Stuart Kauffman - How Complexity and Emergence Create a Cosmos?

The universe began as a simple hot bath of particles and forces. How then the vast diversity of things we find on earth today? Much depends on the principles of 'complexity' and 'emergence'. What are they? How does each work and how do they work together?



Stuart Alan Kauffman is an American theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth.


Closer to Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[SRAVALM]

Great video. Gotta give it up to Robert for always being able to catch the drift of everybody he interviews -- that's a skill.

[Life_]

The world is much richer than we thought!

[-by-_Publishing_LLC]

(0:05) *RLK: **_The two concepts of complexity and emergence always come into a way of thinking."_* ... Arguing that reductionism can explain everything is like arguing that your time in the womb explains who you are 50 years later, or that a $10M Hollywood mansion can be explained by studying bricks and nails, or that da Vinci's painting, _"The Annunciation"_ can be fully understood through examining linen fibers and pigments.

Reductionism is excellent for tracing everything back to an origin point, but an origin point does not dictate an outcome. It only serves as a starting point for everything that follows.

"Existence" can be reduced to "information, " and at the earliest stage of Existence was the smallest, logically conceivable sliver of information. That's as far back as reductionism can take you. To this extent, we all owe our origin to that single, archetypal sliver of information, but what that data has become 13.8 billion years later is literally _light years_ beyond its humble beginnings.

Information constantly evolves into _higher forms_ of information to which the latter always transcends the former.

[andrewferg]

“It is clear that these physical-only processes somehow on the one hand give us the right answers, but on the other hand that they are controlled by another world of ideas somehow; they’re coming from somewhere else.” 
(Professor Nima Arkani-Hamed)

[chyfields]

It helped me to visualise the ribbons of a MayPole. The original beam of the Maypole begins as one. With each generation the dance changes, as the ribboned threads of the Maypole spread out, then co-mingle, furl and unfurl, down the line with other ribboned threads.

[AtlasMeCH]

See I don't disagree with the ceaseless creativity or possibility, I just think it's more of a revelation of the significance of progress in the sense of starting over and integrating. Courageous Reasoning/Reasonable Courage, Open Minded yet Opinionated. A Virtue of Revelation itself.

[rajendratayya]

Just as infinity cannot be resolved numerically, equally complexity cannot be graphically.

[jeffpritchard]

Call me crazy but it sounds like Stuart Kauffman is channeling Heideggerian phenomenology. The Being of beings is not a being, et al. Makes sense to me.

[mikefinn]

I was working on "The Energetic Principle of Natural Selection" and thought that the universe essentially used natural selection for all of its evolution. From making a hydrogen atom to joining two and then more together. Stable molecules persisted and evolved onward to life. Random collisions "mutations" led to something more or they didn't.

[rc]

new images from JWST are, for the lack of a better word, just "Spectacular"... but the question remains: how many more galaxies are out there and why do they all have similar characteristics 🤔

[jamesruscheinski]

How does quantum field mechanics fit in with reductionism? Might quantum fields play a role in emergence, maybe as collection of probabilities?

[jamesruscheinski]

Does energy (of cells) carry out natural selection?

[jamesruscheinski]

Natural selection not needing physics, and biosphere creating possibilities, has something to do with environment? Active agent in environment for evolution that brings greater complexity and emergence?

[jamesruscheinski]

Do the possibilities of biosphere and adaptation from evolution work together for natural selection? Could nature (selection) bring together possibilities and adaptations?

[jamesruscheinski]

Is emergence related to natural selection?

[HyzersGR]

How is the niche of a fish bladder different than any other niche?

[followyourbliss]

'The world is much richer than we thought.' What does that mean?

[frontsidegrinder]

Imagine Alan Watts or Terence McKenna would sit in front of Robert.

[MrJPI]

Exellent, Kauffman is an intelligent man who thinks a speaks clearly.

[lsdc]

Whitehead’s influence on Kauffman’s thinking is evident in this clip: the central and essential role of creativity, and the invocation and relationship of the realms of the possible and the actual.