Physics and controversy

Thanks for posting the links to the essay in Nature, Tim. It is certainly within the same ballpark as my father's area of concentration. The fact that it was published in a mainstream magazine like "Nature" is definite progress because my father once submitted work to them (and other science magazines like them), but it was never printed. It was shot down as being too controversial.

It's still controversial. It's still basically a statement that the emperor is naked. Ellis writes (one excerpt is copied in, below) about aspects of the universe that are every bit as much in contravention with the "laws" of physics as Robert Rosen described. So, when is it OK to be "controversial"?

Many times on this list, as I have been describing my father's work and his attitude and the reasons for his attitude, I have gotten a lot of flack, both on and off list, urging me to not be so plain in my language. "You have to temper how you say things, so that you don't alienate people," I've been told, over and over again. I have only been willing to comply up to a point, because I think that to take all the teeth out of language takes the meaning out, too. (Whoever said that the truth should-- or could-- be "politically correct"??? The truth will inevitably offend somebody, just as prevaricating or not telling the truth will also offend. There is absolutely no way to please everyone...) Well, George F. R. Ellis says a lot of the same things Robert Rosen was saying (and I, on his behalf) about context, interaction, and the relations that define and bind all-- and the importance of these aspects to causality. I couldn't help recognizing that much of what Ellis wrote in that essay would have gotten me a whole pile of off-list e-mails, if I had said it! He says denigrating things about physics that even my father didn't say. And yet I don't hear any squawking from the assembled... How 'bout that.

Physics, complexity and causality

> [excerpt]: Can we nevertheless claim that the underlying physics uniquely causally determines what happens, even if we cannot predict the outcome? To examine whether we can, contemplate what is required for this claim to be true within its proper cosmic context. The implication is that the particles existing when the cosmic background radiation was decoupling from matter, in the early Universe, were placed precisely so as to make it inevitable that 14 billion years later, human beings would exist, Charles Townes would conceive of the laser, and Edward Witten would develop string theory. Is it plausible that quantum fluctuations in the inflationary era in the very early Universe ? the source of the perturbations at the time of decoupling ? implied the future inevitability of the Mona Lisa and Einstein's theory of relativity? Those fluctuations are supposed to have been random, which by definition means without purpose or meaning.

However, such meaning did indeed come into being. Ever higher levels of interaction and causality arose as complexity spontaneously increased in the expanding Universe, allowing life to emerge. Darwinian processes of selection guided the physical development of living systems, including the human brain.

It is possible that what actually happened was the contextual emergence of complexity: the existence of human beings and their creations was not uniquely implied by the initial data in the early Universe; rather the underlying physics together with that initial data created a context that made the existence of human beings possible. Conditions at the time of the decoupling of matter and radiation 14 billion years ago were such as to lead to the eventual development of minds that are autonomously effective. Such minds are able to create higher-level order, such as the Hubble Space Telescope and Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem, that embodies a purpose and meaning not in existence before.

With this view, the higher levels in the hierarchy of complexity have autonomous causal powers that are functionally independent of lower-level processes. Top-down causation takes place as well as bottom-up action, with higher-level contexts determining the outcome of lower-level functioning, and even modifying the nature of lower-level constituents. [end excerpt]