The How and The Why of Emergence and Intention by George Gantz

Dear George Gantz

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

Dear George,

You are a poet, from the flock of starlings , the dancing waves and shimmering surfaces, the sunflower's artihmetic, also the 100 monkeys (I should take a minimum of hundredthousand) and the cause that makes a ball rolling, all these examples are an everyday beauty inviting us to like our life.

Then you continue indeed as a poet: "Galaxies emerge in a cosmic gravitational dance" their goal is to minimalise local entropy... that minimazes avaerage energy losses. But.... how did entropy get this height. Our perceptions of this reality indicate a certain "goal" like you indicate, but this also means that in an earlier point of the time dimension this goal has already been achieved...

Then you mention :"self-reflective conscious beings is the pursuit of science"

Here we are touching the essence "Consciousness" Here you indicate that consciousness is searching for the whatness. Maybe however it is the other way around and Consciousness is the origin of the emerged reality as we are aware of.

We humans are reciprocally connected, I fully agree with you, surely when you add : "a history of emergent threads weaving connections to all living things, to all times and places,and to the universe as a whole." This is the essental phrase for me in your beautiful written essay.

"Love flowing through the Universe" Our emergent reality has given us not only love but also hate and war. These two "feelings" are the origin of natures way to survive and its procreation. Reality is not only poetic dear George...but you are indeed a grandfather which I am not despite my four children and age of 71, and I think that that experience could make a man more optimistic.

You are ending with a question, the same question I am posing myself since years, this question has given me some answers that I am after the same search as yours am giving in my essay : The Purpose of Life".

I hope that you will find some emergeing time to read it, leave an esteemed comment and maybe a rating.

best regards and thanks for your essay.

Wilhelmus

Dear George Gantz,

Thanks for a wonderful essay. My eyes watered at your description of the starlings, and related it to your bicycle racing days. "Wild and crazy fun." Today my wild and crazy fun is mental, but you reminded me of my younger, physical, days of wild and crazy fun.

You place things in perspective. The "crucial difference between intentions and agency. Intentions are behaviors that can be observed. Agency is a quality that must be inferred." Perhaps a slight redefinition of "intention", but the point is that agency must be inferred. Your 'Shakespeare in the monkey gibberish' nicely illustrates that, "it is correspondingly impossible to determine if this universe was written by randomness or by intention." That is key. So how do we decide? I address that in my essay, which I hope you will read and comment on. I loved your "Hole at the Center of Creation", but this year you have surpassed yourself.

You have probably the best thought I have found in this contest:

"The universe has given us life, beauty, joy and self-reflective consciousness - it has loved us. In turn, it is possible for each of us to reciprocate this love."

It is reciprocal. Your grandson "loves the world ... and the world loves him back." And so for your new Colorado grandson (where my grandsons live.)

"Choose as you will, but I believe the Universe is meant to be lived in, to be explored, and to be loved."

Yours, in gratitude,

Edwin Eugene Klingman

Dear George,

the topic left room for interpretations, you went for the cosmic scale. You argue clearly, why you prefer to see intention whenever you have the choice. Your essay is nice to read and comforting. I like your pictures, especially the flocking of birds! Myself, I went for the question whether goal-oriented behavior on macroscopic scales is at all compatible with "mindless mathematical laws" on microscopic scales. I answer this question positively and I wonder whether you'd find this conclusion comforting. I'm leaning towards the naturalist side, in particular methodologically, but I also find joy and delight in exploring the universe. We started with different questions and cover different aspects of the topic, but concerning the attitude resulting from the choices you offer at the end of your essay, we do not end up all that different.

Cheers, Stefan

Dear George,

Thank you for the comment on my essay. Indeed there is a resemblance between your topic and mine. But I think while I went to a more evolutionary point of view, you went to a very beautiful poetic route. It indeed touched my heart seeing how, indeed, everything seem to self organized, despite the aparent lack of purpose in the universe, and that there is a sense of flow in all of that. This gives a reason to see purpose and not chaos to those who wishes to find a reason to exist, that our life has some value.

When you gave your grandsone as an example of the huge flow of love, as part of the universe's purpose in minimizing entropy, while exploring the environment, did made me a drop a couple of tears. It made me see through your eyes how something so simple can be an atom of the huge large scale principles of the universe.

Dear George,

Following up on your invitation to comment, I want to say first of all that I like your writing style, which is both friendly and economical. I know that your larger interest concerns the interface between science and religion (or spirituality), and I share that interest.

I find that the notions of 'randomness' and 'intentionality' are not well defined in the science/math/philosophy community. Perhaps that is unavoidable, since they are essentially human-centric notions. (What does 'random' mean but something whose 'cause' cannot be determined by a human observer? What does 'intention' mean but something imputed by a human observer?) So, the choice between a view of the world as random or intended seems to me artificial. As your essay progresses, there is increasing reliance on mentalist vocabulary (choice, guidance, attraction, disposition, top-down, aspirational, dance, embrace...) culminating in a cosmic vision of "love." While poetic, I don't find that using these terms supports your basic aim--which in more physicalist terms seems to be to reconcile the emergence of order with the 2nd Law. It simply restates the scientific problem in "folk" terms. (In fairness, I could be equally critical of the notion of "symmetry-breaking" as a causal force.)

I agree with many points you make (e.g. that the choice of worldviews is logically and empirically undecidable; that "everything is connected to everything else in a limitless web of reciprocity"), and with the spirit of the whole. On the other hand, I cannot make sense of the statement (or definition?) that "intentions are behaviors that can be observed." I don't see that the billiard ball and the human manifest intention in any comparable or common way, other than a definition imposed by the human. Humans can certainly read what they know as intention into observed behaviors of animate or inanimate matter. (Cf. Daniel Dennett's "intentional stance".) If intentions are to be understood simply as behaviors that can be observed, then why not stick with ordinary space-time description (Dennett's "physical stance")? Similarly, I do agree that human consciousness is NOT epiphenomenal, but serves downward causation in the human organism. But that is because there is a "top" to a human being, which performs an executive function. What is the top level of the physical cosmos? If we have recourse to something standing outside nature to fill that (executive) function--God, the "mathematical laws of physics," or some meta-system of dispositions)--then it is no longer science.

I hope this is helpful and not too harsh, for I did indeed enjoy reading your paper. Wishing you all the best in your philosophical inquires,

Dan

Dear George Gantz,

Descartes I read a long time ago, when I was 20 years old.

In philosophy I was looking for an answer to the question: "What is the matter?" The answer I not found. Then I went to the principle of identity of space and matter of Descartes, which allowed me to say that space is the body of God who works wonders. Moving space-matter became the basis of the New Cartesian Physic, which explained the formula of mass-energy equivalence comes from the pressure of the Universe, the flow of which force on the corpuscle is equal to the product of Planck's constant to the speed of light.

This and other achievements make me ask you to help me to develop it further in FQXi. Rate my essay.

Sincerely,

Dizhechko Boris

George,

Hello again. As the contest is ending, I see that I have not commented or scored your essay ...

Flocking birds are amazing. In the Houston area, there are sometimes flocks as you describe. There are also migratory birds such as ducks that travel to and from the coastal area. They fly in V shaped flocks.

Monkeys and typewriters are a favorite topic for the question of randomness. In actual practice though, monkeys tend to hit a single key repeatedly and then make those screaming noises:-) A true random alpha-numeric generator might be a better choice for that example ... if there is such a thing. Once Shakespeare has been created though, you are correct in stating we don't know if it was intentional or not.

Many of the essays use the ideas of entropy and open & closed systems plus information. There might even be a consensus regarding these ideas..

The narrative of the billiard ball and the pool cue is good. A point that I don't think I have seen in any of the essays is the making and the use of TOOLS. A tool has no agency but its creator and its user certainly do.

The idea of an attractor in the solution space is presented in several of the essays. It seems reasonable to me.

Cooperation is definitely an advantage ... AND ... the ability to cooperate and the choice to cooperate are definitely signs of agency.

Regarding reciprocity, it seems like a reasonable idea. I believe that your essay is the only one that I have read that presents this idea. This allows a constraint to move up or down through the hierarchy to all the levels .... if we were in sufficient harmony with the universe, this might even be a way to have one's "will" expressed as an event.

All in all, this was an excellent effort on your part. Well done.

Best Regards and Good Luck,

Gary Simpson

Hi George (addressing both the cyclist and the grandfather),

very well written essay, well structured, a pleasure to read!

Now, following your comments in my page: if you wanted to really force me into one of the two branches of the choice:

1. Universe (or multiverse) from randomness within mathematical forms -- intentionality as epiphenomenal, OR

2. Universe from cosmic generative intentionality - humanity as part of a purposeful process,

I would choose option (1), if not for other reasons, for the fact that, in my opinion, it defines a much more attractive research agenda: trying to explain away the magic of goals and intentionality. This can be done so well w.r.t. biology, as mentioned by several essays here. (It is always a pleasure to reveal the trick behind the magic, for example showing that the specific distribution of word lengths in a printed western language does not reflect a 'magic' universal feature of human intelligence, but simply derives from attributing some probability to the blank (word_separating) character.)

At the other side (2) I see a much higher risk to mix a scientific approach with other perfectly respectful... aims and intentions. Some of your passionate passages in support of choice (2) reminded me of the visions by Teilhard de Chardin, in content, style, and tone.

It seems to me, however, that the two choices you describe are just the black and white extremes of an interesting spectrum (I see the narrative benefits of this setting), and I would gladly sit somewhere in the middle. For example, I am absolutely convinced of the important role that emergence, enriched with top-down causation, can offer to the growth of complexity in the universe, and I would not see this feature compatible only with choice (2), but also with choice (1).

In fact, one of the abstract pictures I prefer is that of a deterministic universe, mathematical in the sense of computational, with emergence and top-down causation as possibly the most fundamental drivers of evolution.

I would even accept terms such as 'sacred' (as in S. Kauffman's 'Reinventing the Sacred') in connection with these driving forces, but would stop there. In your essay, on the other hand, I perceive the need to describe a physical universe that naturally supports the most transcendental human aspirations, and that reveals divine intentions behind the scenes. Maybe it's a wrong impression. But if it is wrong, then our views may not be that different.

You write: "I believe this question is, and always will be, from an empirical standpoint, undecidable." Is this not unreasonably pessimistic? How can we exclude that some day, maybe in the near future, some computer experiment will generate an artificial dynamical system evolving according to simple algorithmic rules, yielding an ecology of agents that resemble the biosphere, and that develop forms of cooperative symbiotic, 'altruistic' or moral behaviors, without need for a priori design and goal? How would you feel, in this case? Progress in this direction is under way. Wouldn't this count for you as an empirical way to rule out a grand design and ultimate purpose?

You write: "science is a wonderful and intensely collaborative adaptation that serves to minimize discrepancy between theory and reality and maximize information - effectively exporting entropy to the larger world in the process." Do you have a precise form of exported entropy in mind, for this interesting example?

A rather trivial remark: obviously, the universe does not love us back. This is clear, for example, to all the children that were killed yesterday, in Syria, by chemical weapons.

Finally, in case you'll find yourself revising the text for publication (e.g. in the Springer Frontiers Series), I have two minuscule editorial suggestions (pleasing my taste -- you may well disagree!):

"On at least one planet, Earth, some of those chemicals reacted" --> remove "Earth".

"One species, humans, was able to build civilizations and science." --> remove "humans".

Sorry for the length. Bye!

Tommaso

George.

An excellent essay, interesting, beautifully written, original, easy to read and with a well argued hypotheses. They were the scoring criteria. But I struggled to rationalise it on first read so didn't comment until perhaps you'd read mine. I'm not sure if you have, but the second read was better, and it's time to chat.

First I firmly agree and conclude undecidability. But the semantic door opened with "a selection was made" on divergence or interactions. That may or not imply conscious intent so definition was needed, but you introduced "cosmic intentionality", transferring ball interactions to a player or 'the rules'. Certainly behavioural rules exist for cosmic particles, i.e. field alignments. But I struggle to assign conscious intent to the infinite angular relationships between particles and incoming waves, viz;

Take an interaction and momentum exchange between simple rotating spheres or a wave ('function') and a sphere). They may, entirely by chance, meet at any point on the surface. In the centre of mass rest frame; At the equator, one side finds motion LEFT, and the other RIGHT. Near the N pole is anticlockwise, the S pole clockwise (-/) The combinations vary inversely by the cosine with latitude. Now with standard absorption and re-emission the 'arriving' energy is requantized by the spheres momenta but varies entirely with that tangent point. So certainly a range of outcomes is possible, a semantic leap may admit 'a selection' (with conditions), but considering the full 'Bloch sphere' of attitudes possible could we rationally then make another leap to invoke 'intent'?

I also ask do you think causality 'must' imply determinism? (Tangent points are indeterminable) Can we answer this; Would you find or - polarity on an equator? Is that not too undecidable or 50:50?

Interestingly I identify how the scenario above classically reproduces QM's predictions, but is humankind yet quite ready for such heresy!?

I should confess I have published a model of an apparently well evidenced recycling cosmology with a fractal mechanism (evident in quasars), which DOES imply a greater repeating pattern. We would then have one universe (at a time, here) though maybe infinitely many nearby and previously!

Very well done for yours and I'm honoured mine is nearby and hope you'll comment honestly on it (the likelihood it'll be passed over for placings yet again is less important).

Best wishes

Peter