Stuart Kauffman - Is the World Self-Organizing?

Are the laws of nature or physics blind in that they seek no direction and have no ‘purpose’? That’s the scientific paradigm. But the world works so well: from a very simple beginning, complexities and beauties have emerged. Some say that there are deep ‘organizing principles’ in the laws of nature such that complexities are natural and expected outcomes.

Stuart Alan Kauffman is a 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.

[AdamGeest]

I wish my body self-organized as efficiently as Kauffman’s. The guy is in his 80s here. How is this possible?

[herrrmike]

Now, we’re getting to the good stuff.

[thomasellis]

Brilliant! Hope for the future is hard to come by, but this gave me some hope: endlessly propagating and utterly unpredictable ramifying possibilities...

[sgs]

Well about 95% of that went over my head.

[MrSanford]

Basically, its nihilistic creativity beyond form and purpose . It makes sense, because the world created nominalism, not the other way around. All we truly know is that we are in the middle of something.

[JeffBedrick]

Stuart Kaufman is one of the few interviewees in this series who actually makes any sense.

[BrianBrawdy]

A World Beyond Physics is one of my favorite books!

[TerryBollinger]

What a delightfully insight-packed video! 2:34 SK: _“… the parts and processes … interact with one another, and out of that emerges a kind of crystallization [that does] something useful. [__1:53__] It means, if we're right, that Newton after 350 years has reached a terminus.”_

Picture a universe where, far from being inexplicable givens, Newton’s concepts of space, time, and particles emerge together from a scintillating sea of almost uncountable but experimentally observable energic actions. These simpler units defy not only our usual concepts of how space and time behave but also collectively _define_ space and time, at least within the limits of a single current inertial frame.

That universe would be ours. The units of action that defy classical space and time would be quantum wave collapse — not the absurdly overcomplicated version of that phrase that inevitably ends up attached to undefinable and untestable words, but the simple microscopic version in which innumerable and often thermal exchanges of momentum “relocalize” and restart the ability of particles to form waves that reflect and diffract.

The word “relocalize” is the key. When applied often enough at sufficiently short momentum wavelengths, such operations collectively begin to draw out the blurry images we think of as “space, ” “time, ” and “particles.” Quantum uncertainty was never about fuzzy particles in pristine, perfect, inexplicable Newtonian spacetime. It was, and always has been, the blurring of purpose that happens whenever you look at some collective emergent behavior a bit too closely.

I must note, however, that no matter how powerful binary networks may be for modeling biological emergence, they cannot possibly by themselves model the deeper level of creative emergence behind information-preserving — and thus biology-enabling — Newtonian physics. That is because the certainty of binary logic is very much a part of that same emergence.

More is needed, and it needs to come from that same indifference to space and time seen in collapse. The deep universe is more complex than what we see, and it is not fully described by any of the physics currently existing. That includes space-resident quantum physics, though that does give delightful hints.

Nor is there any need to restrict all of the features of the deep universe solely to physics, since the pixilated emulation of Newtonian physics is not, and can never be, that complete. My best guess is that even the networks of biology will, in time, be shown to need and make use of deeper levels of non-space, non-time physics.

The challenge for insightful folks like you, Professor Kauffman, is how you and folks like you can convey your message to those who need it most. Imagine the kinds of research that might break loose if the emergence of spacetime itself proves to be the first and most powerful example of the ceaseless creativity you have been describing for many years.

(an updated PDF of this 2023-07-16 comment is available at sarxiv dot org slash apa)

[drachmirable]

A great conversation, but I kept thinking I was listening to Billy Bob Thornton with different hair.

[jaysonp]

Hilarious that he's arguing against himself. Order is a reduction of complexity, which most definitely has an underlying mechanism behind it. Even in his idea, the fact that boolean interactions take place and give rise to organizing systems is reductionist.

[jeffkwells]

Robert Lawrence Kuhn is an amazing listener. He frequently picks up on waffle and asks a penetrating question which forces the interviewee to clarify his ideas. Pity he's still interested in God.

[harrybellingham]

the emergence is more akin to wave function collapse and superposition than to logic and reason.

[jaelhector]

You cannot change your past, but you can change your present and future. From the past, you only learn, and in your present, you fix the mistakes you made in the past. By repairing in the present what you broke in the past, you will live happily without worrying about anything in the future.
Sincerely, Hector

[Roscoe]

So this isn't a physics issue. Even string theory doesn't touch this. And I think we dropped Darwin somewhere along the line. Natural selection doesn't go far enough. So now we are into consciousness and organization built into matter and energy to form biological entities. We may not like talking about God as supernatural but then "ceaseless creativity" may just be another transmogrification.

[rxbracho]

What Stuart is talking about is the Principle of Wholeness under which certain forces, like gravity, work to produce wholes: fields of activity from parts that are functionally related, giving rise to consciousness within the whole, ranging from "proto awareness" in material wholes to "reflective consciousness" or "self consciousness" in humans. This is a view espoused initially by Jan Smuts in his seminal book "Holism and Evolution" (1926), and greatly expanded by the philosopher Dane Rudhyar in many books, notably "The Planetarization of Consciousness" (1977, 2nd edition) and "Rhythm of Wholeness" (1983), published shortly before his death in 1985, in which he details his metaphysics of reality. Wholeness is, in essence, the interplay of Unity and Multiplicity in a never ending Movement of Wholeness that gives rise to the Cycle of Being, half of which is the existent universe.

I love the concept of ceaseless creativity, which cannot happen in a world where mechanistic motion is the only agent for change, and thus for evolution. Entropy is against creativity because it doesn't form relations, it breaks them. How would any force following the 2nd law of thermodynamics form atoms from the maximum entropy shown in the CMB? Creativity happens because a whole is more than the sum of its parts, and its formation follows the concept of negentropy, more prevalent in the early universe.

BTW, there is a Godhead state within Wholeness, so there is Divinity, and even Divine Creation, without resorting to a supernatural God, or even a Creator. It is simply fueled by the Divine Compassion towards the failures of past cycles. Creation constantly supplies quanta of energy to impulse new cycles of existence, with a cycle being a "time whole" since, by the way, Time is cyclical.

[simonhibbs]

"The biosphere is building, without selection, it's own possibilities of future becoming".
Kauffman believes in strong emergence, although he prefers to call it radical emergence. He has proposed a theory called TAP (Theory of the Adjacent Possible) that includes a commitment to downward causation and teleology. He believes the biosphere cannot, in principle, be reduced to the physical.

He's suggesting the biosphere obeys a directed principle that causes it to create new ecological niches, for the purpose that evolution can fill it. This is basically settlers in a new land praising god for giving them the new fertile land, while settlers in another new land starve to death in a desert. That's basically what happens in evolution, individuals randomly develop novel characteristics. Those characteristics that have a useful function are advantageous and tend to survive in the species, praise be, while the vast majority that happen to be disadvantageous die out.

It is true that ecosystems tend to increase in complexity, up to a point, because life diversifies in order to maximise the utilisation of resources, but it does so through completely undirected processes. Evolution through natural selection is a process, but I think it's a mistake to talk about these things in terms of organising principles. The beauty and power of evolution through natural selection is to show precisely how complexity and efficiency can arise from the bottom up, without any organising principle.

We can write high level descriptions of resulting behaviours, such as population dynamics, but the universe isn't writing laws that cause population dynamics behaviour to occur. If there is no effect on a component of a system that cannot be explained in terms of causal interactions with other components of the system, then there's nothing for strong emergence to explain.

[bretnetherton]

Awareness is known by awareness alone.

[simonlinser]

It's weird this makes me think of this: maybe one could think to themselves by looking at some good or product, "i could make this myself it's easy, you just get this piece of wood put it with this other piece glue it drill holes it is easy, i could get some seeds grow this food it's the same thing. But then you look at how production really works especially today, and you realize there's a different layer that we don't have access to. It's like where do you get the material and how sharp are your tools. When machines are used, a different thing is occurring and it's done with math. Like math is creating the stuff but we think we can see the machine and do the same thing. You can. But it takes too long and doesn't make sense because it's cheaper to buy. This also means we can now create materials that were impossible to make previously.

[mutinG]

Why would you feel anything at all about the world? Breaking rules of the universe is not appropriate to life.🎶💥🌸

[mikefinn]

"The principles are chance and number". Is this consistant with a large pool of quantum states collapsing in a world of probabilities. Reality emerges along the path with the most connections, the highest probability. It flows along the path of least resistance. Like a river flowing down hill.
There may be a feed-back loop that fine tunes the outcome.