpose. We exist for our own purposes, but through love or other reasons, we can dedicate ourselves to what we consider to be a higher purpose than ourselves. The higher purpose might be the good of the whole of which we are an individual subjective part. Not just human beings, but animals like hens with baby chicks can have higher purposes.

Dear Professor Ellis,

More information is available at conference paper A.Ilyanok, I.Timoshchenko "Nanoclusters as superatoms and supermolecules". For the first time the opportunity of transfer functions of the human cerebral cortex in silicon neurochip of 10 cm3 with 3D nanojet printer is shows. This is due to the fact that in the last 10 years a new direction in nanotechnology has appeared - the creation of organic and inorganic nanoclusters of certain size, called superatoms, that exhibit the unique properties of elementary atoms and can formally establish a new "periodic table". The development of an entirely new field of science opens the possibility to use cheaper isoelectronic analogues instead of expensive items. From the standpoint of superatoms we can consider the physical and chemical properties of proteins like supermolecules formed from superatoms. For example, the protein tubulin which forms nerve fibers and nuclear scaffolds and cells shows unique physical properties. It forms nanotubes with a diameter of 14.5 nm. The developed technology of jet nanolithography allows us to grow inorganic artificial neurons, while watching their growth using the methods of nanophotonics. From these superatoms and supermolecules we can create artificial neural logic elements whose dimensions are 2-3 orders of magnitude smaller than the size of brain cells.

https://www.academia.edu/12908500/Nanoclusters_as_superatoms_and_supermolecules

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alexander_Ilyanok/publication/278018684______/links/55787d3808ae7521587037d4.pdf

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278018597_Nanoclusters_as_superatoms_and_supermolecules

Best wishes

You live in a wonderful country Mr Ellis,a lot of things to contemplate,that helps to well understand how this nature buids lifes and consciousness.This consciousness, this mind always,this singularity after all.Our synaps dance in harmony after i n encoding the good informations of evolution.But how to quantify an emotion like the humility or the vanity and how to give an importance to an information? and what about the sortings and synchros.The neuro synaptic encodings and reasonings,why, how,when,where ....it is so simple and so complex.Why we are aware and cosncious after all? why we are emergent lifes and consciousness?How to quantify these improtances ?

I have a simple question Mr Ellis? what is for your the main causality ,the main potential implying lifes and emergent consciousness? do you consider a mathematical singularity permitting to informations a specific architecture of evolution in function of external parameters ? a kind of algorythm of sortings, superimposings and synchros ? And what about this quantum gravitation ?

The consciousness so in a simple resume cannot be created by humans because the system is more complex about consciousness and soul than we can imagine.That said an AI is possible mimating by automata, logic and rational algorythms.

All this to tell you that your work considers themro and photons, not the gravitation which is the main causality.

Best Regards

But of course it is not easy of course to forget the electromagnetic chains of this special relativity.It is after our only basis in sciences,the photons.But they are not the primordial codes.They are not the only one piece of puzzle.That has no sense to consider only our standard model.Like if in less of 200 years of science we have understood this universe in its whole with these phtons.It is so reductor like principle whjen we analyse what is this gravitational universal sphere in spherisation of matter energy.The photons are just a fuel and a system of photonic encodings correlated with our gravitational earth.The soul is more than this simple analyse.The evolution of matters, bodies,minds, souls are more complex than we can imagine.

The evolution is universal and general everywhere inside this universal sphere 3D for me.The biology evolves everywhere like the geology, the minerals....,the complexification and optimisation improvement are foundamentals for all matter, bodies, souls,minds, consciousness.If a soul for example must nourrish its consciousness with universalism and altruism,so we can consider than we die electromagnetically but not gravitationally.So if the souls are ramdomly resynchronised in a being of a planet, so the consciousness and brains are correlated .The relevance and God has well made the things is that we are never on the same place.Interesting like evolution.You see that evolution and gravitation are more than we can imagine.Fascinatin,g isn't it ?

Dear George,

I have read your beautiful essay and concur with top down causation or realization process that you have laid out to explain how biological life drives evolution, what if we can extend this theory to levels of consciousness and see that a higher level of consciousness being responsible for manifestation of different lower levels of it self. A gene is a part of organism and there is no organism with out the gene, it's a singular system. So is consciousness a singularity and we are all a part of it. I request you to kindly read There are no goals as such it's all play

Love,

i.

I have been down with influenza so have been slow and still am. Thanks for the link to Churchland's book. This get into philosophy, which was a minor I did in college, which is fun and helps to frame thinking. Roger Penrose goes on a track of sorts with physics, mathematics and the mental world all connected as joints in a paradoxical triangle.

I tend to focus a bit more locally in my thinking in that if there is a duality between IR and UV physics, then maybe quantum hair on black hole horizons, such as what Strominger argues with BMS symmetry, has structure that appears in the more ordinary world. Black hole quantum or BPS hair is in the UV domain that appears by red shift in the IR range, think of a highly time dilated Planck mass oscillator. I think somehow this equivalency between UV and IR gives what might be called euphemistically a yin and yang relationship between bottom up and top down causal or correlations.

Cheers LC

Professor Ellis,

A wonderfully written essay! Learnt a lot from it. I particularly enjoyed the sections on the differences between the logic of physics vs biology. I had the following question that I was hoping you would help me with:

If we took the example of a bacteria detecting poison and moving away from it, the poison would correspond to context C; let us call the bacteria system S, and we can form the corresponding context dependent statement "If C,THEN S will move away, ELSE S will move toward." Would you agree that if I decided to redraw the 'boxes' differently and looked at the joint system (C,S) together, then the earlier context dependent statement can be restated as a statement one would expect under the logic of physics? If the global (C,S) joint system has to follow physical law and can be analyzed from it, we should then be able to understand the 'purpose' in the local relationship between C and S. Would you agree on that?

Thanks.

Natesh

PS: I explore this C-S relationship in my submission 'Intention is Physical' which I have turned in, and should be up sometime next week. I would be happy if you could take a look at it, and any and all feedback is welcome.

Dear Prof. Ellis,

you've provided a cogent and well-argued essay. One point that---perhaps only to me---has some special significance is where you present Maxwell's equations: I remember very well the moment when I first understood them, which I guess a more religiously minded person might call 'revelatory'. As you note, those few, simple equations, together with gravity, govern essentially all that we encounter in everyday life---I don't think anybody who isn't awestruck by that has truly appreciated this lesson.

I think it's that moment, more than anything, that makes me look at purported explanations of the mind appealing to supernatural or extra-physical powers somewhat askance: it would be profoundly dissatisfying if the simplicity of fundamental physics would have to be muddled by the addition of the essentially mysterious in order to give an account of mind.

Consequently, I think I share your general approach to the matter: let's not throw in the towel and appeal to the ghost in the machine, but let's try and do some more science. Your essay is a welcome contribution to that.

However, I'm not quite sure your essay really cuts to the heart of the matter---or perhaps, I just don't quite see how. You appeal to the 'logic' of ion channels; but I feel one must be a bit more careful not to conflate semantic, meaningful information with the essentially syntactic operations occurring at the physical ground level. One risks introducing what was meant to be derived into the basic assumptions, at least courting circularity.

As an example, I would not say that an overflowing basin implements the logic 'if water level w > h, emit water' (where h is the depth). So even though the basic process can be brought into a 'if...then...else'-structure, I don't think that this automatically licenses us to attribute any genuine information-processing to a system.

One always runs a great risk to import interpretations into one's models, only to then rediscover them---after all, to the human mind, almost everything appears meaningful. As an example, consider the lamp lit at Old North Church by Paul Revere: you might suppose it means 'the English will attack by land', but it does so only to a human mind, who knows how to 'decode' the information, i.e. who knows 'one if by land, two if by sea'. The lamp itself does not carry meaningful information---without the background knowledge, it's just a source of illumination. But this background knowledge itself depends on the semantic capacities of any onlooker.

So I'm not sure I see how your example actually generates meaning and purpose. To me, it seems that these biomolecules are far more like the overflowing water basin than they are like an intentional organism choosing between alternatives, based on relevant information.

It's possible that you intend to circumvent this difficulty by appeal to biological function, as introduced via evolution, in a similar manner to the 'biosemantics' of Ruth Millikan and others, perhaps utilizing the (effective) downward causation to get the 'evolved meaning' to the ground level of ion channels and the like. If so, then I think this line of argument may have merit, and would like to see it fleshed out some more.

Anyway, thanks again for an intriguing contribution to the debate!

Professor Ellis,

Interesting point on J=(C,S) not necessarily following physics style causal relations. I should have stated myself better. Perhaps the following might clear it up with where I am going.

Let us redraw the boxes as the following. For every system S, we will divide the universe into an observable domain O and the rest as B. O is not fixed and can change in time, thus changing the O-B boundary. Any context system C has to be in the observable domain O of S to be able to affect it at that time, and S also has to be in its own observable domain. If O only comprised of C and S in a particular case, then (O,B) or specifically the time evolution (C,S,B) would fall under the physics category now I think. Hope this helps make my argument clearer.

Interestingly if we were to study the correlations between C and S even under the physics category, we can show that energy dissipation minimization under finite complexity constraints (alone) is a sufficient condition for emergence of inference and prediction in such systems. The learning/inference dynamics is in a very particular manner that the implementation requires an hierarchical feedforward feedback model, the type we see in the brain.

It gets even more interesting when you allow for S to have agency (the ability to act but not necessarily with intent or purpose). The optimal solutions to constrained optimization of dissipation for C-S correlations will involve a very nice 'exploitation-exploration' tradeoff. Not to mention an hierarchical model that realizes these dynamics will necessitate the 'sense of agency' in the system, and we might be able to identify the source of intention in the agency of the system S.

In addition to the above, I have shown an interesting way to unify individual learning with England's dissipation driven adaptation and how we could explain the brain as a system exhibiting self-organized criticality and its implications of cognition as input mappings. I would be very interested in your thoughts if you have the chance to read my submission 'Intention is Physical'.

Thanks

Natesh

Hi Professor Ellis,

It is well said ,But I spoke about this weakest quant force, the quant gravity.Not G or g,of course this gravity is everywhere because all mass is Under this force respecting newton and the fact that it exists za force between all, m1 m2 ,r ,G ....give this force.Now about thermo,I love so much, I have several books of Zemansky ,Heat and thermodynamics.One of my favorite équations is this PV=nRT ,fascinating equation.But the problem is not about these lectromagnetic thermodynamic interactions implying our standard model and our biology, mineralogy,....if the photons are not the main piece of puzzle, that implies that we must consider this dark matter, the BHs,the quant BHs,the quantum gravitation together in a road resopecting the principle of equivalence;We had a problem for this gravity because we consider only photons.Now if we consider that the cold and the heat are more than we can imagine and that this gravitation is in fact the realchief orchestra, so that implies that we can explain this quantum gravity with determinism and objectivity with this cold and heat.If the stanbdard model is encircled at all scales by this gravitation.So it implies that photons are in fact a serie of spherical volumes having the entire entropy.Paradoxal but that implies that a photon is a spheron coded ,like if I said that this cold gave the properties to photon.The gravitation is fascinatin,g and seems to be the main primordial gravitationa aether implyin,g properties to thermo.Thermodynamics is important indeeed and foundamental but we must rethought our interpretation of this gravitation and this cold to better encircle this infinite entropical gravitational evolution spherisation.It is fascinating this universe and its 3D sphères, quant and cosm.We are Inside a wondertful project of optimisation,a kind of mechanic of improvement.I liked your papper.I am wishing you all the best in this contest.Best resgards.

Dear George,

I think the word "purpose" is being used in at least 3 senses: 1) a somewhat vague subjective goal or intention which is held in conscious awareness; 2) an ostensibly-objective evaluation of the place/ usefulness/ necessity of organisms/ organs/ molecules in an ecosystem or part-ecosystem; and 3) a hypothetically-existing higher-level external-to-the-universe master-plan that somehow guides outcomes in the universe, in addition to laws-of-nature. I think that there is no evidence of 3).

Re "Purpose in the sense of function is necessary for all physiological systems":

I wouldn't say that purpose (in the above 3 senses) is the same as function. The then meaning of the word "function" ("power of acting in a specific proper way") was appropriated by Leibniz in 1673 to refer to mathematical functions, seemingly because the function ("power of acting in a specific proper way") of a mathematical model is completely determined by its mathematical function.

Nothing has changed: despite the visual appearance of some complex system models, no new function evolves out of a deterministic modelled system because the mathematical function completely defines the function ("power of acting in a specific proper way") of the modelled system. By analogy with models, for new function to emerge in the universe, the equivalent of new mathematical functions/rules have to be added to the complex universe-system.

Human beings can add new rules to a model system, but the actual universe is not a model. Seemingly by definition, there is nothing external to the universe. That is why I contend that the universe must generate its own rules.