III. Ecosmos: A Revolutionary Fertile, Habitable, Solar-Bioplanet, Incubator Lifescape

C. The Information Computation Turn

Cartwright, Julyan and Alan Mackay. Beyond Crystals: The Dialectic of Materials and Information. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. 370/2807, 2012. This lead paper in a Festschrift for Mackay (search), an eminent British crystallographer, is a good synopsis of his project, now with a widening cast, to show that supposed “inorganic” matter actually is graced by life-like properties. An informational aspect akin to a genetic code, quantum computations, and self-organizing dynamics are evident by this view. With regard to his mentor J. D. Bernal, a half-century later a physical basis for life and mind is joined. Typical papers are Decoding the Energy Landscape: Extracting Structure, Dynamics and Thermodynamics by David Wales, DNA, Dichotomic Classes and Frame Synchronization, Simone Giannerini, et al, and DNA Information: From Digital Code to Analogue Structure by A. A. Travers, et al (search). See also in 2015 The Physics of Information from the Materials Genomics of Aperiodic Crystals & Water to Molecular Information Catalysts & Life by Dowman Varn and Jim Crutchfield (search, 1510.02778).

We argue for a convergence of crystallography, materials science and biology, that will come about through asking materials questions about biology and biological questions about materials, illuminated by considerations of information. The complex structures now being studied in biology and produced in nanotechnology have outstripped the framework of classical crystallography, and a variety of organizing concepts are now taking shape into a more modern and dynamic science of structure, form and function. The fundamental level is that of atoms. As smaller and smaller groups of atoms are used for their physical properties, quantum effects become important; already we see quantum computation taking shape. Concepts move towards those in life with the emergence of specifically informational structures. We must integrate unifying concepts from dynamical systems and information theory to form a coherent language and science of shape and structure beyond crystals. To this end, we discuss the idea of categorizing structures based on information according to the algorithmic complexity of their assembly. (Abstract excerpts)

Living organisms are thus seen to have structures where information is concentrated, but both DNA and proteins are made of the same atoms following the same laws of chemistry, all based in turn upon physics. But information may be seen also to be distributed in all structures. In biology, we find hierarchies of structure upon structure from the atomic to the
human scale. (2808) We thus have three parallel worlds: the biological (living processes and their manipulation and synthetic development), the inorganic (materials and their controlled synthesis) and the informatic (the computer world and information processing, including the necessary mathematics and algorithms for this end.) (2809)

https://ufrj.academia.edu/GregoryChaitin.. A new 2014 Academia site for his many papers, presentations, book links, and more of unique mathematical frontiers. Such works as Life as Evolving Software, Metabiology, Meta Math, and many others can be found and downloadable here. Chaitin’s previous site at http://www.umcs.maine.edu/~chaitin/ is being kept as is with similar hits, and a portal for older Springer books. With colleague Stephen Wolfram, Seth Lloyd, and digital, computational universe theorists, a view that nature’s emergent complexity of life, mind and people springs from and exemplifies a realm of intrinsic algorithmic, informational programs.

METABIOLOGY: a field parallel to biology, dealing with the random evolution of artificial software (computer programs) rather than natural software (DNA), and simple enough that it is possible to prove rigorous theorems or formulate heuristic arguments at the same high level of precision that is common in theoretical physics.

Chaitin, Gregory. The Unknowable. Singapore: Springer, 1999. An earlier work by the philosophical mathematician that contends information is the primary essence of a discrete universe, with matter secondary.

Consciousness does not seem to be material and information is certainly immaterial, so perhaps consciousness and perhaps even the soul, is sculpted in information, not matter. (106)

Chaitin, Gregory, et al. Godel’s Way: Exploits into an Undecidable World. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2011. A unique, engaging dialogue between Argentine-American polymath Chaitin, Brazilian logician Newton da Costa, and Brazilian physicist Francisco Antonio Doria serves to join the incompleteness theorems of Austrian-American Kurt Gödel (1906-1978), a premier 20th century mathematician, with current information-computation and chaotic complexity paradigms. The result, along with books and papers documented herein, could be seen as a crossover from a lumpen machine to an organic genesis by reaffirming this once and future doubleness, herewith akin to software and hardware. The text quotes are from Chaitin’s chapters 2 and 6. From his own website http://cs.umaine.edu/~chaitin can be accessed a plethora of books, video lectures, and papers.

The Gödel incompleteness theorem - one cannot prove nor disprove all true mathematical sentences in the usual formal mathematical systems - is frequently presented in textbooks as something that happens in the rarefied realm of mathematical logic, and that has nothing to do with the real world. Practice shows the contrary though; one can demonstrate the validity of the phenomenon in various areas, ranging from chaos theory and physics to economics and even ecology. In this lively treatise, based on Chaitin’s groundbreaking work and on the da Costa-Doria results in physics, ecology, economics and computer science, the authors show that the Gödel incompleteness phenomenon can directly bear on the practice of science and perhaps on our everyday life. (Publisher)

Furthermore, there are many tantalizing analogies between DNA and large, old pieces of software. Remember bricolage, that Nature is a cobbler, a tinkerer? In fact, a human being is just a very large piece of software, one that is 3 X 109 bases = 6 X 109 bits ~ one gigabyte of software that has been patched and modified for more than a billion years: a tremendous mess, in fact, with bits and pieces of fish and amphibian design mixed in with that for a mammal. (Complexity, Randomness, 51)

Is the world built out of information? Is everything software? Let’s now turn to ontology: What is the world built out of, made out of? Fundamental physics is currently in the doldrums. There is no pressing, unexpected, new experimental data — or if there is, we can’t see that it is! So we are witnessing a return to pre-Socratic philosophy with its emphasis on ontology rather than epistemology. We are witnessing a return to metaphysics. Metaphysics may be dead in contemporary philosophy, but amazingly enough it is alive and well in contemporary fundamental physics and cosmology. (Forays into Uncharted Landscapes, 111)

Cooper, S. Barry and Jan van Leeuwen, eds. Alan Turing: His Work and Impact. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2013. The hundredth anniversary of the British polymath genius in 2012 has occasioned this major retrospect of his contributions from foundational computer logic and encryption to the nature of organic form, along with his 1930’s and 1940’s times. From our 21st century, Turing is then placed in a long train from Gottfried Leibniz, to Stephen Wolfram today (several pieces herein) and many who now advocate a mathematical, program-like source that in some way “computes” universe, life, and human into regnant presence. The 900 page compendium ranges widely over computation principles, information, complexity, languages, evolution of mind, artificial intelligence, and emergent morphogenesis, which AT set on course.

But the volume can also be seen in contrast to the vested paradigm that no such generative domain exists, random natural selection is still the only cause. British biologist Peter Saunders writes (753) that decades ago AT explained how biological pattern and metabolism could be traced, via informative algorithms, to physical and chemical processes. His prescience is just now being verified as statistical mechanics and complexity theories join forces (see Active Matter). Philosopher Aaron Sloman follows up by citing a “meta-morphogenesis” and “computational emergence” whose “information-processing” drives major evolutionary transitions. Again, as this site broaches and reports, it just seems that everyone is trying to articulate and describe nature’s own immanent, teleological genetic code.

The concept of Darwinian evolution one to assume that whatever processes now give rise to the forms we see in biological systems, they must have been carefully shaped by natural selection. But the surprising observation that I have made in at least several cases is that instead – in the computational universe of all possible underlying rules – it seems that biology in effect just samples essentially all possibilities, distributing the results among the species of the Earth. In the abstract, one might think that there could never be any real theory in biology, and that instead all features of current organisms must just be the result of endless historical accidents. But instead it increasingly seems that just by knowing the abstract structure of the computational universe, one can understand the different forms that occur across the biological world. (Wolfram, 757)

Thus it was the integration of the parts that was as crucial to the understanding of embryological development as the parts themselves – patterns emerged or self-organized as a result of the individual parts interaction. To see how far ahead of his time he was, one has to note that it is only now in the post-genomic era of systems biology that the majority of the scientific community has arrived at the conclusion he came to some 60 years ago. (Philip Maini, 684-685)

Crofts, Antony. Life, Information, Entropy, and Time. Complexity. 13/1, 2007. A University of Illinois biochemist attempts to expand the philosophical envelope of thermodynamic thinking in the 21st century to include an inherent semantic essence. This genotype-like quality is seen to infuse and distinguish nature as it manifestly ascends with evolution’s intricate phenotype. However in its passage, termed a ‘chronognosis,’ the immaterial message or meanings do not expend a thermodynamic budget, i.e. increase entropy. By way of a thought through argument, akin to Alwyn Scott’s The Nonlinear Universe, a novel appreciation of Bergson’s ‘elan vital’ can be reintroduced. At the present time, as humankind coalesces an extra-somatic global intelligence, a ‘supra-phenotypical’ phase can lately be discerned. But Crofts holds to the tacit view that these goings on occur as ‘machinery.’ The grand step or leap, which this nascent worldwide mind is making to admit an obvious organic genesis, is not taken.

Cuffaro, Michael and Samuel Fletcher. Physical Perspectives on Computation, Computational Perspectives on Physics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. As the title implies, this wide-ranging, authoritative collection covers the on-going cross-synthesis of physical, condensed matter, and quantum phenomena with an algorithmic-informational basis. As this fertile merger proceeds, an epic revolution appears to be coming to fruition in our collaborative, worldwide midst. To wit, it may be possible to at last aver, as long intimated, that this cosmic and Earthly existence is distinguished by a double, generative dimension. Typical chapters are Ontic Pancomputationalism by Gualtiero Piccinini and Neal Anderson, On Characterizing Physical Evolution as Information Processing by Owen Maroney and Christopher Timpson, and The Natural Science of Computation by Dominic Horsman, et al. An Abstract for Quantum Theory as a Principle Theory by Adam Koberinski and Markus Mueller is appended next.

We give a condensed and accessible summary of a recent derivation of quantum theory from information-theoretic principles, and use it to study the consequences of this and other reconstructions for our conceptual understanding of the quantum world. Since these principles are to a large extent expressed in computational terminology, we argue that the hypothesis of "physics as computation", if suitably interpreted, attains surprising explanatory power. Similarly as Jeffrey Bub and others, we conclude that quantum theory should be understood as a "principle theory of information", and we regard this view as a partial interpretation of quantum theory. (AK & MM Abstract)

D’Ariano, Giacomo Mauro. Physics Without Physics: The Power of Information-Theoretical Principles. International Journal of Theoretical Physics. 56/1, 2017. In a special Quantum Relativity issue in honor of David Finkelstein (1929-2016) the innovative Georgia Tech theorist and once editor of this journal, the University of Pavia physicist (search) advances a paradigm shift from an earlier particulate phase to rightly include nature’s computational creativity, a revolution that DF long advocated. Something is in the air, and in the cosmos, due to realizations of a universe to human circuitous course by way of various “bit to it” digital program operations. Along with papers by Stephon Alexander, Lee Smolin, Heinrich Saller, and others is The Life Machine: A Quantum Metaphor for Living Matter by Mario Rasetti.

David Finkelstein was very fond of the new information-theoretic paradigm of physics advocated by John Archibald Wheeler and Richard Feynman. Only recently, however, the paradigm has concretely shown its full power, with the derivation of quantum theory and of free quantum field theory from informational principles. The paradigm has opened for the first time the possibility of avoiding physical primitives in the axioms of the physical theory, allowing a refoundation of the whole physics over logically solid grounds. In addition to such methodological value, the new information-theoretic derivation of quantum field theory is particularly interesting for establishing a theoretical framework for quantum gravity, with the idea of obtaining gravity itself as emergent from the quantum information processing, as also suggested by the role played by information in the holographic principle. (Abstract)

Davies, Paul. The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information are Solving the Mystery of Life. London: Allen Lane, 2019. The British physicist and popular author is now at Arizona State University as director of the BEYOND Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science. This latest volume since 2010 draws upon collegial projects and papers, plus meetings with many co-investigators such as Gregory Chaitin, Stuart Kauffman, Steven Benner, David Chalmers to Lee Cronin, Philip Ball, Giulio Tononi, Michael Levin, and more so to range from cosmos to consciousness. The result is a clearest glimpse to date of a 21st century integral reunion of biology and physics, human and universe, via a missing generative, informative principle.

At the outset, two main predecessors are James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) whose familiar demon of sorts served as an ordering agency and Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961, (search) who in his 1943 What is Life? held that some “source code” must be in active effect. At the cusp of 2020, as this site tries to report, a worldwise cumulative intelligence (which is noted (102) in coherent groupings) seems to be coming altogether into a credible synthesis. In regard, the work joins the frontiers of evolutionary creativity, complex self-organization, algorithmic computation, network theory, integrative consciousness, morphogenesis, quantum biology, and further afield. As the second quote says, while olden material physics does not show signs of life, if such a bevy of novel principles is added to cosmic nature, it increasingly reveals an organic essence and human persons whom are indeed written in.

A lot of the ideas I present here originate with my colleague Sara Walker at ASU who has greatly influenced my thinking over the past five years. Sara shares my enthusiasm for seeking a grand unified theory of physics and biology organized around the concept of information. “Life is the next great frontier of physics” she declares. (2)

There is no evidence that the known laws of physics are rigged in favor of life. But what about the new informational laws of the sort I am conjecturing here? My hunch is that would not be so specific as to foreshadow biology as such, but they might favor a broader class of complex information managing systems of which life as we know it would be a striking representative. It’s an uplifting though that the laws of the universe might be intrinsically bio-friendly in this general manner. 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. (217)

Davies, Paul and Niels Gregersen, eds. Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Another prescient volume from a Templeton conference whose History, Physics, Biology, Philosophy and Theology sections provide a good entry to a waxing 21st century shift from matter-energy only to include, once again, a primacy of Logos word and creative content. In addition to the editors, contributors include Ernan McMullin, Philip Clayton, Seth Lloyd, John Maynard Smith, Terrence Deacon, Jesper Hoffmeyer, Holmes Rolston, Keith Ward, John Haught. But 18 men in all, surely closer to truth but still constrained by computer and machine analogues. For some entries, Paul Davies’ “Universe from Bit” draws on John Archibald Wheeler’s self-observing and selecting reality, which is gaining currency. Biochemist and theologian Arthur Peacocke finds the new complexity sciences to provide scientific support for a “panentheistism” that reveals both an active transcendence and fertile immanence.

Impressive evidence for the naturalistic view of language seems to be found in the language-like arrangement of genetic information. Thus, as is well known, the genetic alphabet is grouped in higher-order informational units, which in genetic handwriting take over the functions of words, sentences, and so forth. And, like human language, genetic information has a hierarchical structure, which is unfolded in a complex feedback mechanism – a process that shows all the properties of a communication process between the genome and its physical context. (Brend-Olaf Kuppers, 175)

De Castro, Leandro Nunes. Fundamentals of Natural Computing. Boca Raton: Chapman & Hall/CRC, 2006. A 650 page compendium by a Catholic University of Santos, Brazil, computer scientist which provides a good overview of attempts to limn from a greater creative nature its broad repertoire of computational processes, so as to avail and continue in computer designs. Our interest is to then note what kind of “nature” is assumed, which de Castro expands beyond Darwinian evolutionary algorithms. General Concepts are thus drawn from the complexity sciences such Agents, Interactivity, Connectivity, Self-Organization, Emergence, and onto Fractal Geometry. In regard, examples in genetic, neural and immune systems along with swarm intelligence, artificial life, and quantum phenomena are inclusively reviewed. By these lights, a nonlinear, self-organizing universe is engaged, but without yet recognizing this represents a significant shift and discovery.

Deutsch, David. The Fabric of Reality. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1997. A work of physics and philosophy which finds the central character and measure of the universe to be an increase in relative knowledge as lately embodied in intelligent human beings. This perception, based on four strands of quantum theory, evolution, epistemology and computation, goes on to join life as “knowledge-bearing matter” with the developmental cosmos.

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