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

Dear George F. R. Ellis

I invite you and every physicist to read my work "TIME ORIGIN,DEFINITION AND EMPIRICAL MEANING FOR PHYSICISTS, Héctor Daniel Gianni ,I'm not a physicist.

How people interested in "Time" could feel about related things to the subject.

1) Intellectuals interested in Time issues usually have a nice and creative wander for the unknown.

2) They usually enjoy this wander of their searches around it.

3) For millenniums this wander has been shared by a lot of creative people around the world.

4) What if suddenly, something considered quasi impossible to be found or discovered such as "Time" definition and experimental meaning confronts them?

5) Their reaction would be like, something unbelievable,... a kind of disappointment, probably interpreted as a loss of wander.....

6) ....worst than that, if we say that what was found or discovered wasn't a viable theory, but a proved fact.

7) Then it would become offensive to be part of the millenary problem solution, instead of being a reason for happiness and satisfaction.

8) The reader approach to the news would be paradoxically adverse.

9) Instead, I think it should be a nice welcome to discovery, to be received with opened arms and considered to be read with full attention.

11)Time "existence" is exclusive as a "measuring system", its physical existence can't be proved by science, as the "time system" is. Experimentally "time" is "movement", we can prove that, showing that with clocks we measure "constant and uniform" movement and not "the so called Time".

12)The original "time manuscript" has 23 pages, my manuscript in this contest has only 9 pages.

I share this brief with people interested in "time" and with physicists who have been in sore need of this issue for the last 50 or 60 years.

Héctor

Dear George,

Congratulations for a great essay. I learned a lot of new things about biology, but I found it particularly interesting since I have been thinking a lot lately about "top-down causation" --- or as you quite rightly prefer to call it, "realisation". I particularly liked how you described your views to Rick Searle in one of the above posts:

"Biology and thinking are indeed emergent, and obey the appropriate laws of behaviour, according to their function, at each emergent level. Thus neurons use energy to propagate action potentials along axons; neural networks carry out pattern recognition and prediction functions; the brain as a whole undertakes logical and psychological tasks. These kinds of interactions are not *determined* by the lower levels lying under them, rather they are *enabled* by these lower levels."

For sure, your new book "How can physics underlie the mind" is on my reading list!

In my essay, which deals first and foremost with metaphysics, I argue that some kind of "co-emergence" between conscious agents and the laws of physics can explain the lawfulness that we observe in our universe. My starting point is an "infinite set of all abstract computations", which I know to be at odds with your own views that there is no computation in fundamental physics. Since I wrote my essay, I have realised (in part by reading other essays and exploring their references) that "computation" might be too restrictive for an hypothetical "ground level of existence". In fact, I believe now that giving any label to the ground level of existence (abstract, concrete, physical, mental, material, mathematical, computational, even "divine") is bound to be problematic. I recently read about "neutral monism", the simple view that there is "something" unique that unifies and underlies all of reality, without being commital about its nature. In our current understanding of the universe, I think it is a reasonable position to take.

Anyway, as I say in my essay, I think that by combining emergence and realisation, we can imagine that, out of all the ways a universe can be, regular domains are somehow "singled out". This could explain the fact that the universe is understandable without having to postulate regular laws of physics as an unexplainable starting point.

I think that the work that you and other scientists (like Erik Hoel) are doing on emergence and the link between consciousness/biology and physics will turn out to be of the utmost importance if we are ever able to formulate a satisfying fundamental theory of reality.

Sincerely,

Marc

Dear George F. R. Ellis

If you believed in the principle of identity of space and matter of Descartes, then your essay would be even better. There is not movable a geometric space, and is movable physical space. These are different concepts.

I inform all the participants that use the online translator, therefore, my essay is written badly. I participate in the contest to familiarize English-speaking scientists with New Cartesian Physic, the basis of which the principle of identity of space and matter. Combining space and matter into a single essence, the New Cartesian Physic is able to integrate modern physics into a single theory. Let FQXi will be the starting point of this Association.

Don't let the New Cartesian Physic disappear! Do not ask for himself, but for Descartes.

New Cartesian Physic has great potential in understanding the world. To show potential in this essay I risked give "The way of the materialist explanation of the paranormal and the supernatural" - Is the name of my essay.

Visit my essay and you will find something in it about New Cartesian Physic. After you give a post in my topic, I shall do the same in your theme

Sincerely,

Dizhechko Boris

Professor Ellis,

I am back again! We had a conversation much earlier on your page about top-down causation (/realization, which I must admit I find as the more agreeable term). I have gone away to better understand the idea and viewed some wonderful lectures on it. I have a few questions/thoughts that I figured I will clarify with you.

In the models I work with, I assume that the brain can behave like a Markov finite state automata and it's next state can be affected by external inputs and current states. If we are the view the macrostates of the cortex for example at a certain level, as such states of finite state automata, with many microstates in the cortex functionally corresponding to the same macrostate; is it correct to say the current macrostate to next macrostate mappings are confining the microstate mappings? Would this fall under top-down realization, with the microstates belonging to each macrostate corresponding to equivalence classes?

Thanks

Natesh

Dr. Ellis,

Over the years I have greatly enjoyed your thoughts on a number of fundamental aspects of physical law, particularly the expanding block universe and crystallizing block universe explanations of space and time. You are my go-to source for the best explanations and the best examples of top-down causality.

In this latest paper, you have a very good description of the computational mind theory which best describes how the mind can function on top of all of the intervening layers of physical and natural law below it.

Purpose is something we see within ourselves and see in others. As embodied minds, we take its existence for granted as part of the requirement for the evolution of life. And like consciousness, it seems to resist a reductionistic explanation. Existence, sentience, consciousness and the nature and mechanism behind the collapse of the wavefunction remain elusive mysterious. As hard problems go, purpose seems to be less intractable than consciousness.

A sentient being is an individuated organism which is connected to and reacts to the variations in its environment by way of receptor and proprioceptor nerve endings. By this definition a worm can be sentient. Consciousness is the subjective phenomenal experience of the qualia of sentience as a first-person observation of the present moment in interaction with an external environment. An agenda somehow comes out of this and presents itself directly to the subject. It would occur to us in retrospect that the veracity, completeness and therefore the predictive power of this internalized observation of reality would serve an organism well. But this would beg the question: how, on the evolutionary trail, did an organism's acquisition of an agenda to extract meaningful and relevant information for survival arise? Somehow, it must be connected to existential threat. But how does the organism come to sense that existential threat? My simplistic answer is that an organism's nerve endings, no matter how primitive, provide the initial feedback. All sentient beings have skin in the game. But there still remains the problem of how that feedback might be converted into sentience and the subjective sensation of jeopardy. {Insert hand waving here} Once the sense of jeopardy has been detected, the obvious back reaction would be a teleological bias to fulfill the dual agendas: stay in the energy flux and avoid destruction. This would go for the tubeworms living near a steam vent or, as more neural circuitry is thrown at the problem in service of this agenda, an investment banker competing for her share of the billions in bonuses available to maintain herself far from equilibrium.

In biology, form follows function and choice between functions follows purpose. Purposefulness seems to arise robustly and discontinuously at the level of the organism; although those half-dead-half-living creatures, the viruses, seem to be right on the fence. To the extent an organism has access to its own assembly code (epigenetics) it has the agenda to craft the components it is comprised of towards the chosen functionality.

Now here are my wild speculations. Since the process of collapse is a mystery at this point, my guess is that the organism, no matter how primitive, serves as the observer that collapses the wavefunction and selects the mode of collapse that fits its agenda. Organisms are, first and foremost, observers of their surroundings. The hemoglobin molecule is a good place to look for the fingerprints of this handiwork; the simple goal of the simple organism to use an oxygen molecule as an energy source. Just how the system locks in the best fit answer is rooted in the measurement problem.

Using the words awareness and agenda in the most metaphorical sense, the cell has an agenda of grabbing on to an oxygen molecule and an awareness of it and its need to harvest it as an energy source and to orchestrate its release for use at a later time. The best way to grab something is to surround it (to form the lock around the key). To craft a structure to do this would be to try as many combinations of the molecules at hand into a structure that performs the function and fulfills the purpose. And the best way to do that is not to try each combination in sequence but to observe them in superposition. Photosynthesis might be even closer to the bone. Perhaps the chlorophyll molecule was adapted for use as an oxygen carrier.

Best regards,

Jim Stanfield

Dear George,

Does your agreement with that empty "neutral monism" mean that Einstein was wrong, that science without religion is actually not lame?

Thank you,

Alexey Burov.

Prof. Ellis

Thank you for the great essay. You approach the subject head-on with clear rational arguments, and you have connected key topics across physics, chemistry, biology, and evolution to make your argument within nine short pages.

Your essay references a subtext of hierarchical structure, which is specifically called out in Fig. 1, sections 5.1 and 5.4, and in the Conclusions. Given this subtext of hierarchical structure, I thought you might be interested in my essay, The Cosmic Odyssey of Matter, which formally defines a hierarchical structure based on precise formations of matter (PFMs). The hierarchical structure of PFMs starts with protons and neutrons and continues through chemical elements, organic molecules, cell structures, organisms, and social organizations.

My essay does not address the hard problem of the emergence of goal-oriented systems per your own essay. However, by formally describing the sequence of precise forms, I attempt to provide some context of how living organisms and social groups relate to the broader universe.

link to The Cosmic Odyssey of Matter

Regards, Ed Kneller

Professor Ellis,

"- that describes the logical operations you are modelling, which thus represents logic happening at the psychological level. It is realised in physical terms via the spike trains of axon potentials which in turn are realised through ions flowing through voltage gated ion channels. But it is the logic of the FSM, realised through all the lower levels of causation acting simultaneously in accordance with this high level logic, which drives what happens at those lower levels."

--> I should be able go to an high enough level, where I can view the whole brain as a single macrostate that maintains itself as it receives inputs and generates outputs. This would be a top down realization with the single whole brain macrostate (with the property being a stable structure) thus placing the top-down constraint of being a stable macrostate, on how lower psychological state levels would map onto each other. Would you agree?

If the above is a reasonable statement in line with top-down realization, it adds a lot to my understanding. If a larger macrostate is maintained as described above, the fluctuation theorems can be used to convert this into an equivalent thermodynamic constraint. And the brain can be seen as a special realization of this top-down thermodynamic constraint. Think this is what I showed in my work, but without the vocabulary of top-down realization, it always felt like a piece was missing.

Thanks for answering my questions.

Natesh

Prof. Ellis,

Thank you very much for your comments on my essay.

Regards, Ed Kneller

Professor Ellis,

"Ok I'll have to look at that. It seems a but like what Karl Friston is saying, or perhaps Jeremy England."

--> Yes I was referring more to England's work. Friston's free energy is information theoretic based (making it closer to machine learning gradient descent algorithms) and not physically grounded.

"Ok I'll have to think about that. I am sure its not just thermodynamic constraint, there is also adaptive selection taking place. The former provides constraints on the latter."

--> Think England's work should be seen as providing the top-down(?) thermodynamic constraints for adaptive selection from a really high dimensional macrostate level (which he does note in his papers).

Thanks

Natesh