Theos-Talk Archives (November 1999 Message tl00138)

> Bart--Tell me more about how our evolving consciousness would create
> mutations.  The concept would explain the uniqueness of humans, but what
> about all other creatures?  What troubles me is the lack of any good
physical
> explanation for the existence of life in its incredible complexity and
myriad
> forms.  "Evolution" can only explain variation within "kinds".  Anything
else
> creates improbabliities far too stretched for credulity.  Randy

There are a number of different fully scientific explanations developing for
the existence of life. For instance, the complexity theorists studying
self-organization and emergent systems. Read Stuart Kauffman's "The Origins
of Order". He is, by the way, a biologist - no mysticism involved. Science,
until the advent of modern computing, was missing the tools necessary to
begin investigating the world from the "ground up" ... i.e., instead of
taking realities and using the reductionist method of attempting to break
them into their compontent pieces, rather, working from those tiny little
pieces upwards. Example ... macroeconomics studies things like "inflation" -
but inflation is really a variable that applies at a particular scale of
measurement. Economies, however, don't actually exist at that level ... what
they really are composed of is millions of daily decisions and transactions
between individuals either buying or selling products and services. With
large research computers, it is now possible to begin to model the means by
which large-scale phenomena arises from individual units. To, for instance,
define a bunch of "individuals" ... i.e., agents defined by a computer to
have particular characteristics (for instance, they want to "eat" every day,
and are each able to perform some sort of "work"), and rules of behaviour
(for instance, each will try to maximize the amount of "food" they get from
the "work" they do), and then set them free (within the computer program) to
interact with each other. This sort of modeling is being done in a number of
different fields - from economics to biology to physics to the environment.
And across the board, those different sciences are all glimpsing similar
things: That there is, apparently at some deep level, a universal tendency
towards *order*. When economists set those agents loose to interact, each
*only* knowing a small set of things, and governed by a small set of rules,
and able to only interact with those in their immediate vicinity, and run
this system through several hundred million iterations (which takes a matter
of minutes) ... stunning patterns develop. The first people to play with
this stuff literally stood back in awe ... as they *watched* economies
develop, watched macroeconomic variables form themselves ... watched agents
form patterns and break them ... watched some agents die (because they went
for a given number of iterations without being able to obtain "food")
watched groups of them clump together ... etc., etc. Thing is, things like
"markets", and disproportionate accumulations of "wealth" in some areas with
a lack of necessities in others, and "inflation" and other macro qualities
came into existence ... *emerged* spontaneously - the thing is, none of the
*individual agents* planned any of these things - all they knew is
micro-level and immediate responses to their local environment.

Complexity work really started in the mid 80's ... when someone (in a
bizarre intuitive act) decided that one of the problems with science was
that each field had become hyper-specialized, developed its own vocabulary,
and while this permitted each one to probe very deeply into its own special
area, it was also preventing insights to be shared across disciplines. A
group of physicists and economists were invited to attend a conference, and
attempt to see whether they might discover anything useful in one another's
disciplines. Curiously enough, within a day, they had discovered that they
*did* speak a common language - mathermatics - and became even more
interested when they started realizing that there were some striking
similarites across their disciplinary boundaries - for instance, the
equations in fluid dynamics that would describe the effects of a rock
dropped in a pool of water looked shockingly similar to the equations
desribing the effects of a market shock (e.g., the effects on the oil market
in the mid-70's when OPEC formed and suddenly affected oil supply and
pricing). They caught the first glimpse of the possibility that there might
be profound underlying principles governing *every* system ... be it
economic, physical, chemical, biological, etc., etc. That each science might
really only be an angle of vision on a single whole.

(In fact, the Santa Fe Institute, one of the birthplaces of Complexity
Theory, has an ongoing project called "CLAW", or "Crude Look At the Whole"
... and they are attempting to (get this) sketch an initial model of
*reality*. In other words, say the sun reaches a particular point in its 11
years cycle, this affects weather in a certain way, which affects plant and
animal life in a particular way, which affects human agriculture and
populations in a variety of ways, which will affect economics systems,
political movements, etc., etc. No discipline alone could even begin to
glimpse this picture, but using a combination of disciplines, each modeled
as systems within a large computer model, and permitted to begin interacting
with each other ... well you get the picture.)

At any rate, one of the more interesting concepts arising out of all this is
the principle that *order at one scale is capable of emerging spontaneously
out of individual interactions between agents at the scale beneath it*. In
other words, a single living cell is composed of chemical interactions
between molecules whose interactions are defined solely by the laws of
chemistry. No molecule knows what a "cell" is, all they do is interact,
according to basic rules, with its neighboring chemicals. The organs in our
body - our heart - is formed of individual cells - none of which is aware of
an entity called a "heart", each only following basic biological laws, and
interacting solely with its surrounding cells, but out of this emerges a
single entity called a beating heart.

Point is, there most definately *is* current scientific work going on in
multiple disciplines that are looking at order in systems, how it arises,
the fact that there seems to be some latent *predilection* towards order
govering reality. Yes - it contains what may become potential explanations
for why "life" formed in the first place, but more than that, even suggests
that the spontaneous emergence of "life" is really only a special case of a
much larger principle.

The problem with this sort of research, however, and the chief reason it is
as of yet hardly ever heard of, is that its chief insights can *only* be
understood if one speaks math.

I'm not sure if you will be helped by it - you seem to want everything
explained in simple english. In response to Dallas, you say you don't want
to learn the Theosophical vocabulary, but want basic reasoning established
that doesn't require it. Trouble is, you are asking questions that *aren't*
capable of being grasped with simple english ... whether it is the
Theosophical vocabulary, or the far *more* complex vocabularies of
biological or physical sciences, or the even *more* complex and fundamental
language of mathematics ... in order to understand and even be able to think
about questions like the origins of life ... you're gonna need to grasp far
more than simplistic logic framed in simple english. As Crowley put it,
english was mostly created by people who wanted to sell cheese to each other
with as few misunderstandings as possible, and is hardly suited to even
beginning to speak about either scientific or metaphysical realities. -JRC