Life is one-of-a-kind

Life may be defined as an open-ended evolving system. We know one example of life. All known living things on earth are related, and have a common biochemical basis, and a common evolutionary ancestor.

Theorists beginning with Darwin are fond of saying that just three things are required to create evolving systems: (1) reproduction with (2) variations, and (3) selection.  But computer scientists can easily recreate these conditions, and what they find is uninteresting dead ends: whatever quality is defined as ‘fitness’ soon maxes out, and nothing more interesting is created.  In contrast, real life displays a richness and complexity that seems to imply open-ended creativity.

Though we are very interested in general properties of life, we are forced to generalize from a single example. Inevitably, we misinterpret some peculiar properties of nucleic acid-based life as necessary characteristics of life defined broadly. Evolutionary biologists realize that we have a tendency to look at what is, presume that it could not be otherwise, and propose a causal explanation for its inevitability.

It would be eye-opening to have another example of life to study. There are four places this might come from:

1. The discovery of life on another planet. (This is actually no guarantee that it evolved independently. There is a ‘panspermia’ hypothesis, which suggests that hardy bacteria can survive on meteors ejected from one and later seeding another.)
2. How hard have we looked for life on earth that inhabits a parallel ecology, right under our noses? Microscopic life forms that don’t share a common chemical basis with us might have gone undetected.
3. Cell biologists are trying to understand mechanisms of life deeply enough to create life in the test tube, combining synthetic chemicals that will collectively be able to metabolize nutrients and reproduce a copy of itself.
4. The ALife or ‘artificial life’ community of researchers is seeking to create evolutionary rules for simulated ecosystems that live only in computers. This has been a multi-decade process, and all systems we have yet devised quickly saturate at some ‘fitness’ ceiling, and then cease to evolve in interesting, new ways.

Article in New Scientist covers just two of the four possibilities.

The one example of life that we know has a remarkable property that it has evolved four times into new levels of cooperation:

1. Self-reproducing molecules banded together to form mutually-catalyzing ‘hypercycles’
2. Larger collections of molecules formed cells.
3. Cells formed into multi-cellular life with a ‘germ line’ and a ‘soma’.
4. Individuals organize into communities, which behave in some ways like ‘superorganisms’.

Perhaps we are currently in the midst of a fifth grand transition, where entire ecosystems are developing tight, cooperative strategies.

I am not my brain

Mainstream philosophy has adopted the position that the locus of conscious activity that I identify as ‘I’ is in the brain.  It is considered ‘obvious’ from basic facts about physiology and neuroscience.  People discuss in all seriousness whether it would be possible for me to know if I were just a brain in a nutrient bath, with its input neurons being stimulated in real time by a very advanced computer program.  People talk about complete simulations of the brain by computers that may be available in a decade or two, and assume that there is no distinction between living in a brain and living within a well-programmed computer simulation of a brain.

‘The brain analyzes, the brain loves, the brain detects a whiff of pine and is transported to a childhood summer spent at Girl Scout camp in the Poconos, the brain tingles under the caress of a feather.’
— Diane Ackerman, An Alchemy of Mind

On the other side, there are not just religious mystics, but many scientists and non-believers who consider it ‘obvious’ that consciousness is not merely in the brain, but there is something more.

‘The brain is essential for our lives, physiology, health and experience. But the idea that it is the whole story, or even the key to understanding the story, is not a scientific conclusion. It's a prejudice. Consciousness requires the joint operation of the brain, the body and the world...Instead of asking how the brain makes us conscious, we should ask, How does the brain support the kind of involvement with the world in which our consciousness consists? This is what the best neuroscientists do. The brain is not the author of our experience.’
— Gordy Slack, interviewed at Salon.com

This seems to me a weak statement compared to a truly dualistic perspective, in which the soul has a prior claim to existence, and it is the soul that creates body and brain for itself.

Today, I am wondering if there is anything that either side can say to the other that would give them pause.  I don’t think Slack will convince anyone who is not already convinced.

Neuroscientist Michael Persinger is ‘incredibly lucky’, and has electrodes hooked up to a subject’s brain as she experiences a ghost in the room.  The EEG shows an aberrant trace in the left temporal lobe.  Just as he had hypothesized — mystical experiences are caused by irregular brain activity.

...Not so fast, says the skeptic. ‘Maybe there was a ghost in the room and it was just registered in that specific part of the brain. If you accept that “the mind is what the brain does” then any experience whatsoever would have to be “the result of neural activity”. Observing that this is true for ‘ghostly’ experiences does not support the proposition that they don’t exist.’

Two things come to mind that the materialist might say to the non-materialist:

1) Computer simulation are already close to passing the Turing Test, simulating normal human conversation well enough that you would be hard pressed to tell the difference.  As this facility inevitably improves over coming years, it will be harder and harder for you to maintain the position that your humanity is more than mechanical.

2) We all want to believe that something of us survives after death.  This constitutes a powerful motivation to delude ourselves.

Two things that the non-materialists might say to convince the materialist:

1) Quantum mechanics is deeply non-local.  To the extent that the brain is a quantum mechanical object, it cannot be an isolated machine. 

2) There is abundant evidence for telepathy, precognition, and other forms of psychic communication, though these phenomena seem to evade reliable reproduction.  By definition, the brain knows things about which there are no known physical mechanisms by which it could be receiving input.

I’m Alive, I Believe In Everything

Self. Brotherhood. God. Zeus. Communism.
Capitalism. Buddha. Vinyl records.
Baseball. Ink. Trees. Cures for disease.
Saltwater. Literature. Walking. Waking.
Arguments. Decisions. Ambiguity. Absolutes.
Presence. Absence. Positive and Negative.
Empathy. Apathy. Sympathy and entropy.
Verbs are necessary. So are nouns.
Empty skies. Dark vacuums of night.
Visions. Revisions. Innocence.
I've seen All the empty spaces yet to be filled.
I've heard All of the sounds that will collect
at the end of the world.
And the silence that follows.

I’m alive, I believe in everything
I’m alive, I believe in it all.

— Lesley Choyce
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Bearing the chastisement of our wishes

I’m posting this article only because it agrees with my preconceived theories

Our brains appear wired to adopt a belief about our milieu, consecrate it, then bar the door to our consciousness against any competing belief. If a different belief gets past our mental bouncer, the result is conflict, sometimes labeled cognitive dissonance. This process should be familiar to most of us, yet how likely is it to reflect some objective quality of our universe? The transcendent achievements of our brains help to blind us to their concomitant evolved limitations. There appears to be little circuitry in the brain encouraging it to adopt a critical posture towards itself...

Perhaps in questioning the integrity of our thinking, we may take a seat at one of life’s great feasts. If we cultivate within ourselves the capacity to hold two competing beliefs, simultaneously, we may proceed from there to a perhaps unlimited gathering of data and ideas within us, resisting the persistent impulse to clear the room of intruders. The very moment we feel the zing of eureka – that we have figured something out, and we would banish the inconsistent data and perceptions – we may do well to resist this deportation. The process of keeping our minds open – familiar to our tongues but rarely to our hearts – may require an ease with dissonance... 

— read more at ehard’s blog

To sleep, perchance to compose

Mozart claimed to receive musical compositions whole from his inspired source, and to transcribe rather than to compose them.  His manuscripts show little sign of editing or correction.

Berlioz reported that he received the opening movement of his only symphony as a dream, remembered it vividly on waking, and wrote it down afterword just as he had heard it.*

‘Music is the only faculty that is not altered by the dream environment, whereas action, character, visual elements and language may all be modified or distorted in dreams. Music in dreams does not become fragmented, chaotic or incoherent, neither does it decay as rapidly as do the other components of dreams on our awakening...Music in dreams then is the same as music in our waking life...One might say that music never sleeps. ..It is as if it were an autonomous system, indifferent to our consciousness or lack of it.’ 
        — Irving J Massey, quoted by Oliver Sachs

Listen to the 1st movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique

* Another legend about the provenance of the Symphonie Fantastique is less inspiring.

of Theories and Theologies

‘...two aspects of Pythagoras: as religious prophet and as pure mathematician. In both respects he was immeasurably influential, and the two were not so separate as they seem to a modern mind....

‘The changes in meanings of words are often very instructive...I want to speak about the word “theory”. This was originally an Orphic word...“passionate sympathetic contemplation...the spectator is identified with the suffering God, dies in his death, and rises again in his new birth.” For Pythagoras, the “passionate sympathetic contemplation” was intellectual, and issued in mathematical knowledge. In this way, through Pythagoreanism, “theory” gradually acquired its modern meaning; but for all who were inspired by Pythagoras it retained an element of ecstatic revelation. To those who have reluctantly learnt a little mathematics in school this may seem strange; but to those who have experienced the intoxicating delight of sudden understanding that mathematics gives, from time to time, to those who love it, the Pythagorean view will seem completely natural even if untrue...

‘Modern definitions of truth...which are practical rather than contemplative, are inspired by industrialism as opposed to aristocracy.’

—Bertrand Russel, History of Western Philosophy

Many worlds

Scientists who study quantum mechanics agree about how to calculate the predictions for results of experiments, but disagree about what it all means.  This situation arose because QM is not compatible with the intuitive way in which we all regard the physical world.  ‘Something has to give,’ and one physicist may preserve what he thinks is the most important aspects of our relationship to reality, sacrificing others that another physicist holds more dear.

The prescription for calculation says that the world exists as fuzzy probability waves that crystallize into a specific outcome the moment any measurement is made.  The questions on which there is disagreement have to do with what constitutes a measurement, and whether the probability waves are regarded as primary, ‘real’ objects, or whether the measured results are more ‘real’.

One of the most conservative views of what it all means is also one of the most preposterous.  According to the Many Worlds Interpretation, every time an ambiguity is resolved, the world splits going forward into branches in which each of the possible outcomes is realized.  (Here the word ‘many’ is clearly the world’s greatest understatement.)

“Sounds wacky, don’t it? Why would anyone believe in a universe that is endlessly splitting into (as far as we know) unobservable slightly-different versions of itself? Here is the point at which, as a physicist or philosopher, your biases will likely show themselves. People will line up behind the Many-Worlds Interpretation because of its consistency. Its advantage is that it keeps the math whole. There is no special pleading about consciousness intruding on the measurement.”

Read about the Many Worlds Interpretation in Adam Frank’s blog for Discover Magazine
Slate article by Jim Holt, on the pros and cons of admitting so many universes

‘What are friends for?   Health and longevity.’

‘A 10-year Australian study found that older people with a large circle of friends were 22 percent less likely to die during the study period than those with fewer friends...Friendship has a bigger impact on our psychological well-being than family relationships.’

— Tara Parker-Hope blogging for the NYTimes Health page
     David Slotnick reviews the benefits

Finlandia

In Finland, where 80% of workers belong to unions, all employees enjoy at least 30 days paid vacation and the gap between the rich and poor is far more equitable than in the United States... it is no small thing that democratic countries like Finland exist that operate under egalitarian principles, which have virtually abolished poverty, which provide almost-free, quality health care to all their people, and provide free, high-quality education from child care to graduate school. 

— Bernie Sanders

Yoga for life

In 1957, the West was still hypnotized by technological progress, and wide-eyed at the first Sputnik.  But Bette Calman was already out to convince us we had a lot to learn from 5,000-year-old practices of physical culture. 

Living in Melbourne, Australia, still teaching and practicing yoga daily at 83, Calman was the subject of several international feature stories yesterday.

B K S Iyengar is still practicing, teaching and writing at 91.  Legend has it that yogi adepts are able to take control of aging as they do other aspects of the unconscious metabolism, but reliability of the stories of information is difficult to verify.  There is reason to believe both that the most celebrated cases are apocryphal and that the most accomplished masters avoid publicity.

Let’s not forget Yogi Berra, who will be 84 next month:
‘Always go to other peoples’ funerals; otherwise they won’t go to yours.’ 

Ah — to be young again!

Carion beetles (Trogoderma glabrum) live their first ten days as larvae before turning into adults.  But if they don’t have enough food to grow into adults, they begin shrinking again, becoming not only smaller but biologically younger.  In the laboratory, if they are alternately fed and starved, fed and starved, they can be cycled through this process of maturation and regression at least 10 times. 

With full feeding, the beetles have an 8-week life span.  But in the lab, they have been cycled through growth and retrogression for two years.  Once they are fully fed, they grow into normal adults, with normal life spans, no matter how many childhoods they have enjoyed.

— article in Science by Beck & Bharadwaj, 1972

A new kind of science

The ‘old’ way to do science was to look at the phenomenon you’re interested, collect data, try to surmise the rules governing its behavior, go back and see if those rules correctly predict some behaviors you have yet to study.  When you’ve achieved some success with one system, you could try to leverage that to a broader class of systems, guessing that there might be a common principle underlying the entire class. 

For forty years, physicists have dreamed of a ‘Theory of Everything’ that would be the natural denouement of this project, generalizing so far that all natural phenomena might be deduced from a small number of truly fundamental laws.

Stephen Wolfram has a different idea.  He earned his right to our attention two decades ago by giving science the gift of Mathematica, a ‘Researcher’s Playground’ that solves equations, performs integrals and derivatives, multiplies matrices, plots graphs, and generally allows the mathematically-inclined investigator to play ‘what-if’ without the drudgery of having to compute anything.

Now he proposes: Let’s assume that there is a Theory of Everything, a few simple rules from which all the phenomena of nature can be deduced.  With sufficient computational power, we can try a really dumb approach to finding the Theory of Everything:  We’ll start with the simplest possible rules, work out their consequences, see if they agree with the Universe in which we find ourselves, then systematically classify all such simple rule sets, try them one-by-one and work out the consequences.  With the right software tools, we can automate the process, sit back and wait for our computer to announce that, after trying the simplest two trillion possible theories, it has found one that works.

In order to automate the process of comparing with reality, there remains the small detail of encoding and systematizing all scientific knowledge — what Wolfram calls the ‘Leibniz Project’.  Wofram has taken a stab at that task, and has promised to unveil his efforts next week.

You have to hand it to the man — he doesn’t lowball his aspirations.