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

Dear Dr. Gantz -

Thanks for your comments over my way ["Causality and Teleology"].

Reading your essay felt like a humanistic version of my own views! What follows is headline-type description of this using your own [well-crafted] words.

"Do you believe that what exists is fundamentally an expression of randomness within mathematical forms? Or do you believe in a cosmic intentionality that provides generative guidance for the emergence and evolution of our uniquely specified universe?"

I guess that I'm saying that one has both of these simultaneously - my discrete combinatorics generate a unique generative model. This is our only large-scale disagreement, I think.

"... local structure and order emerges by exporting entropy to the larger environment."

Yes. Both of our [very similar] views rest nicely on Jeremy England's argument for life's emergence via its drive to maximize entropy creation [ie. growth].

"Phillip W. Anderson ... maintains that the hierarchical structure of increasing complexity arises as a function of symmetry breaking, and the resulting whole is more than, and different from, the sum of its parts."

I claim that the mechanism of emergence is to be described by the co-boundary operation, which is the topological version of the "integration" operation in Calculus. [I've not seen this thought elsewhere.] The erection of a new 'integrated' hierarchical level is entropically driven.

"The system searches through available configurations, constrained by mathematical laws and prior history, attracted to one that achieves that goal." This is the hierarchical bubble-up / trickle-down mechanism I describe.

"Self-reflective consciousness emerges, perhaps in the synchronous coordination of quantum behavior ... ." Indeed! 'Quantum behavior' is what I call space-like computation [versus Turing's time-like ditto].

"There is an additional feature to the cascade of emergent processes - they are reciprocally interactive. Reciprocity at the component level enables the system to seek adaptive solutions. Reciprocity between component and system levels is inherent in the dynamic of emergence --- components enable the system to search, and the system attraction to pointer states drives the selection. These relations flow up and down the emergent cascade. In the emergent history of our universe, everything is connected to everything else in a limitless web of reciprocity."

Oh yes! I say that the web is made out of gravity, which is space-like, not time-like, not causal.

"Cosmic intentionality is love flowing through the universe, guiding the emergent cascade. Each prior state evolves and moves towards a higher state, one reflecting a greater degree of intention, attraction, cooperation and reciprocation." Whether the evolved state is "higher" depends though on the degree of organization it represents in its newness. Not all evolution is progress - extinction is also a possibility, but this is a detail.

"While we can observe the actions of the entity ... we cannot observe his/her/its interior state." Right. But:

"From an empirical standpoint, there is no answer. The question is undecidable." I disagree: If the observer's consciousness is time-like, yes, but if it's space-like [eg. meditative state], this *is* the interior state, and you *are* the intention! Also, re Undecideability, since my view of computation exceeds Turing's formulation, this weakens arguments from this basis.

My conclusion is that the intentionality you mention can be properly identified with entropic gravity - the tendency for all things without distinction to attract each other. My mod4 construction, with the chakra system in mind, then directly and easily identifies gravity with love.

Hello George Gantz,

I very much enjoyed your essay; it's an excellent, literary read. But I think that you assume too much. Given the empirical evidence to date, the universe behaves with mindless, chaotic, deterministic causality according to natural law. If the universe appears to expresses 'cosmic intentionality' - well, that is just us anthropomorphizing the universe. Being mindless, the universe isn't even indifferent.

Causation is the realization that all events are the result of previous events according to natural law. Causation is not reductionist - if anything causation drives emergence and implementation. Determinism and free will are flip sides of the same coin. Free will is a consequence of top-down causation and the loose coupling between complex causal event chains. Both the universe and our minds are causally determined. If they were not, then both would be chaotic and incomprehensible. There would be no galaxies, stars, planets, elements, biology, or us. Without causality, the mind could not form coherent thoughts, as no thought could be the cause of another.

Causal, chaotic evolution is how life and minds with aims and intention arose. Random noise plus natural selection in a chaotic environment driving survival is the engine for the accumulation of complexity and emergence of life.

Intention and purpose are NOT epiphenomenal. A broad look at our accomplishments proves that it is not. Our purpose is our own to make.

As much as I admire your writing, and writing style, I do not think that you have proved your case.

Thanks for the good read.

Cheers,

Bruce Amberden.

Dear Sirs!

Physics of Descartes, which existed prior to the physics of Newton returned as the New Cartesian Physic and promises to be a theory of everything. To tell you this good news I use «spam».

New Cartesian Physic based on the identity of space and matter. It showed that the formula of mass-energy equivalence comes from the pressure of the Universe, the flow of force which on the corpuscle is equal to the product of Planck's constant to the speed of light.

New Cartesian Physic has great potential for understanding the world. To show it, I ventured to give "materialistic explanations of the paranormal and supernatural" is the title of my essay.

Visit my essay, you will find there the New Cartesian Physic and make a short entry: "I believe that space is a matter" I will answer you in return. Can put me 1.

Sincerely,

Dizhechko Boris

Michael -

Thank you for the detailed review and comments. Yes, there are many parallels between our theses (as well the theses of other essayists). This is one of the exciting things about the FQXi contests - probing the most difficult of questions with a community of excellent thinkers. The result is --- the whole is greater than the sum of the parts!

You suggest that your model accommodates the simultaneity of the "random" and "intentional" views of the universe. In one sense, I agree with you --- they do appear as two sides of the same coin. However I pose them as opposites in my essay, although the choice between them is indeterminate on the basis of empirical or mathematical investigation.

I do not see that gravity can connect the two. Gravity is, after all, one of the emergent features of our universe. Rather than being fundamental, I would suggest that it is consequential - an emergent property in spacetime that manifests but does not explain cosmic intentionality.

This is clearly worth further discussion --- but alas the contest is nearing an end!

Regards - George

Dear George,

I'm sorry it's taken me so long to respond to your fine and evocative essay. The problem seems to be that I'm stuck on the horns of your dichotomy. You ask in the Introduction whether I believe that existence is randomness within mathematical forms - I would say yes, at a physical level. But I certainly would not argue that intentionality is an illusion... quite a few of the essays here trace the various stages of its emergence in interestingly different ways; it's evidently real and not incompatible with its physical foundations. (You make some quite eloquent statements about this in your essay too.)

As to whether the universe is generated and guided by a cosmic intentionality - that's also complicated, for me. While I tend to think of God in more personal terms, I do try every day to imagine the world and my own life as the result of divine providence - that seems to me a very healthy way of coping with things.

You say the question is undecidable, and I agree... although not because I can't tell whether a copy of Hamlet was written by monkeys; I can be pretty sure it wasn't. But our world, as marvelous as it is in so many ways, isn't like that at all. The evolution of life, for example, is beautifully explained in great detail in terms of accidentally emergent processes, and I've tried to show in my essay that the physical world and the human mind can eventually be understood in a similar way.

It may seem strange to you, but I don't see any contradiction between seeing the world as a series of random accidents and seeing it as created and guided: these are just two ways of relating to the same set of facts. Believing in God is a good way of expressing my sense of the meaning of things, but it's not a good way of explaining anything.

And it seems the world is explainable, to an amazing extent. I love trying to understand how things work and why: where all these dimensions of meaning come from. But to say they come from cosmic intentionality doesn't help me; it seems too abstract and reductive. What I focus on instead is how new kinds of relationships can emerge in which random events make a difference in new ways - as you summarize in your section on Reciprocity. This happens very differently on different levels.

So I'm more than sympathetic with your feelings about our unique universe, but I don't think there's really an either/or here, between a meaningful world and a world that emerges by accident. I agree that the "multiverse" is a terrible idea, but that's because it explains so little, not because there's any danger that my choices and decisions might not matter.

At any event, I appreciate your adding your distinctive and heartfelt viewpoint to this strange brew of essays - and best wishes to you and your family from another grateful grandfather.

Conrad

George Gantz,

Thank you for reading and commenting on my essay, and I would particularly like to thank you for the question about teleological bias (T-bias). This is a term that I am not altogether satisfied with. First off, the word teleological carries a certain amount of religious or spiritual baggage I wish to avoid. In its most basic definition, I intend it to convey the subjective feeling or goal within a sentient being, no matter how primitive, to survive and flourish.

In reading your well-written essay, I noticed my own internal definitions of many of the T-biased words we both use have substantially different meanings to the way you use them. I think I would need to construct a George-Jim Rosetta Stone to translate between them. I find it useful to slightly redefine several of the most common words used in these discussions. These are phenomenal definitions. A sentient being is nothing more than 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. Intelligence is the quantitative and qualitative capacity to process and organize information. By this definition, the computer Watson is highly intelligent. Consciousness is the subjective phenomenal experience of the qualia of sentience as a first-person observation of the present moment. 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 consciousness and the 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 require the organism to choose a path through phase space that would provide the requisite energy flux or reservoir needed to maintain the dissipative state of the organism in order to be able to selectively navigate this evolutionary landscape. Adaptive response to the environment occurs over a temporal spectrum from real-time to the life of the species. 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.

I generally try to avoid the use of the word 'intentional' as it can be confused with the less descriptive philosophical term of art denoting the content or object of consciousness. This definition is unfortunate. Here, I will attempt to provide you with a more complete picture of what I'm trying to get at with the term T-bias as it applies to sentient beings with intelligence and consciousness but it does not apply to any systems or processes that do not have these attributes. It is exclusively a property of life.

Which is to say, I agree with your essay up to the point where you introduce cosmic intention. When you assume the existence of that which is to be explained, then all further explanation stops. Indeed consciousness is mysterious. They don't call it the hard problem for nothing.

Self-identity and self-interest progress in stages. Right after I am born, with my first inklings of self-awareness my identity and my self-interest stop at my skin. Then as I discriminate myself from my immediate surroundings and the active agents within it I soon come to the awareness of my dependence upon these other active agents for my well-being: my family, my friends and my community. I develop a feeling of what is good for these extensions of myself are good for me. And as I extend my self-definition outwards to my school, the company I work for, my country and finally, if all goes well, the entire globe with its social, economic and political connectivity, and with its ecology and environment, it is in my enlightened self-interest to become one with everything. The greatest good for the greatest number might become the end of this outward self-definition, but this is only half the story. This final step is too easily perverted. Utilitarianism has been used for human sacrifice. The final step of enlightened self-interest is to bring back a balance to what I call the I-thou symmetry. If I do not value and protect my own being as an individual then the whole point of my being is lost. This concept is beautifully contained in the Golden rule and in Kant's contrapositive formulation of the categorical imperative: "do not do to anyone else what you would not have done to you."

As you noted, we have the standard model of particle physics. Just think, if the sciences had been properly funded we could have had the deluxe model!

Best regards,

Jim Stanfield

Dear George,

Your essay was fun and interesting to read. I really liked how you describe the "cascade" of the evolution of our universe at the top of page 2.

I agree with a lot of what you are saying. I agree that the ultimate questions about the fundamental nature of what we observe is basically undecidable (I gave the analogy of driving simultaneously on two interstate highways in my essay for the previous FQXi contest). I also agree with you that top-down causation and "reciprocal interactivity" are very powerful ideas that can help us make sense of the Universe.

In a model where our world is under the intentional control of a God, your hypothesis that God expresses his cosmic intentionality by "controlling" the outcome of quantum events is certainly possible. Of course, I will point out the standard "objection" to any God-type explanation: it just moves the "problem" one level up. The God level can use its intentionality to give purpose to our level, but then, what gives purpose and intentionality to the God level?

I also have some difficulty to understand your use of the word "love" in relation to intentionality or the "guiding" of the evolution of the universe. You seem to say that if an entity gives us something, that entity "loves" us... Maxwell's laws of electromagnetism "give" us light... do they love us?

I think you argue for your hypothesis in interesting ways, but I still think that we do not have to choose between (nihilistic) meaningless randomness or (unexplainable) godly love... there must be some middle ground, and I am searching for it via the co-emergence hypothesis that I defend in my essay.

The important thing is to keep on searching... I wish your essay does at least as well as last time!

See you around,

Marc

George,

Congratulations!

More at the coffee shop :^)

Yours, Alexey.

Marc - Thanks for the comment!

Your comment about "God-type explanations" moving the problem up one level is not limited to God-type explanations. Proving the consistency of arithmetic has a similar problem - one must appeal to an additional axiom (creating an arithmetic of one higher level) to prove consistency of the arithmetic below. The same problem exists in the justified-true-belief model of knowledge - one is inevitably engaged in an infinite regression of justifications in the effort to know that something is true. In one sense, "God" is a response to such dilemmas - an infinite frame within which the infinite nested levels can be contained. In theological circles, God is given "uncreated" status - "who is, and who was, and who is to be", or. more curiously "I am who I am."

You have grasped what I am trying to convey with the word love. At the level of conscious sentient beings, love is expressed and felt and reciprocated in behaviors that we can identify through our mirror neurons. We experience it ourselves, and we have the capacity to recognize it in other beings. And yes, it corresponds to the heat and light of the sun (for example). So, yes, in that sense, Maxwell's equations describe an act of love. Moreover, without Maxwell's equations, love among sentient beings would never exist.

So perhaps the cosmic interconnections will bring us together once this contest is over. We can share a plate of Oysters of Nothingness and play with the amusing and fantastic puzzles of the universe....

Regards - George

A clearly written, accessible, essay. I like that you have presented your view as an option and not the certain truth. I also like that you have considered top down influence. I like the personal touches such as, how your grandson subjectively considers the World. I love watching starlings flock too. There were amazing displays in the evening where I grew up as a child. It is a lovely connection you made between bike riding and their flight. Perhaps we do witness their daily exhilaration, as they have a limbic system enabling emotion. It is a very nice thought. Overall, I like what you have done but here are some places where I disagree.

" The goal is not to create spiral or other specific shapes but to minimize local entropy. The system searches through available configurations, constrained by mathematical laws and prior history, attracted to one that achieves that goal." G. Gantz. I don't think there is any evidence for or mechanisms for the system to search through all available configurations. It is, as I see it , a matter of mechanics; the principle of least action, Newtons first law and conservation of energy.

"There is a critical difference between intentionality and agency. Intentions are behaviors that can be observed." G. Gantz. Your definition of intention is wrong. It is not a behavior that can be observed but a prior aim, goal or objective. Action/behavior that is observed may or may not be intentional, that is goal driven. Outcomes do not have to be results of prior goals just because they are outcomes. People do sometimes look back and see events as purposeful in hindsight but that is rationalization.

"In this case, the intention (motion and direction) of the billiard ball was imparted to it by the intention (a decision to impart motion and direction) of the conscious human agent. In this example, both the billiard ball and the human have intention." G. Gantz. Intention is not motion and direction, that would more correctly be called momentum. The latter use of intention, pertaining to the human decision, is the correct usage.

"...We are like the third person discovering a Hamlet manuscript, trying to decide if it was intentionally produced or if it is just an unusual but totally random coincidence...". G. Gantz. I think it is incorrect to assume that if something is not random it must be intentional and vice versa. Natural processes can be sequential and orderly without an external prior plan. The instruction for reach next step being within the existing configuration of the system and Object universe. Development falls in between being random and planned: controlled, constrained because of physics and chemistry, and macro feedback on the system, sequential because of the foundational sequential passage of time, with an outcome that may be functional but nevertheless not purposely constructed (ie it is without prior goal).

"Cosmic intentionality is love flowing through the universe, guiding the emergent cascade. Each prior state evolves and moves towards a higher state, one reflecting a greater degree of intention, attraction, cooperation and reciprocation." I'm not sure what you mean by "state " in this context, I don't see relentless 'upward' progress. It is evident that more complex states are also broken down or destroyed. There is deposition and erosion, crystallization and dissolving. Growth of galaxies and their destruction. Cycles of growth and death and decomposition. As well as development of biological structures there is also atrophy. There is evolution and diversification of species and there is extinction. Growth of civilizations and collapse. How does highly evolved competitive "arms race" of species such as toxin production, and parasitism and predation fit into your vision of cosmic development?

Sorry if these points gave already been raised and discussed. You have received a great deal of feedback, congratulations, and I haven't the energy to read it all. Kind regards Georgina