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

    Dear Simon,

    I do find your essay particularly volcanic -- full of stimulating ideas combined in original ways. I also think it would benefit, having more space and time, from a more patient and detailed description of the different types of memory-related features and associated self-reference skills (the exact intended nature of this association is not completely clear to me) that originate at the different layers you mention, in particular at the lowest ones, which I like to imagine of pure computational nature.

    Early in your text you claim that (1) it is easy to describe everything, and (2) much harder to describe one thing. This remark immediately rang a bell in my mind: according to Juergen Schmidhuber, if the universe is computable then it is easier to compute all universes than just one. Here is the reference, in case you find it useful for future versions of your essay:

    https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9904050

    Now a possibly pedantic point. Is it not the case that even the first derivative requires memory, or, more precisely, the ability to look both at f(t) and a bit ahead, at f(t dt), for then taking the limit dt->0? Is this not exactly the same 'skill' required for carrying out the second derivative, and the third (jerk)? Why then do you bring on stage the memory feature only with the third derivative? (This is a separate issue than wondering whether in Nature most or all phenomena are adequately described by just first and second derivative.)

    The importance of temporal memory in human perception, even on the shortest (physiological) temporal scales, is quite clear (e.g. in listening to music), and it nicely combines with a similar form of spatial memory, for visual perception: we cannot make sense of a scene in the envoronment if we cannot absorb finite time and space segments of it. (Wasn't there another story by Borges about a man who suffered from some form of memoryless perception?)

    Thank you and congratulations for the originality of your ideas.

    Tommaso

    http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2824.

      Dear Conrad --

      Thank you for this very fun account.

      You get lots of good things by thinking in this very fundamental fashion. It's easy to be misled into thinking that the functions we happen to observe right now are the full suite of all possible functions that we could observe. We can also be confused about what function the mechanism we observe is actually doing: we are still trying to figure out what consciousness is "for", but a simpler example is the role of reproduction in evolutionary arguments. "Making a copy of yourself" is one way to get evolution rolling, but far from the only one.

      Asking what's absolutely necessary to get X, in other words, can help us conjecture alternate forms of X. It's a cognitive heuristic that's something I see my colleagues in origin of life doing. Interestingly, I don't see social scientists doing it as much...

      Yours,

      Simon

      Dear Tommaso --

      Thank you for your kind remarks. You're right, of course, that even the first derivative has a notion of memory in it. It is also, of course, very limited memory. Third order is not much better! The real question is how we go about going beyond the very tight constraints of memory that fundamental physics limits us to; getting to jerk just means that we've broken that constraint.

      I like your mention of music. Last Summer I spent a week reading Charles Sanders Pierce in a seminar at St John's, and he has a lovely account of how what appear to be "mental events" are actually complexes of sensations. He uses music as an example (as well as the sensation of touch, when we run our finger over felt). I hadn't remembered that reading until just now, because of your music example, but it was likely Pierce that started me down this road. The essay is "Questions concerning certain faculties claimed for man", http://www.jstor.org/stable/25665643

      Yours,

      Simon

      Dear Inés --

      You make a number of points. Here are some thoughts:

      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.

      That's a nice point, and shows the ambiguity of the word "memory"; it's related to the problem of deriving the second law of thermodynamics. For a reversible system, I can reconstruct the initial conditions from the final (or, indeed, a large number of hypersurfaces including time-like, as well as space-like, ones). So there's a sense that nothing is forgotten or lost.

      But that's not the kind of memory that can be causally relevant. While it's true that what happens at t=10 "remembers" what happens at t=0, it's also the case that t=10-epsilon is enough to define what happens at t=10. Conditioning on local conditions, the system "forgets" the past. It's a regular grammar (in the language of computer science).

      What you need to get interesting things going is memory that spreads out: where what happens now is not entirely dictated by what happened an epsilon moment just before.

      It's interesting that my responses are often phrased in terms of causation (really, conditional independence here). It may be interesting to consider this in the context of the causal arguments that Larissa Albantakis makes in her essay, or that are coming up in discussions of phenomenal experience.

      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.

      I agree. Social feedback doesn't require memory in the subject herself. I don't have to remember how I behave in order for my own behavior to affect me (indeed, that's the role of a teacher, mentor, coach--to bring things to the subject's awareness that already matter to her). In many cases, the larger society can be more "aware" of us, in the sense of sensitivity and memory to our behavior, than we ourselves.

      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 would say that life is a naturally "intentional" process; in a separate sense, so is a society, or a cultural practice. I can certainly enumerate for different systems; famously, and as Dan Dennett pointed out to us, we can get intentionality, or the illusion of it, from evolution. But not all intentional systems are evolutionary in nature. (It's certainly the case that all of them are rooted in life, and life had an evolutionary origin, but this doesn't explain the intentional nature of derivative systems.)

      Once we recognize the diversity of intentional behavior, we want to ask what's necessary for these systems to get rolling--and my claim is that memory and (further) self-reference is what we need. We don't get the intentional cultural artifact without new forms of information processing and (I'd argue) the transition requires the construction of new methods of memory and self-reflection.

      Yours,

      Simon

      Hello Joe --

      I'm really glad you enjoyed the essay; thank you.

      Physicists like renormalization when theories are (ahem) renormalizable--meaning that there's decoupling, or simplification, in the IR (or, in the case of asymptotic freedom, UV). Here I don't think we need anything like that. It's OK to have a rough and jumbly effective theory that works only partially and can occasionally collapse or blow up.

      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?

      Both; we have plenty of effective theories that work at different scales and domains. And, indeed, I'd agree: we are sensitive to causal properties that do not appear at the most fundamental level of description. At one and the same time, X has causal power, and X does not (indeed, can not) appear at the microscopic level. Like (for example) entropy, or enthalpy, something that tells you which way the reaction is going to go without being related to any basic property.

      By the way, I think people get confused about this. People hear that the fundamental laws of physics are deterministic (for example), and they worry about free will. So then they say, OK, I have to get rid of determinism at the fundamental level, and we get these crazy arguments about quantum mechanics and free will which I think are both wrong ("quantum" randomness is not special, and the wavefunction evolves deterministically), but more importantly really just missing the point. We don't need to bake X into the microphysics to get X at the macrolevel. (I think you agree with all this.)

      Yours,

      Simon

      Thanks, Simon... I'm glad you're having fun. I'm still pondering memory and coarse-graining, but you give me nice openings here to promote my essay, which unfortunately seems to need it!

      >> We can also be confused about what function the mechanism we observe is actually doing: we are still trying to figure out what consciousness is "for"...

      Very true, since not only human consciousness but language, self-aware reasoning, opposable thumbs, are all so obviously adaptive for so many things. But I argue that everything specifically human is rooted in a process that has only the "purpose" of keeping itself going. Likewise with everything physical, and everything biological - each based on a unique recursive technology.

      >> a simpler example is the role of reproduction in evolutionary arguments. "Making a copy of yourself" is one way to get evolution rolling, but far from the only one.

      It's the way biological evolution got itself rolling... which is not to take sides in the argument about whether metabolism or replication "came first." A lot of things were needed to get this train rolling... but reproduction is the key, the process that keeps on making itself possible, over and over. Since you work in social sciences, though, you're in an evolutionary jungle, with all kinds of self-sustaining processes at the level of individual minds, personal relationships and social relations, operating in every communications medium. If only this were as simple as self-replicating!

      >> Asking what's absolutely necessary to get X, in other words, can help us conjecture alternate forms of X. It's a cognitive heuristic that's something I see my colleagues in origin of life doing. Interestingly, I don't see social scientists doing it as much...

      Yes, this is important. Both trying to see what's needed for X, and thinking about how X might have been different, help with the most difficult intellectual task there is, i.e. not taking X for granted. The origin-of-life folks have it easy, in a way, because we don't take life so much for granted. They face a question that's at least clearly defined. The "origin gaps" with physics and human consciousness are much harder to approach, because it's so difficult not to take for granted (i.e. conceptualize) what goes on in the physical world, or in our own minds.

      Incidentally, speaking of fun, I got started on your "Major Transitions" paper. And thanks for the reference to "Renormalisation Group and Effective Field Theories".

      Conrad

      Dear Simon,

      this is a very clearly argued essay, well-reasoned and well-written, and full of original ideas and thoughts. I hope it will do well in the contest!

      One point of criticism I might note is that many of the ideas deserve a more in-depth, formal treatment. I don't believe you actually commit this error, but Gödelian incompleteness is all too often evoked in vague, hand-wavy arguments about how 'we can't know everything about everything', or some other such insight that might sound deep at 2 am in a college dorm. So, while it's clear that, contrary to those making such arguments, you actually know your stuff, I would've enjoyed a little more in-depth treatment of your argumentation there (although I realize that this might be difficult, given the length constraints on the essays here).

      Another issue that one might raise is the question of vagueness: your description of how it's impossible to draw up a list of 'meaningful' books from Borges' library was both entertaining and insightful, but one way out of the bind it poses might be simply to posit that the notion of 'meaningfulness' isn't well-defined. Certainly, there are books where reasonable people might disagree on whether they're meaningful---one just has to take a look at the issues raging over postmodern or poststructural literature some years back. So it might just be that the 'shape' traced out by touching each of the meaningful books in the library simply doesn't exist, at least not in an objective way.

      Nevertheless, I think your core intuition is on the right track. One interesting visualization of the ideas you discuss regarding the information content of 'everything' as opposed to some specific thing is that if one were to draw up a catalog of the books contained in the library, each book's entry would, on average, be as long as the book itself, while the whole library can be succinctly specified as 'every book of length n'. If I understand you correctly, your point can then be translated to the set of all meaningful books likewise not admitting any description shorter than the text contained within all of those books---i.e. 'meaningfulness' is irreducible, or incompressible, in this sense.

      A possible outline of an argument connecting this to issues of incompleteness then might go as follows: every data set incompressible in the above way is, essentially, random; but the digits of a random sequence, beyond some certain index n, correspond to undecidable propositions of a given formal system (Chaitin's incompleteness theorem). Hence, no finite axiomatic system exists that could derive more than some finite approximation of the set of 'meaningful books'. (Or something like that---I think you'll get the gist.)

      So, I think that there are indeed true gaps in our understanding of the world ('true' as opposed to apparent gaps that merely exist due to our particular ignorance on some matters of fact). This is not to imply that there are some true ontological gaps within the world, like the gap between the mental and the physical a dualist postulates; but given the fact that we are finite reasoners operating with finite data, it's unavoidable that it must seem to us this way.

      Anyway, thank you again for an interesting contribution to the debate!

      Cheers,

      Jochen

        Dear Simon,

        Intentional Goal Oriented Life as you indicate is dependent on a certain complexity.

        The question I would like to ask you is "Is this form of complexity related to a certain "rythm" of time ?" what I mean is that indeed compared to our "velocity" of life (80 years) the velocity of for instance a whole planet seems to be inert (our own life seems to be a jerk). But it is not as you are also indicating... The whole universe is moving and changing it seems from a beginning towards ....what ? When we see an accelerated movie of (jerks) climate on our earth we become aware of a certain "goal" in the movements of so called unliving things...earth and the sun are moving towards something we don't know...Of course you can say that this is not "life" not a conscious way of living. But when you are realising that all of this is just a collective memory in the consciousness of short living emerging creatures like ourselves, there may be an acceptance that the WHOLE REALITY as we are experiencing is the result of Consciousness and the goal is not only procreation and survival for the jerks of life.

        This is just a thought I had after reading your very interesting and absorbing essay that I merited a high score. I hope that after these introducing thoughts I could convince you to find some emergent time to read, leave a comment about my thoughts and give a rating to my essay : The Purpose of Life".

        Thanks a lot and good luck in the contest

        Wilhelmus

          Dear Jochen --

          Thank you for your kind remarks. I certainly agree that it's possible to say silly things about Gödel's Theorem--perhaps you'll agree even that it tends to attract them.

          A few years ago, I spent some time with philosophers associated with the University of New Mexico, an hour's drive (at high-speed across the desert) from Santa Fe. They were constantly employing diagonalization, and importing a huge amount of that mathematics into philosophical arguments. And I spent a lot of time hammering back in a skeptical mode, asking whether the substance of their arguments required this machinery. You can take a look at our reading list here: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~simon/undecidables.txt

          In the end I was convinced that many of these arguments actually did matter, despite their unfamiliarity and their often strange patterns. And that it was often not too hard to adapt them to problems apparently outside their scope.

          For example, consider the vagueness problem you mention. If I get you to attribute probabilities to whether or not a book is meaningful under some sufficiently self-referential criterion of meaningfulness, then I'm already off to the undecidability races. It doesn't matter if I get it wrong from time to time, or if people disagree--as long as there is some content to the notion of "meaning", something above-null and beyond triviality, that I can get at or approximate through debate and discussion, then it's pretty simple to show how all of the disastrous logical machinery still kicks into gear.

          Just because a debate exists, in other words, does not imply that there's nothing there to debate--indeed, one can quite easily make the opposite case: that they very persistence of that debate shows that there is some substance there.

          By the way, I was just visiting some folks at MIRI in Berkeley yesterday, and (again) I found myself playing the skeptic on these kinds of arguments. One of the things I took away from them, Jessica Taylor in particular, was that these arguments can also provide new kinds of upper (or lower) bounds. The MIRI style seems to be to assume oracles and other forms of hypercomputation and to show that even then, one can't get what one wants.

          For that reason, I like your account of incompressibility. Of course, the underlying idea is Komolgorov Complexity, which is itself uncomputable (an earlier draft of the essay had this material, but I was over word-count). So by assuming the existence of a way to compute it, you're actually beginning a MIRI-style argument there. I'm not sure if I want to go the direction you're going. Indeed, there are often meaningful statements that are meaningful just because they can be rephrased or made more succinct--think about how mathematicians find shorter and shorter proofs of a theorem. But perhaps I don't grok it yet.

          Finally: I'd agree that this gap is an epistemic one, not an ontological one. That doesn't make it any less real, of course! And because we're epistemic, knowledge-seeking creatures, it has lots of effects in the material world: like causing me to type too long and almost miss my flight, aaa!

          Yours,

          Simon

          Hi Simon

          I had a gap and my comment. It was erased when went back to see your essay again. Well it was unexpected.

          To your essay: I agree with you that there is a gap that is responsible to the unexpected action that a phenomenon A or "existat A, relate to another phenomenon B or more. i.e. each existent is choosing a concrete subjective action (or non-action) out of the potential actions it has in the relation.

          It seems to me that the "freedom of choice selection mode" for each unique phenomenon (and each phenomenon is unique' from a sub particle to a galaxy) is the sub-strata language of nature. The natural language of Movements, which is elaborated in my 25000 philosophical characters : "we are Together, therefore I am", here, in the contest.

          thanks for your unique approach.

          Yehuda Atai

          Sorry to be a fly in the ointment Simon..

          This essay is well-written, and your point is logically argued given your premises, but I can easily take some of them apart.

          A lecture at the 10th Frontiers of Fundamental Physics conference (in '09 at UWA near Perth) by Mikhail Kovalyov stated that the Physics including the higher-order terms IS what's fundamental, so jerk is in no way a departure from fundamental Physics. He explained that non-linear terms are hard to deal with, and often lead to unsolvable equations, so people make limiting assumptions to have solvable equations, plug in numbers, and test their basic assumptions. It is unwise to equate basic with fundamental, though, especially in a topic like Physics. So I see your doing so as a big logical flaw.

          Some of your statements about transient phenomena still make sense, and I love the discussion about fine-grained vs coarse-graining of phenomena, but it is a critical error to put an elevator jerk on a par with something like what Brian Greene talks about in Elegant Universe, where rips in spacetime are self-healing because catastrophic flop transitions are forbidden. As you say "You'll be reminded of the limits of your knowledge, but the universe will not catch fire" because transient phenomena are not an existential threat. However there are limits to your analogy.

          I've been researching exceptions to your generalizations for more than 30 years, starting with a discovery involving the Mandelbrot Set, and a few phone conversations with Ben Mandelbrot back in the 80s. My essay this year focuses on the Octonions, and addresses some of the issue you raise. But the Mandelbrot Set is a wonderful example of a self-referential action in pure Math. Start with a (complex number) value, multiply it by itself, add back the starting value, then repeat. Each time the point of origin is referenced again, but that is the whole formula in a nutshell. But you end up with something that spawns endless copies of itself in miniature.

          I have been filling in the gaps you describe as a student of many of the origin mysteries you describe, for some time now. I assure you some of the problems you talk about are solved, if you don't want to re-invent the wheel. But I'll sign off for now. It was a good read and a good try, Simon, but you simply get a few things wrong. I'll be happy to take as much time as needed to explain. Mind you; it gets kind of deep probing the ultimate origins, but that's why I attended almost all of the quantum gravity lectures at GR21.

          All the Best,

          Jonathan

            On a lighter note..

            Given the topic of your research; I assume you are aware of the great little book The Hidden Dimension, by Edward T. Hall, but if not it's worth checking out..

            All the Best,

            Jonathan

            Some things show up as mathematical proofs..

            Arved Huebler has an elegant result on page 3 obtained by mathematical induction showing the nature of origins. In my comments for his essay, I talk about parallels with the Chinese philosophy of Wu Ji and Tai Ji. Wu Ji is the primal state beyond and before the grand ultimate of separated forms Tai Ji. Analogies can also be made with non-commutative geometry. But my perspective is very different from yours, since I look for parallels across disciplines rather than staying with the views in one field.

            Regards,

            Jonathan

            In regards to Borges' library...

            I think the example is too simplistic to produce meaningful works, like the Sonnets of Shakespeare or the like. One would need randomness along with some rule that enforces directionality to achieve meaning or congruency in any one room. This does appear to arise naturally in the context of non-associative geometry. I got to talk a bit with Tevian Dray about this at GR21 (in the context of quantum gravity), and that forms the basis of my essay. But I have written several pages of octonion poetry, and here's one of my favorite examples.

            One open, as multiplicity and formless nothingness, finds peace in true relation and knows all as self.

            But the curious thing is that when one follows the rules of progression dictated by the octonion framework, it is a hierarchy of levels of abstraction. In this way; each possible outcome is a span from most abstract to most specific conceptually. So this notion shows more promise, in being able to crank out meaningful works, than the schema of Borges.

            However; it would seem the analogy with Borges holds at a level closer to the origin. There is evidence that human language is a paring down of the glossolalia metalanguage of young children, such that the tonal elements of a specific language of one's family or nation of origin - instead of the prior notion that syntax is hard wired. So at that hierarchical level, the example might make more sense. I look forward to seeing your response.

            All the Best,

            Jonathan

            Dear Jonathan --

            The difficulty with higher-derivative theories is not that they lead to "unsolvable" equations that then must be approximated, but rather that they contain negative energy states, violate probability conservation, and generally lead to non-physical results. One needs to re-interpret them as effective theories for something else in order to handle these problems. It's important to distinguish higher-order (e.g., polynomial functions of fields and their derivatives) with higher-derivative (e.g., a Lagrangian with a fourth derivative) theories. There's a large and complex literature on this (you can dig into the references from the papers with Alan and Dimitrios, including Jonathan Simon's).

            I don't buy the idea that the Mandelbrot set is the kind of self-reference that matters, though it's a nice suggestion. It is indeed a set whose boundary is defined by the fixed point of a function, so there's a recursive feel to it. But not all fixed point questions trigger Gödelian concerns. I can find the Nash equilibrium of a finite game (for example) and it's usually not the most mindblowing thing of all time; indeed, finding the Nash Equilibrium of an arbitrary game is somewhere between P and NP-complete.

            I'll have to take a look at Edward Hall's book, and your "octonions" essay, to get a better sense of the things you're after.

            Yours,

            Simon

            Quite impressive, Simon.

            You've taken us on somewhat of a metaphorical journey into ontological meaning.

            "the universe runs in assembly code, the coarse-grained version runs in LISP, and its from that the world of aim and intention grows." I have used FORTRAN, an older language but not LISP, a perfect language to simulate and characterize life, thus used for AI robotics and function humans perform. Assembly Language, ones and zeros basic.

            Math, physics and learning gaps and the eloquent leaps of vivid comparisons: non-life to life, chemical reaction to mind, one thing to everything.

            I think that you wax eloquent with vivid comparisons to supercharge your argument.

            Hope you get a chance to comment on my essay.

            Jim Hoover

              Thanks for the thoughtful reply Simon..

              I think you'll appreciate Hall's book on proxemics, and perhaps your views will grow on me, but I feel that your essay reveals a blind spot to me, which your comments above acknowledge but do not deal with entirely. I'll return to this thread later, and I'll be open to further discussion even when things wrap up.

              I've still got a lot of essays to digest!

              All the Best,

              Jonathan

              Dear Simon DeDeo,

              Thank you for your delightful essay. It was a real pleasure to read and I agree that the counterintuitive nature of specifying scale is very real indeed. In another large-scale example, Hubble's Classification scheme of spiral galaxies was at first deemed too simple because of its simplicity, but it has turned out to stand the test of time precisely because of that, and is still in use today. I also enjoyed your intriguing conclusion that there may be more stages/levels (accelerations) to come in our quest for understanding intelligence and ultimately us.

              I have in the meantime rated your essay and wish you good luck in the contest.

              Regards,

              Robert