An 11 minute video that should be well worth your time.
As modern humans we experience a different world and experience than anyone who has ever come before us. This is because we've inverted the dynamics of how our lives unfold. We live on a planet defined by local stability, but global instability. The hunter-gatherers that came before us lived in a world that was defined by local instability, but global stability, says political scientist Dr. Brian Klaas.
As hunter-gatherers, their day-to-day lives in their local environment was unpredictable. Now we have flipped that world. We experience local stability, but global instability. We have extreme regularity in our daily lives. We can order products online and expect exactly when they're going to arrive. We can go to Starbucks anywhere in the world and it's going to taste roughly the same.
But our world is changing faster than it ever has before. Consequentially, when things do go wrong, the ripple effects are much more profound and much more immediate. This is where that sort of aspect of global instability becomes very dangerous.
'eh?
NOTE: A recent post-Klaas read that started me down my current exploratory path.
It eventually led me here today.
With several intermediary stops along the way (more on those in a bit). Paul Davies in particular is knocking me out at the moment. e.g.,
Re that last slide: "...from the informational architecture in their heads..."
Yikes. Nita Farahany, anyone?
CITE FROM THE EPILOG...
…In this book I have charted a burgeoning new area of science. As I write, scarcely a day passes without the publication of another paper or the announcement of a new experimental result having a direct impact on the physics of information and its role in the story of life. This is a field in its infancy and many questions remain unanswered. If there are new physical laws at work – informational laws, perhaps involving state dependence and top-down causation – how do we mesh them with the known laws of physics? And would these new laws be deterministic in form or contain an element of chance, like quantum mechanics? Indeed, does quantum mechanics come into them? Does it in fact play an integral role in life? In addition to these imponderables lies the question of origins. How do life’s informational patterns come into existence in the first place? The appearance of anything new in the universe is always an amalgam of laws and initial conditions. We simply don’t know the conditions necessary for biological information to emerge initially, or, once left to get going, how strong a role natural selection plays versus the operation of informational laws or other organizational principles that may be at work in complex systems. All this has to be worked out.
There will be those who object to dignifying the informational principles I have been elucidating with the word ‘law’ in any deep sense. While most scientists are happy to treat information patterns as things in their own right for practical purposes, reductionists insist that this is merely a methodological convenience and that, in principle, all such ‘things’ can be reduced to fundamental particles and the laws of physics – and hence defined out of existence. They don’t ‘really exist’, we are warned, except in our own imaginings. While reductionists may concede that certain rules ‘emerge’ in complex systems, they assert that these rules do not enjoy the fundamental status of the laws of physics that underlie all systems. The reductionist argument is undeniably powerful, but it rests on a major assumption about the nature of physical law. The way the laws of physics are currently conceived leads to a stratification of physical systems with the laws of physics at the bottom conceptual level and emergent laws stacked above them. There is no coupling between levels. When it comes to living systems, this stratification is a poor fit because, in biology, there often is coupling between levels, between processes on many scales of size and complexity: causation can be both bottom-up (from genes to organisms) and top-down (from organisms to genes). To bring life within the scope of physical law – and to provide a sound basis for the reality of information as a fundamental entity in its own right – requires a radical reappraisal of the nature of physical law, as I am arguing.
It would be wrong to think that these arcane deliberations are important only to a handful of scientists, philosophers and mathematicians. They have sweeping implications not just for explaining life but for the nature of human existence and our place in the universe. Before Darwin, it was widely believed that God created life. Today, most people accept it had a naturalistic origin. While it is true that scientists lack a full explanation for how life emerged from non-life, invoking a one-off miracle is to fall into the god-of-the-gaps trap. It would imply a type of cosmic magician who sporadically intervenes, moving molecules around from time to time but mostly leaving them to obey fixed laws. Yet within the broad scope of the term ‘naturalistic’ lie very different philosophical (even theological) implications. Two contrasting views of life’s origin are the statistical fluke hypothesis championed by Jacques Monod and the cosmic imperative of Christian de Duve. Monod appealed to the flukiness of life to bolster his nihilistic philosophy: ‘The ancient covenant is in pieces,’ he wrote gloomily. ‘[Man’s] destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose . . . The universe was not pregnant with life, nor the biosphere with man.’12 In responding to Monod’s negative reflections, de Duve wrote, ‘You are wrong. They were,’13 and proceeded to develop his view of what he called ‘a meaningful universe’. Boiled down to basics, the issue is this. Is life built into the laws of physics? Do those laws magically embed the designs of organisms-to-be? There is no evidence whatever that the known laws of physics are rigged in favour of life; they are ‘life-blind’. But what about new state-dependent informational laws of the sort I am conjecturing here? My hunch is that they would not be so specific as to foreshadow biology as such, but they might favour a broader class of complex information-managing systems of which life as we know it would be a striking representative. It’s an uplifting thought that the laws of the universe might be intrinsically bio-friendly in this general manner.
These speculative notions are very far from a miracle-working deity who conjures life into being from dust. But if the emergence of life, and perhaps mind, are etched into the underlying lawfulness of nature, it would bestow upon our existence as living, thinking beings a type of cosmic-level meaning.
It would be a universe in which we can truly feel at home.
Davies, Paul. The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Solving the Mystery of Life (pp. 215-217). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.
More to come...
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