I’ve tried to explain the key idea in my essay “The How and the Why of Emergence and Intention” (available for download on the publications page) briefly to several friends. My off-the-cuff attempts have tended to “wander towards the goal,” confusing rather than enlightening. Coincidentally, “Wandering Towards the Goal – How do Mindless Mathematical Laws Give Rise to Aims and Intention” is the topic for the Essay Contest, sponsored by FQXi (The Foundational Questions Institute). So here is a quick summary of the key points in the essay.
First – Why I Wrote This Essay
I had two goals in writing the essay. The first goal was to have the FQXi community read the essay and not dismiss it out of hand. The challenge is that FQXi is an elite group of some 300 physicists and cosmologists from around the world (names like Max Tegmark, Anthony Aguirre, Nick Bostrom, David Chalmers, Alan Guth, Martin Rees, Lee Smolin, and Frank Wilczek, among others). I am an “amateur” and do not have the qualifications to be in the Institute. Moreover, the collection of members and competing essayists is heavily tilted to a secular, even anti-religious, point of view. My conclusion is something that many would consider theological and therefore wildly out-of-bounds. So I had to avoid using words that would give the appearance of religiosity and build my argument without offending the sensibilities of the scientific reader.
My second goal was broader – to open secular thinking to the possibility of spiritual concepts. I believe that modern science points to some of the same spiritual truths as the ancient wisdom traditions. But you have to be open to this idea in order to consider the possibilities. I am trying to use science and mathematics to lead to conclusions that extend beyond the empirical boundaries of secular thought — to spiritual truth.
Surprisingly, my essay is doing well! The community ranking process, where this year’s 229 essayists read, comment and score the other essays, is complete, and my essay ranks 5th. The top 30 essays have now been sent to an outside panel for final award selections, to be announced later this summer. There are a variety of award levels, so I am hopeful my essay will be in the final mix.
The Main Argument
Basic physics suggests that everything is running down. A clock stops when the spring winds down (or the battery is drained). Once the milk is spilled on the floor, it will not go back in the bottle. The universe itself is slowly cooling down over billions of years. This idea is linked to a measure called entropy, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that entropy always increases.
But complex systems do something else. In the turbulent flows of energy and matter, sophisticated forms and structures seem to emerge spontaneously. Water going down the drain starts to spiral. So do galaxies, and sunflowers. This spontaneous “something else” is called emergence. Sophisticated forms and structures emerge in complex systems. This counter-entropic result works by exporting the “running down” tendency, the entropy, from the local environment to the rest of the environment. So, scientists can now explain how more sophisticated and complex structures emerge in a universe that is, overall, still running down. But they still cannot explain why.
That’s where my essay comes in. I maintain that emergence is a consequence of what I refer to as an intentionality flowing through the universe. I use the word “intentionality” to describe the fact that every object and every system has a direction, movement or purpose — an intention. Even a rolling billiard ball has “intentionality” – and it will strike another billiard ball with a specific force and direction. Every particle, every wave, every atom, every object and every collection of objects (systems) has direction, movement or purpose — it is going somewhere. Hence – intentionality. So, from the beginning of time, everything in the universe is caught up in a process that is moving forward; this is cosmic intentionality at work. This intentionality has a number of interesting qualities:
Attraction: The mathematicians that study complex systems found out that as the new features of a dynamic system emerge, they tend to settle in on particular configurations. Spiral configurations are common! The mathematicians refer to these particular, more common, solutions as “attractor states.” A dynamic system is “attracted to” particular solutions. The behavior of a dynamic system is not random!
Cooperation: A dynamic system evolves as the individual components interact in turbulent conditions, and structure emerges as these components begin to cooperate. Water molecules jostle with each other as gravity pulls them towards the drain, but then begin to cooperate and spin around each other — a spiraling whirlpool develops. Spiral galaxies are stars dancing with each other – each responds to the pull of gravity from the others. Ants cooperate to build and maintain their colony. Chemistry is actually the science of how molecules cooperate by binding together in different configurations, and particular configurations form complex chains of reaction that lead to life itself.
Reciprocity: The cooperation of the components of a system is a form of reciprocity, but, in addition, the components are in a reciprocal relationship with the system. Water molecules shape the whirlpool – and the whirlpool directs their movement. Ants build a colony – the emergent features of the colony protect, preserve and fulfill the destiny of the ants. Ultimately, this reciprocity cascades through the all the levels of physics, chemistry, biology and human behavior. Causal influence goes both ways.
The Conclusion
We all have a word we use when we refer to relationships that reflect intentionality and feature the qualities of attraction, cooperation and reciprocity. That word is love. So I call the cosmic intentionality that flows through the universe – forms of love. This love guides the emergent cascade. This cascade is not random, but in fact leads to increasingly complex, sophisticated and intelligent structures and systems. We observe this process at work in our universe. We can see that it has, through time, and perhaps inevitably, led to self-reflective sentient consciousness. Such consciousness provides the capacity for us to engage with and reflect on the universe, closing the cosmic circle. The universe gives us life, beauty, joy and consciousness – it has loved us. In return, it is possible for us to observe and explore this universe, and to reciprocate that love.
I hope you have enjoyed this quick review! Any thoughts or comments would be welcome… For a download of this essay, please visit the publications page.
Darn, George, I can’t find anything to push back about. Except is there also a concept equivalent to hate? You have attraction, reciprocity, and cooperation. Is there also repulsion somewhere? A Trump surrogate?
Also, you lead very logically to the word “love,” but it still creates a dissonance. It’s a trigger word. Makes me feel like you shifted gears big time (even though you didn’t and I could see it coming.) You might have to circle the concept (or spiral around it?) before you actually drop the L word to draw the secular in.
Love (attraction, reciprocity, cooperation),
John
PS, congrats on your essay. Very impressive. Good luck next week.
Thank you John!
Yes, there is repulsion, conflict, confusion, disorder, entropy and tragedy – all the unfortunate and necessary price of free will. If we did not have choice, entropy and disorder, love would have nothing to work with.
The dissonance you mention was intentional. There was a page and word limit to the FQXi essay contest. I did all the spiraling I could before getting to the punch line. And too much spiraling is just spinning……
Many thanks!
Interesting, as always. It might help to envision our universe, in which dS is always positive, as a bubble within another, greater Universe wherein the laws of thermodynamics are different or, perhaps, nonexistent.
Some consider the opposite of Love to be Chaos.
JG – Yes, and note also that “opposite” is a reciprocal relationship. Like zero and infinity or nothing and everything. This is the subject of another FQXi essay – The Hole at the Center of Creation (available in Publications).
In response to your other comment, my sense is that without the pull of entropy, the positive dS of thermodynamics, there is no motion. What is a universe where nothing happens? Perhaps a mathematical one – all form and no action! I cannot visualize a cosmology within a cosmology without movement. Movement is what flows in the mathematical forms and without movement those forms are… nothing.
Good Love=Order / Bad Evil=Chaos?
Chaos is just the canvas, intention the brush, and any judgement is in the eye of the beholder…
Chaos is required to even have order, and usually to attain ‘higher’ order, a system must go through a chaotic state first…if energy is trapped in structure it can only re-organize after that structure is dissolved, right? Think of powdered sugar…dissolve it in water, put a stick in and watch the beautiful, highly structured crystals grow out of the chaotic soup. There is no way that the powder is going to form crystals without going through that process, is there?
So you could define it however you want, but Chaos cannot be evil if it is a catalyst for such beauty and order as a crystal, or a flower.
Dualistic thinking is one of mankind’s most insidious addictions. We must overcome it or we are doomed.
Thanks for the comment. I don’t fully agree, although your remark is more poetic than analytic, so my disagreement is more an aesthetic view than anything else. Chaos is a concept that has no form, and no precise definition (except in mathematics). It is something we fear as inherently unknowable, but I agree it should not be labeled as good or as evil — it is beyond such categories.
I do agree that the emergent process by which order, structure, function, purpose, beauty and understanding arise involves a creative transformation. That is what “emergent” means, and in my essay I attribute that transformation to intentionality, since what emerges is evidence of purpose and meaning. This flowing intentionality is Love. Chaos could be defined as the disordered pre-emergent landscape, but I would not call it a catalyst.
As to the addiction of dualistic thinking, I think it is unavoidable. We are physical beings in a physical world, with the gift of self-reflective consciousness. This is a wonderful thing, but it makes it easy to forget our fundamental interconnectedness with everyone and everything else – the unitary aspect of our existence. In my view, this is the fall of original sin – the downside of the gift of consciousness. The challenge, and the solution, is to think and to be both dualistic and universalistic at the same time.
Hiya George,
Excellent essay!
JG mentions a nested set of realities/universes of bubbles within bubbles, wherein the Ultimate Non-Bubble has no motion, no thermodynamics happening. There is precedence for this. Some of the more intense spiritual masters over the ages have mentioned, often casually and in passing, that in the Ultimate Reality, “nothing is happening.” The space (if you will) within that Ultimate Non-Bubble is simply Infinite Awareness; i.e. a state that is always pregnant with endless potential, but without actual form or motion. You might imagine it as a space full of vibrating energy, somewhat like Brownian motion but without any boundaries, out to infinity. Just raw energy… or maybe to call it raw “pre”-energy.
The first actual Bubble that forms nested inside Awareness would be Infinitely Intelligent Consciousness, the first reduced step down from Awareness. It is a Bubble; it has “boundaries”in the sense that it is self-referential. Through that self-referential quality, form and action manifests at multiple levels. The commonly experienced level is that of Duality… but Duality itself in encompassed and nested in a larger Bubble of Non-Duality, wherein apparent opposites continue, but are experienced as a giant, flowing Oneness of form, movement and intention.
Essentially it is this: Pure Awareness is the foundation; Unlimited Consciousness arises from that; further denser bubbles populate the various nested levels within that, until arriving into manifested Oneness, which further reduces into apparent Duality with its 3 or 4 dimensional attributes.
Deep spiritual practice, intense kundalini processes and even hallucinogens can provide glimpses into all of these realms, as they are a continuum.
Thanks BDev! An interesting comment. I’m Reminded if the story about a student asking about the Greek myth about the earth resting on the back of a turtle asking what the turtle was redting on. The retort – “oh, it’s turtles all the way down.” In this case “it’s bubbles all the way up.”
That said, I do think conscious awareness raises issues of recursive paradox – and this sits at the core of being. This was the subjuct of my essay “The Hole at the Center of Creation” – on the Publications page..
Cheers! George
Interesting. However, phenomenons always have a driving force. Why would you assume something emerges when you don’t know the full story?
What seems to violate the Entropy principle is the idea that life arose from nonlife by itself and without external input. Snowflakes, sand dunes and turbulent vortices are all subject to external forces. As far as we know, refrigerators and all other machines do not arise spontaneously either, but instead are created by humans. Sure, randomness can theoretically account for any bizarre occurrences including a refrigerator, a watch (Paley) or a 747 (Fred Hoyle), but no such event was ever observed. Some try to theoretically break down the complex system into a combination of simpler components with higher probability of occurrence, but this breakdown does absolutely nothing for the complex system as the probabilities of all subsystem have to be multiplied to get back to the complex final assembly.
http://nonlin.org/category/views/
Thanks for you comment. However I would suggest:
“Emergence” is not an assumption, it is an observation. Simple systems form complex systems, and the properties of those complex systems cannot be either predicted or fore-ordained by the properties or behaviors of the simple ones.
It is also a fallacy to suggest that a refrigerator can be explained by spontaneity or randomness. The math does not add up, as the typing monkey theorem demonstrates – infinity does not divide, and zero does not multiply.
Some people continue to ignore emergence and believe in the fallacy of spontaneous order but I think the evidence is compelling. The universe has been getting more complex with every broken symmetry – and each step in the cascade has demonstrated order and intelligence that did not exist in the previous one. The entire process exhibits intentionality – it is going someplace. We are in that place, and we can choose how we envision the process and our role in it. “Choose life”, as Moses said to Israel in Deuteronomy 30:11-20.