I. Planatural Genesis: A Phenomenal, PhiloSophia, Propaedutic, TwinKinder, PersonVerse Endeavor

C. Our Earthumanity Glimpses an Animate Family Ecosmos Cocreative MultiUniVerse

Dodig-Crnkovic, Gordana. Reimagining Life: Emergent Complexity from Non-Living to Living.. preprints.org/manuscript/202411.1827/v1.. The Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden natural philosopher (search) provides another luminous essay which proceeds to survey and integrate the nonlinear systems revolution from the 1980s into the 2010s and today. As the Abstract cites, a cogent theoretical gathering of contributors to nonequilibrium thermodynamics, self-organized criticality, symbiogenesis, complex adaptive systems (John Holland), teleodynamics (T. Deacon), autopoiesis and onto ecological aspects (Simon Levin) is reviewed and tabulated into a uniquely thorough chronicle, In this year of convergent syntheses, it is high time to put everything back together and wonder at the natural universe to human genesis that is just now being revealed.

The paper highlights its central themes of self-organization, emergence, and the interplay between physical, informational, and biological processes. Ilya Prigogine’s concept of dissipative structures and irreversibility provided a foundation for understanding complexity in physical systems, which later expanded into biology through Stuart Kauffman’s models of creativity and evolution. Lynn Margulis's endosymbiosis theory further illumines the cooperative dynamics of life’s vitality, while Sara Walker's work integrates thermodynamics and information theory to bridge chemistry and biology via multiscale interactions and adaptive dynamics. As a synthesis of these views, this article situates life as an emergent phenomenon across many scales which defines a unified framework to understand complex cognizance in the natural world.

Conclusion. Toward a Unified Paradigm of Complexity From Prigogine’s thermodynamics to Walker’s information theory, these thinkers collectively advance our understanding of life and complexity. Their contributions converge on the rejection of reductionism, emphasizing the active properties of matter—such as self-assembly and self-organization—along with emergence, creativity, and the dynamic interplay between physical and informational processes that shape life in the natural world. (9)

Ellis, John, et al. Ellis, John, et al. Do we Owe our Existence to Gravitational Waves?. arXiv:2402.03593. John Ellis, Kings College London, Brian Fields, Center for Advanced Studies of the Universe, University of Illinois, and Rebecca Surman, University of Notre Dame engage a novel imagination, akin to Simon Conway Morris, which is not constrained by the vested verdict that no other reality exists on its own. Rather by way of an integral vista, certain celestial elements and conditions can be seen to have a necessary relation to our considerate presence, This is not “anthropic” as much as an ability to perceive independent phenomena without which human beings could not be here. Our point is that just a mindfulness to allow the very possibility, which has been excluded for the past male century, can reveal an innately animate genesis.

Two heavy elements essential to human biology are thought to have been produced by the astrophysical r-process, which occurs in neutron-rich environments: iodine is a constituent of thyroid hormones that affect many physiological processes, and bromine is essential for tissue development. Collisions of neutron stars (kilonovae) have been identified as sources of r-process elements including tellurium, which is adjacent to iodine in the periodic table, and the lanthanides. Neutron-star collisions arise from energy loss due to gravitational-wave emission, leading us to suggest that they have played a key role in enabling human life by producing these certain elements. (Abstract)

In nuclear astrophysics, the rapid neutron-capture process, also known as the r-process, is a set of nuclear reactions that is responsible for the creation of approximately half of the atomic nuclei heavier than iron, the "heavy elements"

I am fascinated by the "inner space/outer space" connections that link the science at the smallest and largest scales. My research focusses on highest-energy sites in such as the big bang, exploding stars (supernovae), and particles in space (cosmic rays). Understanding these processes and their interplay allows us to trace the history of matter over a temporal expanse. (Brian Fields)

Evans, Constantine, et al. Pattern Recognition in the Nucleation Kinetics of Non-Equilibrium Self-Assembly. Nature. 625/500, 2024. This intricate, frontier posting by Cal Tech and University of Chicago computational biologists including Erik Winfree is able to graphically describe an expansive, self-similar consistency from molecules all the way to minds. Its deep neural net operations are found to well apply across these domains to an extent life’s spatial and temporal developmental panorama and self-observation well appears as a procreative genesis.

Inspired by biology's best computer, the brain, neural networks achieve a profound reformulation of computational principles. Analogous high-dimensional, interconnected architectures also arise within information-processing molecular systems inside living cells,. Might neuromorphic collective modes be thus found broadly in other physical and chemical processes such as protein synthesis, metabolism, or structural self-assembly? Here we examine nucleation of animate structures to show that complex patterns can be classified similar to neural network computation. Specifically, we design a set of 917 DNA tiles that can self-assemble in three alternative ways such that competitive nucleation depends on the co-localization of tiles within the three structures. This success suggests that ubiquitous physical phenomena, such as nucleation, may hold powerful information processing capabilities when scaled up to more intricate systems. (Abstract excerpt)

Our work adds sophisticated information-processing as a new emergent phenomenon in which self-assembly gains programmable and potentially learnable phase boundaries to solve specific pattern recognition problems, analogous to earlier results for large
N neural networks. This neural network inspired perspective may help us recognize information processing in high dimensional molecular systems that are entangled within physical processes, whether in biology or in molecular
engineering: multicomponent liquid condensates, active matter, and other systems might have similar programmable and learnable phase boundaries.

Fabbro, Franco. Biological and Neuroscientific Foundations of Philosophy. London: Routledge, 2023. Into this year it seems a sage polyscholar is able to contribute his opus work as a whole scale course from matter, energy, space and time across Earth life’s evolutionary emergence all the way to our planetary intelligence. Chapters flow from Philutsophical Foundations of Science and the Origin of Knowledge to the Evolutionary History of Human Beings, Communication and Information, onto DNA as a Symbolic Domain of Life, and Psyche as a Domain of Imagination, and Language as Symbolic Sharing. With this current vantage, the author traces a central course as an increase in informational knowledge and relative literacy which then engenders more personal agency and shared imagination. Altogether the volume exemplifies an participatory perception that may just now be possible.

Written by an expert scholar, the book draws together different strands to explore how scientific and neuropsychological discoveries are vital to our understanding of mind. A philosophical paradigm moves beyond physics and mathematics to embrace more complex frames of the knowledge of psychology and biology. The work reflects on the symbolic dimensions of "information" that characterize DNA genetics and the linguistic psyche involved with cognitive sociality, communication and consciousness. (Publisher)


It has been said that all living organisms from bacteria to human beings that the genetic information is contained in the DNA, which is made up of two strands of nucleotides that wind in a helix around each other. It is possible to compare the sequence of nucleotides bases to the letters of the alphabet that follow one another in ordered combinations to form the words, phrased and chapters of a book. (116)

The genetic code represents a “symbolic order” of a fundamental and universal nature. We speak of “symbols” because the information contained in the DNA is “something that stands for something else.” This is the symbolic order that makes life all living beings possible. The characteristics of universality and indispensability place this order in the innermost of living organisms surrounded in human beings by the most external symbolic layers made up of psyche and language. (117)

Franco Fabbro is Affiliate Professor at the Sant’Anna School of Advances Studies, Pisa. He was full professor of physiology, child neuropsychiatry and clinical psychology at the University of Udine, Italy some thirty years after he graduated in medicine (1982) and specialized in neurology (1986).

From Computation to Life: The Challenge of a Science of Organization. www.walterfontana.zone/writings. This entry is the Inaugural Lecture for the Chair in Informatics and Computational Sciences 2019-2020 at the Collège de France, Paris by the veteran Harvard Medical School systems biologist (see website). He was notably the coauthor with Leo Buss of The Arrival of the Fittest (1994, search) about an innate evolutionary course. Some 25 years later, this richly composed edition proceeds to describe a deep integration of chemical phenomena with complexity theories and physical substrates which altogether can be expressed b informative computer programs. As the quotes convey, along with a catalytic force, the whole package can well presage a natural genesis synthesis with a global 2020s research agenda. For a current example, see Representing Catalytic Mechanisms with Rule Composition by Jakob Andersen, WF, et al at arXiv:2201.04515,

(3) In addition to statistical models, researchers also construct mechanistic models to gain insight into the dynamical processes that generate the system state reflected in the data. Analyzing the behavior of a molecular interaction network is helpful for understanding how and why a biological system might function. Such networks are modeled at various levels of abstraction. One recent approach represents each interaction as an instruction in a purpose-made programming language. A model then effectively represents a biological system as a program. This is more subtle than just using a computer; it is about representing a complex system using ideas from computation. (E-1)

(4) At a more fundamental level, many systems in nature are composed of components that mutually construct each other in a way that glues them together into a unit: metabolisms, cells, organisms, ecologies, cognitive systems, economies, cultures. All these systems are functional organizations. What kind of dynamics produces organizations of this sort? How much of their architecture is contingent and how much of it is inevitable? The idea of computation is the modern formalization of the idea of mechanism. However, unlike its predecessors, the clockwork and the steam engine, computation emphasizes a constructive aspect of interaction. (E-1)

Auto-catalysis is relevant in origin-of-life scenarios, because it concentrates the mass of a system in the autocatalytic loop, while suppressing many side reactions that could be a kinetic threat. It would be of great interest to understand whether, given hypotheses about the chemical substances and the chemical rules available 3.5–4 billion years ago, this cycle was the only solution in the accessible chemical space, or whether there are other paths. In other words: is the universality in the functional organization of metabolism that we observe today one of many options, or is it necessary? (E-11)

In closing, I would like to take in the whole picture. I tried to span an arc between three chemistries and representations of their interactions founded on ideas from computer science. When endowed with dynamics, all three give rise to aspects I associate with functional organization. At the beginning I asked about such aspects as self-maintaining organizations of logic whose change is constrained, the auto-catalytic chemical networks present in living systems, and the causal structures that organize the signaling processes in cells. These dynamics are a constructive force based on interactions that directly build new objects with new interactive properties. The challenge of a science of (chemical) organization consists in formalizing and understanding this constructive dynamics. (E-16, 17)

Frank, Adam, et al. Intelligence as a Planetary Scale Process. International Journal of Astrobiology. February, 2022. Veteran astroscholars AF, University of Rochester, David Grinspoon, Planetary Science Institute and Sara Walker, Arizona State University provide a latest admission, description and affirmation of the actual evolutionary emergence a worldwise cerebral faculty. As the quotes engage, a mindfulness to allow something going on by own agencies, such an appearance and fulfillment now becomes readily evident.

Intelligence is usually seen as an individual faculty. Here, we broaden the idea of intelligence as a collective group property and extend it to the planetary scale. We consider the ways in which a relative technological intelligence may represent a kind of planetary scale transition, much as the origin of life itself may be seen as a global phenomenon. Our approach follows many researchers today that the correct scale to understand key aspects of life and its evolution is planetary, beyond traditional focus on individual species. (Abstract excerpt)

A transition to planetary intelligence, as we described here, would achieve its operative presence at a global scale. Such a mindful world could steer the future evolution of Earth, acting in concert with and guided by a deep understanding of natural systems. If other civilizations that may exist in the universe undergo such a transition, we would expect to see a marked difference in their biosignatures due to a sustainable, global intelligence versus those that not been able to attain this emergent phase. (27)

We propose five properties required for a world to show knowing cognitive activity operating across planetary scales. These are: (1) emergence ,(2) dynamics of networks, (3) networks of semantic information, (4) appearance of complex adaptive systems, (5) autopioesis. Different degrees of these properties appear as a world evolves from abiotic (geosphere) to biotic (biosphere) to technologic (technosphere). (33)

Frank, Adam, et al. The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience.. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2024. . As this decade goes on, senior scholars AF, University of Rochester, MG, Dartmouth College and ET, University of British Columbia convened for some time to come to the realization that a main lacunae of 21st century thought was the exclusion of any human place and relevance in a cosmic to cultural scenario, which is then relegated to accidental. While scientific descriptions achieved by our sapient acumen run from muons to a multiverse, it is rarely imagined that our present learned occasion has any other phenomenal or participatory account.

In The Blind Spot, astrophysicist Adam Frank, cosmologist Marcelo Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompson call for a revolutionary scientific worldview which includes humanity as a vital part of objective truth. For centuries people have looked to science to tell us who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going, but without our own inclusion. This Blind Spot impedes our learning about the universe, quantum physics, life, AI, mind, consciousness, and Earth as a precious planet. As a result, we can view ourselves as an intended source of nature’s self-understanding, going forward in the new millennium.

Furtak, Marcin, et al. The Forest, the Trees, or Both? Hierarchy and Interactions between Gist and Object Processing during Perception of Real-world Scenes. Cognition. Vol. 221, April, 2022. Into this year, Polish Academy of Sciences and Tel Aviv University neuropsychologists can draw upon their own research along with a review of past 21st century work to an extent that they can presently reach a strong conclusion. Taken together, these studies join our results in supporting the global to local accounts, suggesting that gist (field) is processed more readily, and earlier, than objects. (5) As reported across the website, a temporal sequence appears to go on for both evolution and an entity. A sighted occasion is viewed by way of these dual archetypal modes, whereby a contextual scene is perceived first, after which item details are noticed and situated.

The global-to-local theories of perception assume that the gist of a scene is computed early and automatically, whereas recognition of objects occurs at a later stage, requires attentional resources, and is primed by the representation of whole. To test these views, we investigated the sequence of gist- and object-recognition. We generally found that backgrounds were classified more accurately than foreground objects, while wider fields influenced object recognition. Thus these findings support global-to-local theories, implying that gists are more readily seen than details, and at an earlier stage. (Abstract excerpt)

Gagler, David, et al. Scaling Laws in Enzyme Function Reveal a New Kind of Biochemical Universalit. PNAS. 119/9, 2022. Arizona State University bioscientists including Sara Walker, Chris Kempes and Hyunju Kim enter a good example of novel Earthuman abilities which can now find life’s deeper phases to also be distinguished by common, recurrent, self-similar patterns as everywhere else. A further implication is that such a result can be traced to and rooted in physical phenomena. A section heading is Universal Scaling Laws Define the Behavior of Enzyme Classes Across Diverse Biochemical Systems. A graphic depicts how the same forms hold from Archaea and Bacteria to Eukaryotes and Metagenomes, independently of specific components. We wonder again at our emergent EarthWise faculty whom can just now come to these discoveries.

All life on Earth uses a shared set of chemical compounds and reactions which provides a detailed model for universal biochemistry. Here, we introduce a more generalizable concept that is more akin to the kind of universality found in physics. We show how enzyme functions form universality classes with common scaling behavior. Together, our results establish the existence of a new kind of biochemical universality, independent of the details of life on Earth’s component chemistry. (Abstract excerpt)

In physics, the notion of coarse-graining is critical to identifying universality classes, because it allows ignoring most details of individual systems in favor of uncovering systematic behavior across different systems. (3)

Garcia-Sanchez, Miguel, et al. The Emergence of Interstellar Molecular Complexity Explained by Interacting Networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 119/30, 2022. Centro de Astrobiologia (CSIC/INTA), Torrejon de Ardoz, Spain and Swedish University of Agricultural Science researchers including Jacobo Aguirre contribute a frontier synthesis by adding and applying such equally real and vitally present interlinking webworks to nature’s intrinsic formation of nodal biomolecules. This integration is achieved and demonstrated by through novel NetWorld algorithmic computations. As the quote says, an especial value accrues by virtue of a quantified perception of commonly recurrent processes and vivifying anatomies.

The road to life is punctuated by transitions toward complexity, from astrochemistry to biomolecules and eventually, to living organisms. But studies of these original phases remain a challenge to which complexity and network theory has not been much applied. We introduce a computational framework whereby simple networks simulate the most basic elements of life as they interact to form complex structures. We observe a resultant explosion of diversity when the parameter representing the environment reaches a critical value. While this model is abstract, its predictions well mimic the molecular evolution in the interstellar medium during the emergence of chemical complexity. Altogether our work suggests that the rules leading to biological complexity may be relatively simple as they engender universal patterns. (Abstract/Significance)

All in all, we believe that (i) the similarities between the results in [30], based on models that are firmly rooted in classical ecological theory and checked with real data, (ii) those obtained from molecular abundances in interstellar clouds, and (iii) the ones introduced by our computational environment, derived from a simple framework with no a priori ecological or chemical assumptions, are not coincidental. They instead hint that the long path from the creation of the basic prebiotic compounds in the interstellar medium to the origin of life and its evolution on the early Earth could show universal patterns and common phenomena at all scales and across all stages. (8)

Gontier, Nathalie, et al. Introduction: Language and Worldviews. Topoi. 41/3, 2022. University of Lisbon, Barcelona, Porto, Seville and Pavia scholars introduce the issue’s topical subject and survey some 15 contributions, see Abstract for more. Its reach by design traces all the way back to Animal Minds and the Evolution of Communication and Language. A major essay by the lead editor well summarizes, posted next. For example see Language: The Ultimate Artifact to Build, Develop and Update Worldviews by Lorenzo Magnani, The Work of Words: Poetry, Language and the Dawn of Community by Ricardo Santos-Alexandre and Language, Thought and the History of Science by Carmela Chateau-Smith. See also Evolutionary Epistemology by Nathalie Gontier and Michael Bradie in the Journal for General Philosophy of Science. (52/2, 2021) for an issue on this companion endeavor.

This special issue on Language and Worldviews grew out of a workshop on Language Throughout the Ages (Google) that was organized by the Applied Evolutionary Epistemology Lab (appeel.fc.ul.pt) at the University of Lisbon in 2019. Language and worldviews are favorite topoi for philosophers of language or mind, science, or religion, epistemology or logic. How language establishes, mediates, constructs, or enacts a contextual milieu amongst peoples, and between basic physical, sociocultural, and biological aspects is a huge, vital realm. (Excerpt)

Gontier, Nathalie, et al, eds.. Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. The volume editors are NG, University of Lisbon, Andy Lock, Massey University, Australia and Chris Sinha, University of East Anglia, UK. The quotes next provide a good gist of this expansive scholastic collection as it has become newly enhanced by diverse global collaborations. Typical authoritative entries could be A Timeline for the Acquisition of Symbolic Cognition in the Human Lineage by Ian Tattersall, The Aboutness of Language and the Evolution of the Construction-ready Brain by Michael Arbib, The Evolution of Language and Speech by Antonio Benítez-Burraco and Dan Dediu, Animal Signals and Symbolism by Ulrike Griebel and D. Kimbrough Oller and Archewriting: The Symbolic Evolution of Script and Narrative by Rukmini Bhaya Nair. But from our late 2020s vantage, this historic collective cognitive sapience by which to accumulate a worldwise knowledge repository could be seen, in retrospect, as a intended descriptive re-presentation of a self-making participatory genesis to itself.

The capacity to symbolize and the use of symbols concern every aspect of human life. This dedicated volume investigates how such a capability arose in human development and is expressed in many areas of societal life. Thirty-nine topical chapters grouped into six themes that focus on epistemological, psychological, anthropological, ethological, linguistic, and social-technological dimensions. The handbook presents an in-depth, interdisciplinary, and comprehensive overview of the state of the art and science of this premier distinction of our individual and collective Earthumanity. (Publisher)

The Evolution of the Biological Sciences This chapter introduces the main research schools along which the field of evolutionary biology has proceeded. It was for some time as n the paradigm that combines traditional (Neo) Darwinism with those of the genomic Modern Synthesis. This 20th century view has since diversified into the Micro-, Meso-, and Macro-evolutionary schools which altogether compose an Ecological Evolutionary Developmental Biology (Eco-Evo-Devo). A 21st century version studies Reticulate Evolution (see NG) by means of symbiosis, lateral gene transfer, infective heredity, and hybridization. My second chapter examines how these different aspects are implemented into the symbolic sciences such as psychology, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, sociology, and economics. (Chap. 1, N. Gontier)

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