I. Our Planatural Edition: A 21st Century PhiloSophia, Earthropo Ecosmic PediaVersion

C. An Earthumanity Era: A 2020s Global Cognizance Achieves a Knowsphere by Her/His Bicameral Self

Azarian, Bobby. The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness and Cosmic Complexity. Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2022. The author is a science journalist with a neuroscience PhD from George Mason University, where he was a member of Harold Morowitz’s discussion group. His acknowledgements close with a quote (see below) from Harold’s The Emergence of Everything (2002) as an early glimpse of an epic 21st century revolution. In this prescient edition, Dr. Azarian provides a rare, insightful, wide-ranging survey to date. Three main sections, Origins, Evolution, and Transcendence, have chapters such as Our Cohesive Cosmic Story, Poetic Meta-Naturalism, the Biosphere is an Autocatalytic Set, Evolution is a Knowledge Creation Process, An Evolutionary Synthesis, A Unifying Theory of Reality and We are a Way for the Cosmos to Know Itself. A central theme is an animate presence of a universal self-organization which proceeds engender fractal-like scales of an emergent intricacy, organic beingness, and cognitive awareness. Here is a good glimpse so far which we seek to report and document. But a work remains to get on with it in this decade.

According to the prevailing scientific paradigm, the universe tends toward randomness; it functions according to laws without purpose, and the emergence of life is an accident devoid of meaning. But this bleak interpretation of nature is currently being challenged by novel findings at the intersection of physics, biology, neuroscience, and information theory. Generally known as “complexity science, it has led to new understandings of an oriented, emergent evolution. A revolutionary cosmic narrative is taking shape whereby simplest “parts” come together to form ever-greater “wholes” in a process that has no end in sight. (Publisher)

We are clearly at the beginning of viewing science from the new perspective of emergence. I believe that it will provide insights into the evolutionary unfolding of our universe, our solar system, our biota and our humanity. This essay will introduce some of the concepts that are coming into focus. The outlook is largely scientific, but certain philosophical and theological elements keep appearing. I offer no apology. (Harold Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything 2002)

(For myself, I first heard Harold in NYC in 1972 when his title was Biology as a Cosmological Imperative. I next met him at the Santa Fe Institute in 1987 where I asked if he would speak at an annual meeting of the American Teilhard Association, which he did in 1991. His 2016 opus with Eric Smith is The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth.)

So, the inevitable growth of knowledge and spread of adaptive complexity in the cosmos can be seen as a learning process that keeps life out of thermodynamic equilibrium. It arises from an evolutionary process that involves constant inferences and better iterations. (133) Our unifying theory of reality has made progress in understanding life’s origin, evolution and destiny. Now we are ready to ask what comes next in the grand process of cosmic self-organization. (243)

Because the universe has a built-in tendency to self-organize to an increasingly complex state, a collective purpose for intelligent life emerges from fundamental laws of nature. It is the teleological nature of the universe that creates a cosmic context that instills life with meaning and purpose, which is to suffuse the cosmos with intelligence. (275) The tendency to disorder by the second law is offset as life gains knowledge forever, giving us all an individual and collective purpose. As a result, we can aspire to live more meaningful lives, in harmony with one another and with the aspirations of nature. You are not a cosmic accident. You are a cosmic imperative. (279)

Ball, Philip. Organisms as Agents of Evolution: A New Research Review. templeton.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Biological-Agency_1_FINAL.pdf. The British science polyscholar posts a 40 page contribution in May to a Templeton subject Agency, Directionality and Function: Foundations for a Science of Purpose project. Its description (Google words) notes that into the 2020s, a new theoretic and evidential sense is in ascent, as not before, which views life’s long development from invertebrates to human cognizance as mainly due to innate proactive, self- and group serving behaviors. Short chapters herein include Agency as Autonomy, Thermodynamic Origins, Multicellular Collective Agency and Engineering and Ourselves. As this site records, other versions are autocatalytic, collectively intelligent, autopoietic self-maintenance. For example, prebiotic complexity (Egbert) seems to have its own motives, while a Bayesian theory occurs in physics (Fuchs). See also How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology by PB for his premier volume about life’s self-propelled quickening, cerebral evolution all the way to our observance and record. (November 2023)

Agency is the capacity to make goal-directed changes to one’s self and environment – seems to be a real and general characteristic of living organisms. Yet unlike other general features such as replication and metabolism, we lack widely accepted models or theories of what agency is and how it arises. Do modern biology and evolutionary theory need them? If so, what might they look like? (Introduction)

If agency does affect the trajectory of evolution, might it generate directionality to the overall process – giving evolution itself some goal or target? Can the agency of organisms, the objects of selection, produce at least the appearance of agency in evolution itself? In some sense it is uncontroversial that evolution possesses something resembling goals, for we see it in persistent convergence, where evolutionary lineages find their way to the same attractor states created by the environment along with the principles of physical law. By the same token, might the operation of agency conceivably create evolutionary attractors shaped by the internal nature of evolution itself? These are open questions. (28)

There is a strong case for considering agency to be a real property of most living organisms, and perhaps as a defining feature of life on a par with metabolism and self-replication. Yet if this is so, it remains unclear how it is to be defined and identified so that researchers can formulate and answer questions about living systems that cannot be addressed mechanistic approach like cognition and consciousness, it is probably not some single essence that living things contain in different amounts. (33)

Ball, Philip. Physicists Rewrite the Fundamental Law that Leads to Disorder. Quanta. May 26, 2022. In this significant article, the British polyscholar science writer surveys a rush of current advances which altogether well imply an historic revision of 19th century thermodynamic theories By a novel inclusion of quantum information qualities, the entropic demise implied by the second law from Ludwig Boltzmann (1877) can be set aside and moved beyond. This wide=ranging entry builds its case by enjoining the thought and writings of key contributors such as Chiara Marletto and David Deutsch (constructor theory), along with Vlatko Vedral, Gilad Gour, Markus Muller and others.

In addition quantum physicists such as Giulio Chiribella (search), Carlo Scandolo and Nicole Yunger Halpern provide insights based on relational aspects, resource computations, networks and more. Earlier work such as The Resource Theory of Informational Nonequilibrium in Thermodynamics by Gilad Gour, et al (1309.6586) and Quantum Resource Theories by Eric Chitambar and GG in Reviews of Modern Physics (91/025001, 2019) set the scene for Linear Growth of Quantum Circuit Complexity by Jonas Haferkamp, et al in Nature Physics (18/528, 2022), General Quantum Resource Theories by Kohdai Kuroiwa and Hayala Yamasaki (2002.02458), The First Law of General Quantum Resource Theories by Carlo Sparacian in Quantum (4/259, 2020), and Resource Theory of Quantum Uncomplexity by Nicole Yunger Halpern, et al (2110.11371).

The second law of thermodynamics is among the most sacred in all of science, but it has always rested on 19th century arguments about probability. New arguments trace its true source to the flows of quantum information. (Summary)

Yet physicists don’t just want descriptions of what will probably happen. Can the second law be tightened up into more than just a statement of likelihoods? A number of independent groups appear to have done just that. They have woven the second law out of the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics, which may have directionality and irreversibility built into them at the deepest level. According to this view, the second law comes about not because of classical probabilities but because of quantum effects such as entanglement. And it arises from from the most natural basis that we know of — the quantum resource of information. (1)

Crucially, the quantum informational approach suggests a way of getting rid of the statistical picture that bedevils the classical view, where you have to take averages over ensembles of many different microstates. “The true novelty with quantum information came with the understanding that one can replace ensembles with entanglement with the environment,” said Carlo Maria Scandolo of the University of Calgary. (5)

Quantum resource theories allow a kind of zooming in on the fine-grained details of the classical second law. We don’t need to think about huge numbers of particles; we can make statements about what is allowed among just a few of them. When we do this, said Nicole Yunger Halpern, it becomes clear that the classical second law is just a kind of coarse-grained sum of a whole family of inequality relationships. (6)

Bezgodov, Aleksandr and Konstantin Barezhev. The Origin of Planetary Ethics in the Philosophy of Russian Cosmism. UK: Xlibris, 2019. The Russian philosopher authors are General Director and Research Director of the Planetary Development Institute, which is based in Dubai. Into March 2022, it is timely that I came upon this erudite volume based on a deep native wisdom of these Eastern Slavic peoples. From the 1890s to the 1950s, this stellar school conceived an organic, numinous, feminine milieu which requires our human/Earth participation. (See George Young 2010 herein for a historic review.) The epochal endeavor was distinguished by contributors such as Nikolai Federov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Vladimir Vernadsky. Two chapters are Nikolai Umov: Anti-Entropy Ethics for Controlled Evolution and Ivan Efremov: Between Inferno and Harmony. An overall unitary, “panbiologic” animation and procreative destiny was traced from dark to light, relative chaos to order, with a quickening consciousness which peoples would spread across the galaxies.

As a later instances, I heard the systems scholar James G. Miller speak at MIT in 1984 when he said there was little USA interest in his work, but was often invited to Russia where thinkers wanted to hear about nested cellular connectivities. for a 2015 notice, the Russian-American cosmologist Andrei Linde (search) spoke about a people purpose to awaken and illume the celestial reaches. And the Biosystems journal edited by Abir Igamberdiev (Memorial University, Canada, search) seek to publish integral syntheses such as Autopoiesis: Foundations of Life, Cognition and Emergence.

But the prime motive of this visionary persuasion from V. Vernadsky, when he collaborated with P. Teilhard in Paris in the 1920s, to this present edition was to perceive our whole Earthsphere bioabide as a vital unitary center of cosmic cocreation. As the lead title advises, only an actual Planetary Ethics will save us. (As a sign of a global, noosphere civilization in place, I received this esoteric work from Amazon in two days.) Into March 2022, at the same while how absurd and tragic is it that an Armageddon-like conflagration rages and threatens to become a nuclear war.

This book seeks to formulate a Planetary Ethics as a moral basis and value code for a biocompatible, harmonious, and manageable civilization. Its essential content is extensively drawn Russian cosmists from the 1890s to the 1950s who made up this unique philosophical, scientific, and cultural phenomenon. By way of their joint planetary-cosmic consciousness, they developed a system of biocentric and humanistic values. Another facet was a spiritual rebellion of life against chaos, death, and limitation. The cosmists focused on a united humanity and a definitive relationship between human beings and a biouniverse still in the making. (Excerpt)

Bowick, Mark, et al. Symmetry, Thermodynamics and Topology in Active Matter. Physical Review X. February, 2022. This is an invited perspective review of a 2020 Kavli Conference with this title by Kavli Institute, UC Santa Barbara, MIT and Indian Institute of Science physicists. Two coauthors are Cristina Marchetti and Sriram Ramaswamy who were the main founders of this scientific notice of how particulate materials (e.g., colloids, bacteria) in both organic and inorganic media tend to self-organize into complex, dynamic forms. As a COVID remote meeting, many more authorities could present their work. Now ten years on, it is strongly evident that a common, robust spontaneity serves to vivify natural phenomena everywhere.

The Active Matter phrase refers to any collection of entities that individually use free energy to generate their own motion and forces. Through interactions, active particles spontaneously organize into emergent large-scale structures. This self-organizing paradigm is now applied to living and nonliving systems from subnuclear structures in the cell to collective motion at the human scale. The diverse phenomena they exhibit all stem from a dynamic assembly of discrete components that dissipatively break time-reversal symmetry. Here we review an array of current and emerging research directions as physical materiality, broadly conceived, comes to life. (Abstract, excerpt)

Today, the name active matter refers to any collection of entities that individually use free energy to generate their own motion and forces. Through interactions, these active particles spontaneously organize in emergent large-scale structures with a rich range of materials properties. The defining property of an active system is that the energy input is out of equilibrium, whether internal or created by contact with a proximate surface, acts individually and independently on each “active particle.” (1, 2)

The field of active matter was born from the physicist’s ambition to use statistical physics and hydrodynamics to describe collective motion in the living world. The active-matter framework has now had important successes in capturing examples of organization in living matter on scales from subnuclear to oceanic. (19)

Canup, Robin and Philip Christensen, Co-Chairs. Origins, Worlds and Life: A Decadal Strategy for Planetary Science and Astrobiology. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 2022. The online posting is a thorough, graphic, 700+ page volume all about this ambitious 2023 to 2032 USA research project, with many global inputs. A paper edition will appear next year. It even considers “Planetary Defense” against astro objects. An Earthuman basis is conveyed by some 600 White Paper topical proposals across a wise span such as A Solar System Space Telescope, New Planetary Data Ecosystems Centers, and Cryogenic Comet Sample Return. Specific chapters cover Evolution of Protoplanetary Disks, Global Atmospheres, Magnetospheres, Moons, and Climate, on to Exoplanets, Dynamic Habitability and Life Elsewhere, along with program plans, equity concerns and so on. Many sections discuss spaceflight missions in this period and beyond

In regard, “A Table of Twelve Priority Scientific Questions” in accord with subject matter such as What Mechanisms Dispersed the Nebula and What are Giant Planets Made Of often recurs. Many sections come with an extensive reference list. But as one reads along, by any natural (Earthural) philoSophia it ought to be asked why we capable, collaborative Earthlings are embarking on this vast exploratory venture at all. To gain any such sense, a revolutionary ecosmos genesis neds to be appropriated which seems involved with its own self-quantification, decipherment, and recorded description. By these lights an integral self-discovery and recognition could be achieved. And within a Participatory UniVerse model, a decisive act of aware, informed self-selection and affirmation becomes possible.

STATEMENT OF TASK: The Space Studies Board shall establish a survey committee to develop a comprehensive science and mission strategy for planetary science that updates and extends the Board’s current solar system exploration decadal survey, Vision and Voyages for Planetary Science in the Decade 2013-2022. The new decadal survey shall broadly canvas the field of space and ground-based planetary science to determine the current state of knowledge and identify the most important scientific questions to be addressed during the interval. In addition, it will address relevant programmatic and implementation issues of interest to NASA and the National Science Foundation.

Q(uestion) 9.2 What are the Energy Sources that Life can Exploit on Earth and Other Planets?, (4-29); Q 9.1 How Did Early Earth Environments and Prebiotic Pathways Co-Evolve and Give Rise to Life and What Major Milestones in Earth History Were Coincident with Major Transitions in the Abundance, Quality, and/or Complexity of Life? (12-5); Q11.1 What Is the Extent of Molecular Complexity (e.g., Size, Heteroatom Diversity, Structure, Pathway Assembly Index) and Degree of Organization (e.g., Isomeric Preference, Polymerization) that Can Be Generated Abiotically Under Habitable Conditions? (14-4)

Q 11. Life Elsewhere: Expanding the search to include the possibility of life ‘not as we know it’ requires further technical and conceptual maturation, including advances in statistical methods, scaling laws, information theory, and probabilistic approaches. Understanding the relationship between the geochemical environment and the prebiotic pathways that can give rise to life requires cooperation among diverse disciplines that extends beyond the traditional platform to include geochemists, atmospheric chemists, geologists, geophysicists, astronomers, mission scientists and engineers, and astrobiologists, among others. (11-1)

Cavagna, Andrea, et al. Natural Swarms in 3.99 Dimensions. arXiv:2107.04432. Eight physicists from Italy and Argentina including Irene Giardina provide a further quantitative basis for the universal presence of optimum member-group integral behaviors which can be rooted in statistical physics. A definitive explanation can they be derived from Renormalization Group theories about relations between nested active scales. As the authors note, their advance is the first time that such a specific connection has been made.

The dynamical critical exponent z of natural swarms is calculated using the renormalization group. To order \epsilon = 4-d, a novel fixed point emerges, where both off-equilibrium activity and mode-coupling inertial interactions are relevant. In three dimensions the critical exponent at the new fixed point is z=1.3, in fair agreement with experiments. (Abstract)

Collective behaviour is found in a wide variety of biological systems from clusters of bacteria and colonies of cells, up to insects, bird flocks, and vertebrate groups. A unifying ingredient, which can be based in statistical physics, is the presence of strong, consistent correlations. Studies of avian flight, fish schools, mammal herds, swarms, microbes and proteins have found that the correlation length is much larger than the microscopic scales. Another key hallmark of statistical physics is dynamic scaling, which has been verified in many of these occasions. the case of natural swarms of insects. (1)

Within statistical physics, strong correlations and scaling laws are the two stepping stones leading to the Renormalization Group (RG): when we coarse-grain short-wavelength fluctuations, the parameters of different models flow towards one common fixed point ruling their large-scale behaviour. RG fixed points therefore organize the macroscopic behavior of strongly correlated systems into few universality classes. Biology is vastly more complex than physics, but the widespread presence of strong correlations and the validity of scaling laws cannot be considered a coincidence. They rather call for an exploration of the correlation-scaling-RG path also in collective biological systems. (1)

Chanu, Athokpam, et al. Analysis of the Structural Complexity of Crab Nebula Observed at Radio and Infrared Frequencies using a Multifractal Approach. arXiv:2206.04717. We cite this entry by Jawaharlal Nehru University, School of Computational and Integrative Sciences, Indian Institute of Astrophysics, and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research investigators for its self-similar content and as an example of deep human proclivities to carry out such studies wherever possible. A reference list harks back to Per Bak who in 1988 proposed a “physics of fractals” and “self-organized criticality.”

Into these 2020s, a convergent revolutionary discovery of a common, familial ecosmos can be attributed to a collaborative Earthuman sapience. In regard, an aware “planatural philoSophia” view might wonder how these mathematic, anatomy/physiology patternings get there in the first place. Why are we peoples moved and capable to learn all this? At this fraught moment, on this site we seek to support an evident presence of a greater phenomenal genesis with its own encoded course from universe to me + We = US.

The Crab nebula exhibits complex morphological patterns at different observing frequencies. We carry out a systematic investigation using imaging data at radio and infrared frequencies. For our analysis, we use standard multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MFDFA). We find long-range, power-law correlations, as expected from the physics of supernova evolution. Consequently, its multifractal properties originate from the probability density function as well as different correlations of large and small fluctuation values. Our analysis thus provides a fresh perspective on the morphology of the Crab nebula from a statistical physics viewpoint. (Abstract excerpt)

Cornish-Bowden, Athel and Maria Cardenas. The Essence of Life Revisited. Theory in Biosciences. 141/2, 2022. We locate this entry by Aix Marseille University, CNRS biotheorists amongst various current endeavors to consider and maybe resolve the deepest issue of something more or nothing else. It opens with past views of inevitability or randomness, e,g, Jacques Monod vs. Christian deDuve, and onto how a understandings of an evident catalytic self-organization form life origin could reveal a natural emergence. The authors ask whether novel theoretical bases can lead to an answer, which seems to involve a finesse of both motive agencies and post happenings. See also, e.g., Emergence, Construction or Unlikely? by Stuart Bartlett and Michael Wong at arXiv:2303.08018 for more wonderings.

Czegel, Daniel, et al. Bayes and Darwin: How Replicator Populations Implement Bayesian Computations. BioEssays. 44/4, 2022. DC and Eors Szmathary, Institute of Evolution, Budapest, Hamza Glaffar, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Joshua Tenenbaum, MIT, continue their project to perceive and identify life’s developmental emergence as mainly a cerebral, cognitive learning advance. It is argued that every organism across all Metazoan domains must be primarily able to be aware of and predict their ever-changing environs. By this view, bodily evolution (Darwin) and proactive mind (Bayes) need proceed in a parallel way. Here, this 2020s version is informed and braced by probalistic, iterative, cognitive models or versions. Writ large, once again an outline of a self-educating, making, affirming, autocatalytic participant reality can become evident as a complementarity of past reference and open future.

Bayesian learning theory and evolutionary theory both formalize adaptive competition dynamics in variable environments. What do they have in common and how do they differ? In this paper, we discuss structural and process analogies at a computational and an algorithmic-mechanical level. We point out mathematical equivalence and isomorphism between Bayesian update and replicator dynamics. We discuss how these mechanisms provide similar ways to adapt to stochastic conditions at multiple timescales. We thus find replicator populations to encode regularities so as to predict future environments. As a notable result, a unified view of the theories of learning and evolution can be achieved. (Abstract)

Czegel, Daniel, et al. Novelty and Imitation within the Brain: A Darwinian Neurodynamic Approach to Combinatorial Problems. Nature Scientific Reports. 11:12513, 2021. DC, Eors Szmathary, Marton Csillag, and Balint Futo, Institute of Evolution, Budapest, along with Hamza Glaffar, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory post a latest version of their studies of life’s creaturely evolution as most involved with progressively gaining intelligence and knowledge so to best survive. See also Bayes and Darwin: How Replicator Populations Implement Bayesian Computations by this collegial team in BioEssay. (44/4, 2022.)

Efficient search in combinatorial spaces, such as those of possible action sequences, linguistic structures, or causal explanations, is an essential component of intelligence. Based our prior work, we propose that a Darwinian process, operating over sequential cycles of imperfect copying and selection of neural informational patterns, is a promising candidate. In teacher and learner settings, we demonstrate that the emerging Darwinian population of readout activity patterns can maintain and continually improve upon existing solutions A novel analysis method, neural phylogenies, is then proposed that displays the unfolding of the neural-evolutionary process. (Abstract excerpt)

da Costa, Luciano. On Similarity. arXiv:2111.02803. We cite this 2021 entry by the senior University of Sao Paulo complexity theorist (search) as a way to record his steady flow of wide-ranging, collegial papers since the early 2000s. Another reason is a present burst of studies over a topical span from enzymes to texts and cities. By this work, along with many other worldwide contributions, 21st century nonlinear systems science altogether seems to have reached an integral convergence. Into the 2020s, a consistent natural recurrence of common patterns and processes, forms and flows, has now become quite evident everywhere.

In regard, the revolutionary outlines of an innate, organic evolutionary genesis can be expressed. By some affinity with a each one of us, a genetic-like universal, independent, network code source is found in self-organizing effect across every spatial and temporal domain. Its constant generative influence then serves to inform and exemplify itself in each phenotype-like occasion from galaxies to geckos. A familial, indeed Taoist, image becomes portrayed as an archetypal part/wave = light, DNA/AND = genome, bigender complementarity so as to compose a whole beingness in community.

In further regard, see also Coincidence Complex Networks by L. da Costa in Journal of Physics: Complexity (3/1, 2022), Enzyme Similarity Networks at 2205.0516) Text Characterization Based on Recurrence Networks by Souza, Barbara, et al. (2201.06665, see review) A Similarity Approach to Cities and Features by Da Costa and Eric Tokuda (2202.08301), City Motifs as Revealed by Similarity (2204.09104) and Neuromorphic Networks as Revealed by Features Similarity by A. Benatti, et al at 2207.10571.

The neural criticality hypothesis states that the brain may be poised in a critical state at a boundary between different types of dynamics. Many studies show that critical systems tend to exhibit optimal computational property. Here, we provide an account of the mathematical and physical foundations of criticality. We then review and discuss recent experimental studies so to identify important next steps to be taken, along with connections to other fields. (2111.02803 excerpt)

Many complex systems reveal intricate characteristics taking place at several scales of time and space. In particular, texts are distinguished by a hierarchical structure that can be studied by multi-scale concepts and methods. Effective approaches can emphasize words with more informational content. Here we advance this work with a focus on mesoscopic representations of networks. We extend this domain to textual narratives wherein recurrent relationships among parts of speech (subject, verb and direct object) form connections among sequential pieces (e.g., paragraphs). (2201.06665 excerpt)

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