Informational Unification of Intelligent Life with Fundamental Physics. by Jesse Liu and Sonali Mohapatra

Jesse and Sonali,

I read your essay with great interest. Certainly the development of language and mathematics provided a tremendous boost to human learning. I like your phases of development: life, consciousness, language and high intelligence. In my essay I noted the brain development from a stimulus-reaction, to remembering past events (hence learned behaviors) and to the ability to imagine future events. If I were to rewrite it, I would include language development.

For my use of aims and intentions, the person needs to imagine future outcomes and select a path to achieve the most desirable outcome. I ignore the weak use of intentions as in "I intend to lose weight" with the hidden meaning that "I probably won't lose it".

In my essay I pose some new ideas. I raise the possibility of an information dimension where our thoughts, imagination, and emotions are stored. Think of the emotions around your first teenage love and the subsequent breakup. The brain uses its power in the physical dimension, such as its electromagnetic impulses, to access this dimension. But this information dimension does not have to follow the physical laws. We can imagine things that are not true in the physical world. For the most part, humans use this dimension that is within the brain. In some rare cases, people can access information beyond the individual brain.

While this is not part of my essay, I mention it to stimulate your thinking. In the quantum world, one experiment was to separate entangled particles by a large distance, then simultaneous measure their spin. The knowledge of the first particle's measurement was conducted faster than the speed of light to the second particle. So if this pair-wise knowledge occurs in the information dimension, then maybe the information dimension is not bounded by the speed of light, i.e. information could have different properties than in the physical world.

Hi Conrad,

Thank you for taking the time to read our essay and your kind comments. You certainly raise interesting issues and we appreciate your interesting take on this subject so I'll read yours in due course.

Quantifying degrees of perception and environmental interaction in a continuous way is certainly consistent with integrated information theory's 'Phi' measure (indeed there are insightful essays dedicated to this subject). But a continuous 'order' parameter can be used to quantify a feature of a system e.g. temperature of water, yet qualitative features of the system exist in phenomenologically distinct phases e.g. ice vs steam. I think "ability to perceive and interact with the environment" (which interestingly is a subset of ingredients used by Legg and Hutter to define intelligence) likely has analogies to and it may be more useful to appreciate in this phase transition picture. A silicon photodiode or photosynthetic life can obtain information about sunlight, but I think there is a qualitatively different way of processing that information in a human or cat, which enables a response that is greater than just the sum of light signals.

I suppose we indeed differ in that we argue that natural language may have the same informational importance for human intelligence as genetics has for life, alluding to the Walker-Davies picture. This language very likely was necessary for humans to systematically think about themselves, one another and their environment (scientifically) to engineer and alter even biological constraint. This is a significant transition reversing environment shaping agents' behaviour in evolutionary processes. Nonetheless, you raise an interesting multi-agent picture where we could only reference as theories of social dynamics. We didn't get round to thinking much about humans' awareness of other agents' consciousness, but my first hunch is that it is likely important for understanding the qualitatively distinct behaviour from other lifeforms and propagation of high level information with natural language. Indeed the very recent 'Anthropocene" phenomena of humans imparting geological and climatic changes to the entire Earth is likely only possible via a collective societal rather than individual awareness of the environment.

As you say, these are evidently complex questions with many interdependent issues. Thank you again for making me think about these interesting issues since we wrote about it!

Best,

Jesse

Jesse, thanks for your response, and I'm sorry I didn't see it a few days ago.

First, going back to look at your essay again, I was struck by the first paragraph. My essay makes a similar point, with the opposite emphasis - that is, though the principles and predictive precision of physics are unmatched, we have no clarity at all as to why physics works the way it does; in fact this question hardly seems approachable. In biology, while principles are not exact or highly predictive, there's a very clear understanding of why things happen the way they do, all the way down to the molecular level.

So we have two complementary descriptions of the "great divergence." I emphasize the way things are understood in biology, because the goal of my essay is to show that in principle it should be possible to understand physics, and also the emergence of the human mind, at a similar depth.

I also noted the question you mention in passing, in your essay - "to what extent do these emergent structures have the same reality as their building blocks?" Thankfully there are a number of essays here, particularly the one by George Ellis, that give a clear answer. Without doubting that everything in the world obeys the principles of physics, evidently other kinds of principles are equally important at higher levels, and don't just reflect our need for simplified descriptions. I'm sure you agree, since you note above the importance of qualitative features that emerge in phase transitions, even in physics. I like the way you put it - that there are "different ways of processing information" at different levels, that enable different levels of response.

As to natural language, I fully agree that "natural language may have the same informational importance for human intelligence as genetics has for life." I would say that language was certainly necessary for the emergence of reflective thought in any form, and was definitely the key factor in bringing about "qualitatively distinct behavior" in our early human ancestors.

On the other hand, the RNA code very likely evolved sometime after self-replicating proto-organisms had reached a high level of evolved complexity, though so little is known about how all this happened. Similarly, spoken language must have evolved when proto-humans were already operating in a new dimension of interpersonal connectedness. Though the emergence of language is also still hard to understand, it's recapitulated to some extent by each new one-year-old. The book by Reddy (in my essay's references) gives a good account of the unique kind of pre-verbal contact between kids and moms out of which language emerges.

Anyway, thanks again for your efforts in pulling together so many different viewpoints on the evolution of meaningful information. Your essay certainly deserves a much higher rating!

Conrad

Hi Sonali, I'm glad to hear from you.

You bring up some key aspects of language. The one that's central to my essay is just its ability to get itself passed on from one brain to another, constructing the channel through which eventually tremendous amounts of information began to flow. I'd be happy to respond to your thoughts in that thread.

Something I find very interesting to consider is that for nearly all of human evolution, until about 2,500 years ago, all the information "downloaded and encoded in language" could only be passed on orally, in real-time face-to-face interaction. Even after written records began to be made, it was a long time before writing began to play a major role in preserving and transmitting culture, as was happening in Greece when philosophy and science began - certainly a "crucial phase transition," from our standpoint today. And now we're going through a similar transition, with emerging electronic media. If you're interested, I wrote about this in an earlier FQXi essay.

Thanks again - Conrad

Hi Jesse and Sonali,

An extremely well written essay. I enjoyed it a lot. I agree that information is the necessary link to answer a lot of these fundamental questions, and that information is physical. I would suggest reading "Information as a Physical Quantity" by Neal Anderson. I think you might enjoy that paper.

I have not quite wrapped my head around (or agree) with top down causation yet but I see it is very popular, and exploring it further will be a major takeaway from this contest. I wonder if the consciousness box in Fig.1, should have 'lower intelligence' written within in. I am not quite sure we can any consciousness without some amount of intelligence accompanying. However consciousness as form of information phase transition is something I concur with and discuss in detail with the associated math in my own submission "Intention is Physical".

"What are the theory-independent observable phenomena and informational links behind the origin of life and intelligence that a unifying framework must contain?"

I suggest some thermodynamic constraints, inspired by derivations based on the Landauer Principle to explain emergence of both learning and intelligence, as well goal directed agency in agents modeled as Markov finite state machines. Have a look if can.

Cheers and good luck.

Natesh

PS: I rated your essay, deservedly high because I think this is top-notch work. And I also got introduced to Goldenfeld and Woese's work from your references. Thanks for that.

Thank you for your kind comments and pointing out the interesting mapping between our and your interesting essay. What you call 'extrinsic intelligence' motivated by social systems is certainly something we were thinking about during the writing process, though we did not discuss it extensively beyond referring to humanity influencing the natural environment. Viewing collective systems (of intelligent agents) and its structures as having its own intelligence is certainly interesting for us to think about further.

Best,

Jesse

Thanks Alfredo for your kind remarks. As you say, this essay was our first survey of what phenomena an 'explanatory theory' must be able to derive, tackling the question holistically from a natural science stance. We certainly consider developing our ideas further in the future, where we can profit from your ideas.

Best,

Jesse

Thank you William for your interest in reading our essay. We certainly are in agreement in thinking there's something more to information in addressing the question at hand, though our approaches differed. Of course, we argued that information must ultimately obey the laws of physics in contrast to what you propose in your intriguing 'information dimension' idea. I suppose one might argue the fact our human imagination has the ability to invent new hypothetical situations or laws of physics that may or may not be realised in the universe as some loose way of arguing some abstract/emergent structure encodes these ideas. Call it our imagination - facilitated by the richness of information we can hold in our natural language - certainly helps with our agency. You present interesting ideas for me to ponder over so thanks again!

Best,

Jesse

Hi Natesh, Thank you for your very kind comments. Goldenfeld and Woese is a fine read and we thank you for your reference. Having a quick look at it, it certainly looks consistent with our argument. Yes I came across your extremely well-written essay some weeks ago on the minimal dissipation hypothesis (but have yet to digest the details!) for manifesting learning like phenomena and enjoyed your engineering perspective.

From my particle physics background, the use of 'top-down' confused me at first (as it means underlying microscopic theory in my field) whereas in this context it is quite the opposite. The ideas of top-down causation certainly appear in some of the literature we surveyed, but my understanding is that it is a feedback mechanism of the macroscopic structures imposed on the microscopic, when the reductionist would usually study the inverse. I would personally have to read and think about it more to appreciate it, but the approach is usually very absent in particle physics so I was quite intrigued.

I'm glad you agree with our stance that consciousness is a distinct phase transition. While we do not develop this idea very deeply or concretely given the constrained scope, it does not seem far-fetched. And yes we thought quite a bit about how we wanted to distinguish consciousness from 'lower intelligence'. We used the Legg-Hutter definition of intelligence, which seems somewhat independent to perhaps the integrated information theory of consciousness, so we settled for now on them being separate concepts. One might imagine a somewhat sophisticated AI on our phone, but at least intuitively it doesn't seem conscious. I think this is far from unambiguous though.

And thanks for your suggestion to that question - we'll certainly think about it!

Best,

Jesse

Jesse and Sonali,

Thank you, Jesse, for your kind comments regarding my essay. It is a special treat when someone reads your work and comments rather than rate w/o reading.

My thoughts on your essay is a well-thought-out process analysis with roles of information, evolution, natural law, and humans. Some notable thoughts include "Life begins as a phase transition when information gains top-down causal efficacy over the matter that instantiates it." Matter giving instance to life and its cognizant causes has meaningful fluency.

Somehow I think other sciences are left out when you say, "One speculates that we are witnessing the start of a profound informational unification in the natural sciences. Certainly biology and quantum biology involve agents in the process, and consider the blossoming role of quantum biology, the importance of quantum coherence in the high efficiency of photosynthesis and the migration of the European Robin. New discoveries seem to feature situations where even environmental noise fails to cause decoherence in some processes like photosynthesis, " Neural processes typically arise on time scales of order 100 ms and there is consensus that quantum effects decohere too quickly for any relevance" Is this true regarding the human brain, utilizing a type 0 civilization technology?

Jim Hoover

Dear Jesse and Sonali,

Very interesting and ambitious essay --- and quite "concentrated" too, as you seem to bring forth a new idea every few lines! I agree with you that information is a key concept that must be better understood if we hope to come up with a complete theory of the Universe. By the way, I really like the way you define the two "hallmarks" of information, "1) substrate independence --- we regard information without referring to its medium of instantiation; 2) interoperability --- we move information across media and its properties are unchanged." It is by reasoning along similar lines that I have come to the conclusion that deep down, everything can be understood in terms of abstract structures --- even more than that, EVERYTHING is an abstract structure! To Lorraine Ford's objections above in your essays' thread, I would say that indeed, information is physical, but to be physical is to be observed by a conscious observer, and consciousness, in the end, is nothing but an idea --- an abstract structure.

One thing is for sure: since information can be understood in terms of entropy and thermodynamics, it turns out that thermodynamics is as central as quantum mechanics and general relativity to the big, fundamental questions of existence! I will reread your essay and ponder these issues further. Meanwhile, I've bumped you higher in the ratings so that your essay gets more well-deserved exposure!

Good luck in the contest,

Marc

Jesse and Sonali,

As time grows short, I have a practice of returning to essays I have read to determine if I have rated them yet. I discovered that I hadn't rated your very well-done essay and rated it today.

Hope you enjoyed the interchange of ideas as much as I have.

Jim Hoover

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

Dear both,

I really enjoyed your essay. It was recommended to us by Willy K.

I agree with you as the conclusion in our essay seem to align with your proposal and moreover you seem to further extend our conclusions by proposing information as the underlying concept which can link language and consciousness.

I would like to ask you if you also see mathematics as part of natural language or it may be interpreted as another phase transition. Or if this is not the case where is mathematics place in your discussion?

Once, again brilliant essay.

Kind Regards,

Yafet