My Background
When I came to Harvard in 1958, I had studied physics at Brown, reading about
entropy in
Arthur Stanley Eddington's
The Nature of the Physical World, his 1927 Gifford Lectures.
The entropy law, the second law of thermodynamics, isn't like all the other physical laws, Eddington said. For one thing, it isn't
time reversible like Newton's laws. For another, it has qualities unlike any other physical quantity, it feels more like beauty or harmony.
Maybe it's something like good and evil, I thought.
I asked all my professors a question, "if the universe began in a state of thermal equilibrium, maximum entropy, how can we have so much information in the world today?"
Only two professors took me seriously. One was
David Layzer. He spent the rest of his life on the problem. I've been reading philosophy and physics for seventy years to explain it.
Does the Universe Develop and Evolve?
Of course it does. We study Cosmic Evolution (
Eric Chaisson’s book), including
Galactic Evolution, Stellar Evolution, and Planetary Evolution.
Now Planets, Stars, Galaxies, and the Universe itself are all
Complex Systems.
Complexity Science studies all of them.
Since Georgi's satellite meeting on complexity science September 4 in Siena, where I had hoped to meet
Paul Davies, I've drafted a brief
history of complex systems showing how Davies turned the Santa Fe Institute toward theology and
teleology.
Of course
Life is also a complex system, but I want to discuss a
vital difference between living things and the
abiotic universe.
The difference is the
role of
information.
In particular, what is the role of
information in the deep philosophical questions of "
value,
meaning,
purpose, and
value,
The universe and its galaxies, stars, and planets are all rich in
abstract immaterial information. This
immaterial information needs
matter to be embodied and
energy to be
communicated, for scientists to
observe and to
measure that information!
All the objects in the universe are
concrete material information structures, composed of matter and energy components, from the quarks, gluons, electrons, and photons present at the origin, through the atoms, molecules, and macromolecules that could not be stable until the universe cooled to the current surface temperature of the Sun (around 6000K),
about 380 thousand years after the origin of the universe.
Non-living objects like atoms, molecules, planets, stars, and galaxies are
passive information structures. They are entirely controlled by fundamental physical forces - the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravitation. These objects do not control themselves. They are
reducible to physical causes.
They are not acting. They are acted upon.
But living things, you and I, are
active dynamic growing information structures, we are forms through which matter and energy continuously flow. And it's the
top-down communication of biological information that controls those flows!
Now the fundamental laws of thermodynamics apply to both living and non-living systems.
The second law says that entropy (disorder) must always increase, suggesting a "heat death" for the universe.
It also suggests the universe began with a vast amount of information, since increasing entropy has been decreasing information since the origin and there's so much left today.
But I'll show how the universe began with a
bare minimum of information.
And I'll explain how it avoids that "heat death."
First we need to consider
Laplace's Demon.
Pierre Simon Laplace knew Newton's Laws of classical mechanics extremely well.
He imagined an
intelligent demon who knows the positions and the velocities of every particle in the universe and the demon knows the forces on all those particles.
The demon could then
know the entire past and the future of the universe.
In that case,
information would be a constant of nature (plotted as the blue line below).
My MIT colleague
Seth Lloyd thinks information is a conserved constant, like the conservation laws for mass and energy. He also thinks the universe is a computer!
However, midway through the 19th century,
Lord Kelvin realized that the
then just discovered second law of thermodynamics requires that information can not be constant. It would be being destroyed as the entropy
irreversibly increases.
The physicist
Hermann Helmholtz described this as the "
heat death" of the universe.
Now Kelvin’s claim of a "heat death" would be correct if the universe were a closed system.
But it's not closed.
The universe is open and infinite. We'll see how an open universe can actually create negative entropy locally to avoid thermal equilibrium.
In his famous 1944 article "What Is Life?,"
Erwin Schrödinger famously argued that
life "feeds on negative entropy."
Schrödinger’s source for negative entropy was our Sun. With the bright Sun as a heat source and the dark night sky as a heat sink, the Earth is a thermodynamic engine.
But Schrödinger
didn't know how the Sun came to be such a source of negative entropy.
That’s a problem for cosmology. We need to explain how a universe beginning in thermal equilibrium with maximum entropy (total disorder) can create a spherically symmetric star sending a stream of negative entropy to Earth.
Arthur Stanley Eddington was the great scientist who proved
Albert Einstein's general relativity claim that space is curved at a 1919 eclipse expedition (making Einstein famous).
Eddington suggested in 1934 that the universe expansion, discovered by Edwin Hubble in 1927, might create new "phase-space" cells faster than the particles can randomly fill those cells and maximize the entropy.
Note that the universe could allow local reductions in the entropy, what I called "pockets" of negative entropy at the time, but only if the global entropy elsewhere is increased even more to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics.
In his 1989 book
Cosmogenesis, my Harvard mentor
David Layzer developed Eddington's idea. Layzer showed that the
maximum possible entropy of the expanding universe increases much faster than the
actual entropy increases. Disorder (entropy) and order (negative entropy) are simultaneously increasing in the universe.
I adapted the diagrams in Layzer’s book to create this picture of his Growth of Information.
Between the
actual entropy and the
maximum possible entropy you can see there's plenty of room for galaxies, stars, and planets to form.
Notice that the universe didn't have a lot of information at the origin. It also didn't have the same information that it has today, as Laplace and my MIT colleague
Seth Lloyd believe. Lloyd also believes the universe is a computer!
The expansion of the universe creates new space, which means there are many more
possible "phase-space" cells where particles can
actually be distributed.
I decided to call this the
Cosmic Creation Process , based on Eddington and Layzer’s insight into the growth of order in the universe.
My Cosmic Creation Process is the
first of four examples of random possibilities being created that can lead to new information in the universe.
The others are
I call these all
"two-stage models." First
possibilities, then a new
actuality.
In the first stage new
possibilities randomly appear.
In the second stage one possibility becomes
actual.
Biological Information and Its Communication
In his famous 1944 article "What Is Life", Erwin Schrödinger also explained how genetic information could be stored in the atomic structure of a long molecule or "aperiodic crystal." That molecule was found to be DNA just nine years later by
James Watson and
Francis Crick in 1953.
Just three years before information in the genetic code was discovered,
Claude Shannon formulated his theory of the communication of information, describing digital "bits" of information as 1's and 0's (or yes and no answers to questions). Shannon said that the amount of information communicated depends on the number of possible messages. With eight possible messages, one actual message
communicates three bits of information (23 = 8).
If there is only one possible message, there is no new information. This corresponds to the
deterministic view that
there is only one possible future!. Both that future and the entire past are completely
pre-determined from the beginning of time, and the total information in the universe is a conserved constant, as many physicists, and some world religions, believe.
The Problem of Free Will
Again inspired by Arthur Stanley Eddington, who suggested in 1928 that
Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle could put a "chink" in determinism, David Layzer and I debated about the
free will problem.
In the 1970’s I came up with my "two-stage model" of free will, in the first stage
alternative possibilities randomly come to mind, in the second stage the agent makes
adequately determined decisions or choices.
Researching the literature for years since then. I’ve now identified
many philosophers and scientists who proposed the same two-stage model, well before me and after me.
Over the years I debated the problem of free will with the libertarian philosopher
Robert Kane and the
determinist/
compatibilist philosopher
Daniel Dennett. Time permitting in the discussion, I'll tell you more about them.
A Two-Stage Model for Evolution
In the 1990's I extended my two-stage model of
first possibilities, then actualities to all the processes in the universe that create all new information and information structures. This obviously included Darwinian evolution. Here is the evolutionary biologist
Ernst Mayr describing the two-step process.
Evolutionary change in every generation is a two-step process: the production of genetically unique new individuals and the selection of the progenitors of the next generation. The important role of chance at the first step, the production of variability, is universally acknowledged, but the second step, natural selection, is on the whole viewed rather deterministically: Selection is a non-chance process.
Toward a New Philosophy of Biology, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 159
Now all complex adaptive systems are obviously creative. And the self-organizing
autopoetic description of
Umberto Maturana and
Francesco Varela obviously describes them perfectly. But the "self" in a Benard cell is
not communicating information to its component atoms.
It has no thoughts, no intention, no goals, no
purpose.
A Benard cell is a
passive information structure,
reducible to its components. True, it is a
dissipative structure, at the edge of chaos, as
Ilya Prigogine saw, but it is not alive. And finally also true, the
autocatalytic process is
top-down causation controlling or
constraining lower level processes. But these top-down forces are purely physical. Benard cells are not alive.
As I see it,
Purpose enters the universe when
Life appears.
But (corrected, October 2)
Value in the sense of an Objective
Good and some
Meaningful Information existed long before life appeared.
Let me explain...
The only place in the universe where life is known to exist is our
biosphere, first named by the Austrian chemist Edward Seuss in the nineteenth century as the interface of the lithosphere and lower atmosphere.
In the twentieth century, the biosphere was made more popular by
Vladimir Vernadsky, who inspired
Teilhard de Chardin's
noösphere. And today the biosphere is the locus of
James Lovelock and
Lynn Margulis'
Gaia Hypothesis.
If there exists an entity which has provided us with everything, to which we should be thankful, even reverential, it is surely the
biosphere, which is our
home in the universe.
Summary
I introduced my
cosmic creation process, which consists of two stages or steps, first the ontologically random generation of
alternative possibilities, followed by the
adequately determined selection of one
actual outcome.
I described how the cosmic creation process does not violate the second law of thermodynamics. And I showed how the universe avoids a "heat death," without violating the second law of thermodynamics.
I claimed this two-stage creative process helps to explain
three great problems in philosophy and science.
-
The problem of free will and determinism.
-
Shannon’s communication of information.
-
Darwin’s theory of natural selection
I've made four more original contributions to science that might be of interest.
-
A biological model of the mind as an Experience Recorder and Reproducer
and the problem of learned representation in AI.
-
The "weird" problem of Quantum Entanglement, which creates two "bits" of information instantly at widely separated locations, without "spooky action at a distance."
-
The Flatness of the Universe, that average spatial curvature may be zero, as confirmed by Steven Weinberg in his text Cosmology.
-
The Origin of Irreversibility, based on Einstein's 1916 paper on the absorption and emission of radiation, which was the basis of my Ph.D. thesis.
All my work is available on my website
informationphilosopher.com
My personal story is here -
informationphilosopher.com/about
The ERR model is here
informationphilosopher.com/mind/err/
Entanglement is discussed here -
informationphilosopher.com/entanglement/common_cause/
You can contact me here
bobdoyle@informationphilosopher.com
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