Essay Abstract

The rich experiences of an intentional, goal-oriented life emerge, in an unpredictable fashion, from the basic laws of physics. Here I argue that this unpredictability is no mirage: there are true gaps between life and non-life, mind and mindlessness, and even between functional societies and groups of Hobbesian individuals. These gaps, I suggest, emerge from the mathematics of self-reference, and the logical barriers to prediction that self-referring systems present. Still, a mathematical truth does not imply a physical one: the universe need not have made self-reference possible. It did, and the question then is how. In the second half of this essay, I show how a basic move in physics, known as renormalization, transforms the ``forgetful'' second-order equations of fundamental physics into a rich, self-referential world that makes possible the major transitions we care so much about. While the universe runs in assembly code, the coarse-grained version runs in LISP, and it is from that the world of aim and intention grows.

Author Bio

Simon DeDeo is external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, and assistant professor in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, where he runs the Laboratory for Social Minds. http://santafe.edu/~simon

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Dear Simon,

One of my favorite citations from your essay is this:

"Yet no matter how well we do once meaning-making beings are taken as a given, we stumble when we are asked to predict their very being at all. It is this gap, the inability to leap from one side to the other, that begs explanation, and I refer to it as the Origin Gap because it is familiar to those working in the "origin" fields: the origin of society, the origin of consciousness and meaning, the origin of life. It is the gap that gives those fields a very different flavor from their parallels in the sciences of their mature subjects. Origin of society looks very different from social science and anthropology; origin of consciousness looks very different from psychology; origin of life looks very different from biology."

I fully share your focus on the problem of great origins. However, my son Lev points my attention that your list of those, " the origin of society, the origin of consciousness and meaning, the origin of life" misses the most fundamental: the origin of the laws of nature. All in all, I like your essay and give you a high score.

Good luck at the contest,

Alexey Burov.

PS

I just answered you on my page. Your rating of our essay is important for us.

Simon,

You've obviously got a highly inventive mind. You might be interested in my hypothesis of how those transitions come about. In any case, I would be interested in your feedback.

Dear Stefan --

Let's persist with the jerk example, and not just because it's a great name, but because I think we share a lot of the same intuitions and I think the example can be of use to your arguments as well.

Of course, we sense jerk, it plays a causal role in our life, and that's not "at odds" with Newton. But we do have to explain how it is possible that jerk can play that role when it is forbidden from doing so in the fundamental theory. (You can always calculate x-triple-dot, of course, but it can never play a causal role there.)

So, how does this fit with your arguments? One angle that people take is that macroscopic phenomena exist, but are fundamentally epiphenomena: they have no causal powers. These people would say that the only true causal powers are found through mechanistic investigations of finer and finer scales. Scientists can spent a lot of time explaining away in this fashion, reducing things to microscopic causes.

There's another method that's Darwin's great contribution to intellectual life: explaining away causes through evolutionary arguments. "Hard seeds causing birds to have robust beaks" is explained away through an evolutionary dynamics (rather than a teleology or divine aim or intention). The causal relation we see there is not really real, it can be explained away as an illusion.

So the upshot of those two procedures, Newton and Darwin, is that if I see a cause at some scale X, it should eventually (1) be cashed out through causes at lower levels, or (2) explained away as ersatz and "as if" the way that evolution explains away teleology.

But jerk provides a clear counterexample to both. Evolution can explain why I have the ability to sense jerk, but it can't explain the particular instance of a sensation (at the risk of "swampman" counterarguments). At the same time, the experience of jerk can't be cashed out in terms of microscopic forces, because we know that that quantity can't play a causal role at the microscopic level.

Now (having just opened your essay), I know you have similar feelings about the reality of the macrolevel! You would agree that we shouldn't just say hey, (e.g.) irreversibility is a feature of an effective theory but not really real.

And I'd suggest that jerk gives you something fun to help drive intuitions for your interlocutors as well, simply because it's so obviously an event, forbidden from being baked in at the fundamental level, with causal consequences. If you think the higher-level property of being jerk-sensitive is not really real, tell me how I can find jerk as a causal property at the lower level.

Yours,

Simon

Thanks :-) seems I have to rethink jerk. Not today, it's late here in Europe. I see your reply to my jerk-post but I don't see my post anymore - is it gone? Cheers, Stefan

Dear Simon DeDeo,

If you go to my essay you will find further discussion on the role of the Godel-Turing undecidable theorems. This is presented though mostly at the end.

Higher derivatives do play a role in physics. Brehmsstralung emission of photons involves 3 derivatives, and the continuity condition in general relativity is at order 3.

Over all you essay is interesting.

Cheers,

LC

Since I still had a copy of my original posting, and since your nice answer makes so much more sense together with my question, I repost it below. Cheers, Stefan

===

Dear Simon,

your essay flows nicely and you have a point! Coarse-graining creates memory-terms and the like which are absent from microscopic theories but emerge in effective theories. I think you're putting your finger on an aspect resonating in a couple of essays (maybe also in mine) but which is not spelled out in this way. You overdo the jerk-example, in my opinion, but, well, when do you get the occasion to write jerk so many times... Honestly, I don't think being able to sense jerk is at odds with Newton's laws not being expressed in terms of jerk. You can calculate the jerk for any solution of Newtons equation. Why should our senses be confined to only observing the key ingredients of our microscopic theories? Anyway, thumbs up for "it just means that, occasionally, the coarse-grained description will fail. The fine-grained details will emerge with a vengeance, ruining the predictive power of the theory. You'll be reminded of the limits of your knowledge, but the universe will not catch fire."

Good luck, Stefan

I think you're right. Maybe jerk is a better example than I thought. Do you know how to derive an effective theory involving jerk from a Newtonian system? Cheers, Stefan

Nice essay Dear Prof DeDeo,

Your ideas and thinking are excellent for eg...

'1. Today, it's considered a reasonable research goal to reduce even that story, of the wrinkles in spacetime that seeded Andromeda, to the first principles of basic physics: Hawking radiation at a horizon, or the quantum statistics of a multiverse. etc...'

A Good idea, I fully agree with you, But I hope you will consider an another type of Universe Model also................................. I want you to ask you to please have a look at my essay, where ...............reproduction of Galaxies in the Universe is described. Dynamic Universe Model is another mathematical model for Universe. Its mathematics show that the movement of masses will be having a purpose or goal, Different Galaxies will be born and die (quench) etc...just have a look at the essay... "Distances, Locations, Ages and Reproduction of Galaxies in our Dynamic Universe" where UGF (Universal Gravitational force) acting on each and every mass, will create a direction and purpose of movement.....

I think intension is inherited from Universe itself to all Biological systems

For your information Dynamic Universe model is totally based on experimental results. Here in Dynamic Universe Model Space is Space and time is time in cosmology level or in any level. In the classical general relativity, space and time are convertible in to each other.

Many papers and books on Dynamic Universe Model were published by the author on unsolved problems of present day Physics, for example 'Absolute Rest frame of reference is not necessary' (1994) , 'Multiple bending of light ray can create many images for one Galaxy: in our dynamic universe', About "SITA" simulations, 'Missing mass in Galaxy is NOT required', "New mathematics tensors without Differential and Integral equations", "Information, Reality and Relics of Cosmic Microwave Background", "Dynamic Universe Model explains the Discrepancies of Very-Long-Baseline Interferometry Observations.", in 2015 'Explaining Formation of Astronomical Jets Using Dynamic Universe Model, 'Explaining Pioneer anomaly', 'Explaining Near luminal velocities in Astronomical jets', 'Observation of super luminal neutrinos', 'Process of quenching in Galaxies due to formation of hole at the center of Galaxy, as its central densemass dries up', "Dynamic Universe Model Predicts the Trajectory of New Horizons Satellite Going to Pluto" etc., are some more papers from the Dynamic Universe model. Four Books also were published. Book1 shows Dynamic Universe Model is singularity free and body to collision free, Book 2, and Book 3 are explanation of equations of Dynamic Universe model. Book 4 deals about prediction and finding of Blue shifted Galaxies in the universe.

With axioms like... No Isotropy; No Homogeneity; No Space-time continuum; Non-uniform density of matter(Universe is lumpy); No singularities; No collisions between bodies; No Blackholes; No warm holes; No Bigbang; No repulsion between distant Galaxies; Non-empty Universe; No imaginary or negative time axis; No imaginary X, Y, Z axes; No differential and Integral Equations mathematically; No General Relativity and Model does not reduce to General Relativity on any condition; No Creation of matter like Bigbang or steady-state models; No many mini Bigbangs; No Missing Mass; No Dark matter; No Dark energy; No Bigbang generated CMB detected; No Multi-verses etc.

Many predictions of Dynamic Universe Model came true, like Blue shifted Galaxies and no dark matter. Dynamic Universe Model gave many results otherwise difficult to explain

Have a look at my essay on Dynamic Universe Model and its blog also where all my books and papers are available for free downloading...

http://vaksdynamicuniversemodel.blogspot.in/

Best wishes to your essay.

For your blessings please................

=snp. gupta

Simon -

An excellent, imaginative and impressively well-written essay, thank you! There aren't many here that compare with it, and I only wish mine were as clear and readable.

Your discussion of the "origin gaps" is very good... though I think there's something a little one-sided about taking the notion of "self-reference" as the key element in the major transitions from fundamental to macroscopic physics, from molecular physics to biology and from the sociality of primates to that of humans.

I can easily see why, from a computational perspective, you focus on memory and self-reference. These are surely important aspects of the naturally emerging technologies through which "systems gain new powers" that lead to new and unpredictable phenomena. But there are others equally important, e.g. anticipation, or communication between systems. So I'm not convinced that self-reference is the key to explaining these "gaps". Likewise it seems to me that the possibility of "coarse-graining" information arises from the emergence of new kinds of systems, not the other way round.

The "self-reference" at the basis of biology, for example, is specifically self-replication, the ability to create new copies that create more copies. Then of course there are many levels of looping self-reference involved in maintaining homeostasis in all the molecular networks in and between cells. Which is all very different from the kind of self-reference we humans discover as kids, as we first learn to talk with other people, and then later gradually being talking with ourselves. And none of these is like the kinds of self-reference we might see in physics. (From your abstract, I was hoping you'd say something illuminating about the self-interaction of particles in their fields, since you mentioned renormalization... but no such luck!)

In my own essay I tried to describe what's special about the "gaps" in our history in terms of emerging technologies that recursively regenerate the conditions for their own success... becoming subject to natural selection when they fail. Each such process is unique, involving its own ways of doing self-reference along with much else. Since you and your colleagues in the Santa Fe research project have been thinking through these issues for a long time, I'd very much appreciate your feedback.

Thanks again for renewing my faith in this contest -

Conrad

    Dear Conrad --

    Thanks for your remarks here. I want to push on your response a little because my goal was to go as far back as possible: to ask what what's required to get us beyond fundamental physics. If we don't push as far back as we can, we're not truly dealing with an origin problem, but just saying interesting things as amateur sociologists, or evolutionary biologists, biochemists, neuroscientists...

    Pushing further back does get you some things that you will want as well. It clears up some technical questions. And it suggests new ways to distinguish derived aspects of life-like behavior from fundamental ones. So for all those reasons it's worth highlighting where we differ in emphasis.

    Let me reply to two things of interest:

    These are surely important aspects of the naturally emerging technologies through which "systems gain new powers" that lead to new and unpredictable phenomena. But there are others equally important, e.g. anticipation, or communication between systems.

    Putting anticipation aside for a moment, and driving back to the fundamental level, our most basic notion of "communication between systems" is correlation. And correlation is insufficient to get what we want. Fundamental physics already has a richly correlated field structure, and there are plenty of interactions in the standard model between the fields. Including self-interaction terms! But you need renormalization to get the memoryful higher-derivative terms. For many reasons, including the instability problems when these are taken are (incorrectly) taken to be fundamental.

    Now when you write "communication between systems", you may have in mind boundaries (spatial or otherwise), and all sorts of other interesting phenomena. I'd certainly agree that these will get you very far. But this is something at a later stage. Lurking behind the ability to create boundaries is the ability to create memories (which might be thought of as having a persistent correlation between environment and "description") and self-reference (the creation of dynamical correlations within that description space).

    As for anticipation, this to me seem to be a memoryful process as well: the need to compare representations of an expected state with a current state.

    Likewise it seems to me that the possibility of "coarse-graining" information arises from the emergence of new kinds of systems, not the other way round.

    It is definitely the case that living systems coarse-grain their environment. The recognition of this fact is one of the biggest insights in the information-theoretic study of living systems; I don't know when it first emerged in the literature, and I'd appreciate references if you know of any going further back (take a look at the papers I refer to in the essay).

    In any case, when we want to push our explanations all the way back to t=0, we face a problem. Life-like behavior (computation, reproduction, etc.) requires memory. But the fundamental equations do not allow for memory. So we're stuck. Nothing gets off the ground. But we can use the coarse-graining arguments to say, well--we don't see it at the microscopic level. But it does appear at the macroscopic level.

    By the way, one alternative that is not in the essay is the possibility that this memory is "baked in" to the initial conditions--that somehow, we get a few random hotspots arranged in such a way as to make a memory system. I haven't thought too deeply about this idea, and it may be possible to make it work in some kind of Darwinian fashion (a very large universe with a vast array of causally-disconnected initial conditions chosen "randomly" to avoid fine-tuning).

    One other remark you make:

    The "self-reference" at the basis of biology, for example, is specifically self-replication, the ability to create new copies that create more copies. ... Which is all very different from the kind of self-reference we humans discover as kids, as we first learn to talk with other people, and then later gradually being talking with ourselves.

    They certainly look different. At the same time, they share something crucial in common. And it's that shared feature, self-reference, that gives their origin problems a similar feel and structure.

    Best wishes from 30,000 feet. I look forward to reading your essay in the coming week.

    Yours,

    Simon

    Your essay has given me a large amount of new raw material to think about - which is what I enjoy most when looking at other people's writings. I probably lack the computer science intuition, but I might try to put up with that, eventually. Here I write down a few questions, in case you have a bit of time:

    1. I understand that memory allows for self-reference to emerge. It is not clear to me, however, that the memory must necessarily belong to the same system that makes the self-reference. Did you mean it that way? As long as something else has some memory of what happened (see point 2 below), and that something else can return the information as feedback, self-reference is possible, is it not?

    2. Ultimately, in a system of particles interacting with each other, some part of the system always has the memory of what happened before, either to that same part of the system, or to some other part of the system, just because of the reversibility of the laws of physics. But that is not what we mean, when we say "this system has memory", because such type of memory is always present. So, what exactly do we mean by "this system has memory"? I am afraid the precise definition of what we understand as "this system" becomes relevant, and perhaps also the code in which memory is stored...

    3. I can imagine the storage of memory without need for coarse-graining, that is, taking place in the most basic, non-dissipative processes. Is this type of memory useless in your picture?

    4. I can see from your discussion that self reference makes predictions impossible, because of Godelian arguments. Characterization of systems with self-reference may also be impossible. How should I connect this to the more specific problem of emergence of intentionality? I can see a general point in the line of "self-referential systems are complicated", and complexity + impredictability leave room for wonderful things to happen. But did you intend to argue in general terms, or did you make a specific argument in the direction of goals, or consciousness?

    Thanks for the great read! inés.

      Hi again Simon,

      Reading your exchange with Stefan has helped me formulate some questions, mostly to see if I'm clear about your thesis and what it implies. I've been sitting with the jerk example for a moment, and I think it's a great example but I'm not exactly sure of what. I think this is a confusion I have concerning the effective field theory paradigm, but I can't tell, from the jerk example, what is the effective theory and what is the 'fundamental' theory.

      I think I understand that the jerk can't play a causal role in physical dynamics because of the symmetries of our fundamental laws, and I think I understand also that our experience of the jerk relies on the capacity of our bodies to remember their past states, compare their past and present internal degrees of freedom and thus compute this third derivative and output a response in the pits of our stomachs or the backs of our necks or wherever we "feel" the jerk.

      So it seems like in one sense you are saying that our experience of the jerk is an emergent property of the fact that our experience is coarse-grained, and we create the jerk through an evolved computation our minds have learned to perform. But is there also another sense in which you are saying that our experience of the jerk is an intuition of a critical phenomenon? When you bring up renormalization it seems like you are suggesting that the jerk's causal impotence is itself an emergent property of the fact that we do Newtonian mechanics away from critical points that so that fluctuations at UV scales can be neglected, or in other words that the effective, low-energy theory is what's keeping the universe from catching on fire. I guess I'm asking is our perception the effective theory or is classical mechanics the effective theory? Aren't they both? And does that mean that our coarse-grained experience of the world somehow captures a glimpse of aspects of nature that are nevertheless causally separated from the low-energy descriptions that must hold in order for biology to emerge in the first place? Perhaps there's something I don't understand about the fundamental physics here, because I admit I'm a mere physical chemist and I only understand high-energy physics to the extent that I recognize the parts of it that are statistical mechanics, so please tell me if I simply misunderstand something basic.

      Again though, this is my favorite entry. As someone who has existed in both the humanities and the sciences, I find the combination of breadth and depth on display here to be stunning. Good luck!

      Joe

        Simon - thanks very much for your high-altitude notes... though between those, and rereading your essay, and the comments by Inés and Joe below, I now have an overwhelming number of interesting thoughts to consider.

        I'll focus here on what's fundamental in physics, and where memory comes in, and how it relates to other kinds of functionality. Since what I appreciate most about the issues you raise is that they're questions about functionality, rather than "what's ultimately real."

        Though we don't think of atoms as fundamental, functionally they are, in many respects. The emergence of atoms gives for the first time a physical memory - in that the variable energy configuration of their electron-shells gives a means of storing and retrieving information. Not coincidentally, these same structures are able to discriminate between photons of different frequencies, and exchange this information with other atoms. It also happens that the e/m field works beautifully not only to convey such information over arbitrary distances, but also to operate locally, linking atomic electron-shells together in several kinds of relatively stable molecular formations, as the basis for chemistry and all higher-level material structure.

        There are various aspects of self-reference here too. Electromagnetic self-interaction plays some role in localizing charge in electrons; and the incredibly complex system of internal nuclear interactions somehow enables an extremely stable concentration of mass-energy and charge in a much more exact locality, around which electrons can form their shells.

        One thing this picture illustrates is the interdependence of many different kinds of functionality. At least at the atomic level, memory and self-reference, discrimination and communication, etc. all go together and require each other.

        This also raises the issue of what it means to be "fundamental", i.e. what it takes to be a basis for something. Your wonderful question about "origin gaps" is about how a new kind of basis comes into existence, redefining the scope of what's possible. Atoms certainly accomplished that: as they "recombined" in the early universe, a new "coarse-grained" view of things began to be meaningful - i.e. our familiar world of dust coalescing into galaxies and stars, visible through a transparent void, where stars explode to scatter heavy nuclei out into space, all that.

        So what about t=0? We suppose there must have been something simpler and more basic than atoms, earlier on... and amazingly, physics gives us a consistent story all the way back to the first nanoseconds, assuming that the complex structure of spacetime and laws of physics hasn't changed.

        On the other hand, none of the informational elements in this system - space and time, energy and momentum, all the other quantum field variables and coupling constants - none of this was meaningfully definable or physically measurable, prior to the emergence of atoms.

        So between t=0 and atoms, a very sophisticated information-technology came into being, that lets our universe define, measure and communicate literally everything about itself. So far as physics goes, this is the ultimate in self-reference. I puzzle over how to tell that story - the functional view of the world's pre-history... as complementary to our current fields-and-particles view.

        I hope you don't mind my focusing on my picture rather than the several that you draw in your essay. I don't mean to be talking past your issues... rather, looking for a common frame of reference for thinking through this incredible series of accidental "origins".

        Thanks again - Conrad

        Simon, I loved your essay -- it has a breadth and sense of wonder unlike any of the entries I have seen so far. I, too, was taken by the jerk example. As a bicyclist, I think about it every time I go down an incline that's getting increasingly steep, which is always more thrilling than a mere inclined plane...and I will surely think differently about such hills from now on.

        One thing I didn't follow, and wish you had expanded upon, is how memory-type features emerge out of coarse-graining. You write, "by averaging together nearby points, it introduces the possibility of inducing physical laws that (in contrast to their forgetful fundamental cousins) do have memory." I don't see this as averaging together nearby points; I see it as creating informational relations across time, which is a function of memory, not of coarse-graining. If I measure the jerk of a car with a pendulum and videotape, that seems only to require writing down and comparing accelerations measured at different times, not averaging out nearby points in the quantum-mechanical description. Is there something I'm missing?

        p.s., I think I sent you my book a while back, but I'm sure it got lost in the mailroom!

          Dear Karl --

          You touch on a really nice question: does anything actually do the coarse-graining? It may seem a little strange to phrase it that way, but I'm not sure. Because (of course) to average itself usually does require memory of some form (I keep a running total of values in some neighbourhood)--so if the averaging is real, it can't precede the emergence of memory. It seems, in other words, that we've just punted the problem further back. (You make a distinction between averaging and creating informational relations, but at the level we're talking here the first is an example of the second.)

          But another way to understand this step is to say well, look, a description exists at the coarse-grained level. Nobody has to be there to actually average things (or, as you say, to construct informational relations). It's enough that this new level of description is possible.

          I'm not thrilled by either approach. To say that "something" intervenes to actually do averaging is to invoke a deus ex machina that saves the day (a little like the story Richard Feynman tells of mixing in yellow paint). But to say that it's solely a matter of description also seems unsatisfying, because at some point the averaging does become real. Living systems really do create coarse-grained representations; we really do create new microstates in a form of downwards causation.

          So in that case, how does the possibility of a description gain causal force? It's fine once things get rolling--once you go beyond locality, one form of memory can lead to another, just as we use our minds to make books. Things get very difficult when you take the origin challenge seriously, and try to go all the way back.

          On that note, I did receive your book. Thank you for mailing it. It had a voyage from mailroom to mailroom but arrived in January, and I have been dipping in on and off over the Winter. I was pleased to read in the preface that the FQXI community had encouraged you to put it together. That was one of the reasons I decided to contribute something myself this year.

          Yours,

          Simon