John G. Messerly's Blog, page 13

Edward Arlington Robinson, “Richard Cory”

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I recently posted Edward Arlington Robinson’s poem, “Dear Friends.” It reminded me of a poem of his I encountered in high school, “Richard Cory.” I find the poems connected, as both suggest that worldly acclaim is not what’s most important. 

“Richard Cory”

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked; 
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
‘Good-morning,’ and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread; 
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head. 

Dennett’s “I’ve Been Thinking”

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A reader has alerted me to the new memoir of Daniel Dennett, one of the world’s most prominent living philosophers. I have read quite a bit of Dennett over the years and have written about a few of his ideas. But a disclaimer. I have only read brief excerpts of the memoir so far as I await a library copy. Nonetheless, the prologue resonated deeply with me.

It recounts how he barely survived a “dissection of the aorta.” Reflecting on the experience helped him see with great clarity the many individuals who together saved his life—surgeons, anesthesiologists, neurologists, physical therapists, nurses, phlebotomists, x-ray technicians, as well as all the important persons who cooked and delivered the meals, cleaned the rooms, did the laundry, pushed his wheelchair, and on and on.

Still, Dennett doesn’t worship modern medicine, it deserves continual scrutiny, but he knows his life was saved by reasoning and empirical science and its technological applications. Every action is checked and rechecked systematically; appeals to faith are never tolerated. This contrasts sharply with the religious approach emphasizing heartfelt intentions which are utterly useless in such situations.  Dennett owes his life to reason and open inquiry.

As for those who say they prayed for him Dennett tries to translate their concerns into “they are wishing me the best.” Still, he has to resist replying “did you also sacrifice a goat?” And while this may seem to be a harsh reply, there are a number of reasons to think it appropriate. For one thing,  his well wishes could have actually done something useful either for him or for someone else. For another, overwhelming evidence shows that intercessory prayer doesn’t work. Moreover, you would be dissatisfied when a drug company whose drug harmed you told you that, while they had no evidence of the drug’s efficacy, they had prayed hard that it would work? I don’t think so and neither does Dennett. He is thankful for the high standards of rational inquiry to which the medical world holds itself.

Note that this is just the subject matter of the first pages of the prologue; I don’t know what is to come. But be prepared to encounter Dennett’s fearless intellect if you read the book. I’ll try to write more later when I have the chance to read it in full.

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Edward Arlington Robinson’s “Dear Friends”

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Dear Friends

Dear friends, reproach me not for what I do,
Nor counsel me, nor pity me; nor say
That I am wearing half my life away
For bubble-work that only fools pursue.
And if my bubbles be too small for you,
Blow bigger then your own: the games we play
To fill the frittered minutes of a day,
Good glasses are to read the spirit through.

And whoso reads may get him some shrewd skill;
And some unprofitable scorn resign,
To praise the very thing that he deplores;
So, friends (dear friends), remember, if you will,
The shame I win for singing is all mine,
The gold I miss for dreaming is all yours.

Edward Arlington Robinson (1869-1935) spent his childhood in a small town in Maine. His father was a prosperous merchant; his mother had been a schoolteacher. The parents were primarily interested in their two older sons and tended to ignore Edwin, though they recognized his exceptional intelligence.

Robinson studied at Harvard from 1891 to 1893 and afterward returned to Maine to stay for three years. Miserable and lonely, he moved to New York in 1895. His first volume of poems had been published while he was at home in Maine; in 1897 a second volume appeared. But he prospered neither as a poet nor as a businessman and ended by working as a checker of loads of shale during the building of the New York subway. Luckily, the president of the United States Theodore Roosevelt, found Robinson’s poetry impressive and helped him get a clerkship in the New York Customs House, where he worked until 1910.

Suddenly, with the poetic revival that preceded World War I, Robinson began to play a major role as a poet. He became widely read and exerted a strong influence on other poets, notably Robert Frost. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry three times in the 1920s, a record exceeded only by Frost, who received the prize four times in all.

The core of Robinson’s philosophy is the belief that man’s highest duty is to develop his best attributes as fully as possible. Success is measured by the intensity and integrity of his struggle; failure consists only of a lack of effort. Robinson was most interested in people who had either failed spiritually or who seemed failures to the world but had really succeeded in gaining spiritual wisdom.

For many this poem describes the kind of work I do.

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Note – I owe my summary of Robinson’s life to the brief biography at”American Poems.” The entry on Robinson can be found in full here.

Carl Sagan On Hypatia

More than 40 years ago I first heard the story of Hypatia from Carl Sagan. She was one of the last scientists to work in the great Library of Alexandria, a center of science and learning in the ancient world, and a repository for much of the world’s collective works in science and philosophy.  She was a mathematician, astronomer, physicist and head of the school of Neo-Platonic philosophy in Alexandria. There, in 415 AD, as the Roman empire disintegrated and Christianity gained power, the classical mind of the antiquity and the medieval mind of Christianity intersected–and a war between scientific rationality and religious fanaticism followed. Christianity would win and civilization would lose; the Dark Ages were born and Hypatia would be one of its first victims.

Today the battle between superstition and science, between faith and reason, continues. It is not the religious fundamentalists who are under attack but the scientists–harassed for demonstrating the evidence for everything from climate change to evolution. What does this foretell? Will we return to a medieval world of witchcraft and sorcery? Could we become a society that discourages the young from learning science? Could we return to what Sagan called “the demon-haunted” world? (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.)

Let us hope not. Let us all be guided the twin lights which illuminate the darkness–reason and compassion.

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This column is dedicated to the philosophers and scientists throughout history who have preserved and advanced our knowledge; and to Hypatia and all the oppressed women of the world.

Science & Ambiguity

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The Church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the Church. ~ Ferdinand Magellan

Those who proclaim that they positively know the truth merely reveal their ignorance. The universe is unimaginably large and our brains are infinitesimally tiny. Metaphysicians should be especially humble about drawing definitive conclusions about perplexing topics. Yet our science should not be dismissed; it has given us the little knowledge we possess. To abandon it would set the human species back a thousand years. As Einstein said, “All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike–and yet it is the most precious thing we have.”

So as we swing on a pendulum between belief and doubt, between certainty and skepticism, we should not lose faith. “Dare to know,” Kant said, was the motto of the Enlightenment. With arduous scientific searching, answers will continue to be forthcoming. In the meantime, we should not despair. Let that great 20th-century scientist Richard Feynman have the last word today. 

I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything, and many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit, but if I can’t figure it out, then I go on to something else. But I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t have to … I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn’t frighten me.

Negentropy, The Driving Force Behind the Rise and Evolution of Life

by Chris Crawford

I’m quite certain that Larry is wrong in his stated belief that thermodynamics is insufficient to explain complex life. (Please correct me if you think I have misunderstood his position.) The basic notion that negentropy is the driving force behind the rise and evolution of life has been around for perhaps a century; Schroedinger put all the pieces together for the public back in 1943.

I therefore propose the following short, simple piece that presents no arguments, instead offering links to resources that explain my points. My expectation is that these links will demonstrate to readers that my arguments represent the conventional views of most scientists.************************************************************************

I invite readers to examine any of the many sources explaining why negative entropy is the fundamental driving force behind the rise and evolution of life. An ideal starting point is the aforementioned short book by Erwin Schroedinger “What is Life?”. 

A PDF of the book can be found here:
http://strangebeautiful.com/other-texts/schrodinger-what-is-life-mind-matter-auto-sketches.pdf

a good general explanation of the thermodynamics of life:  https://www.wired.com/2017/02/life-death-spring-disorder/

a six-minute video:
https://bigthink.com/series/great-question/entropy-origin-of-life/

an article, which presents a radical extension of conventional ideas about how negentropy drives life. It’s a detailed analysis showing exactly HOW negentropy can drive the development of organized systems.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-thermodynamics-theory-of-the-origin-of-life-20140122/

In regard to the objection that the fundamental constants of physics must be precisely tuned for life to develop, I offer this humorous classic short story: https://web.archive.org/web/20190501130711/http://www.terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/

An hour-long video; I did not watch it all but skimmed it, and it seems fairly conventional:
 “Thermodynamics and the Origin of Life”

Chris

************************************************************************“Thermodynamics and the Origin of Life” the YouTube video

Rifkin’s Final Statement on Cosmological Natural Selection

[image error]by Lawrence Rifkin

There were many confident-sounding statements in the previous post about which I’d suggest a general reader check in with mainstream expert friends and colleagues to weigh in on before accepting. The specific suggestion that I made that natural selection can explain high-information entities like life and mind without negentropy is a complete mischaracterization of what was written and a straw man argument.

The causal explanation for why the laws of our universe are apparently exquisitely fine-tuned to allow for the formation of many billion trillions of stars (and life) cannot, I believe, be explained away by “negentropy” alone. The causal explanation for development of non-designed high-information entities like the human mind cannot, I submit, be explained away by thermodynamics alone. I believe naturalistic emergent explanations are needed and fundamental to explain and understand the development of these higher-level phenomena that quarks and energy flow underlie and sustain.

The puzzle of scientifically explaining life on Earth pre-Darwin seems analogous to me here. Natural selection explained the development of non-designed high-information entities, and at this point, we know of no other process that can explain the development of higher-level high-information entities like cells, bodies, and minds. One could say that energy flow and negentropy explain why you chose to read this right now, but wouldn’t one agree that higher-level fundamental explanatory explanations would be missing? For the analogy to biological natural selection to hold, cosmological natural selection would require cumulative change via differential survival of variants.

I do not intend to post further on this particular exchange. For readers interested in the underlying possibility of cosmological natural selection, I stand by my original publication in Scientific American Blogs and the links to other writers listed in this exchange. Physicist Lee Smolin popularized the idea of CNS in his book “The Life of the Cosmos,” in which he also promoted his idea for a possible mechanism. For anyone interested in videos and writings I’ve done on the intersection of meaning and science, my website is lawrencerifkin.com. I thank  Mr. Crawford for stimulating my responses and for his writing ability, and John Messerly for creating this forum for reflection and understanding. I hope this exchange stimulated thought, without needing to “take sides.”

And now, I am off to my very favorite bit of negentropy, the high-information system, exquisitely fine-tuned entity, that I prefer to think of as the love of my life.

Larry

Crawford Responds To Rifkin – Part 4

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Below are Crawford’s replies to Rifkin’s previous arguments highlighted in italics. But note that Rifkin has not replied to these new points.

Rifkin – Why is there a universe of matter and stars, and why do the laws of nature allow energy to organize matter into staggering complexity, including life and mind?

Crawford – The energy and matter are ALREADY organized! The total organization (negentropy) of the universe was maximal at the instant of the Big Bang and has been declining ever since. In the case of life on earth, humongous quantities of organization in the sun-generated lots of organized sunlight, a tiny fraction of which struck the earth, scattering large amounts of organization over its surface, a tiny fraction of which was manifested in the rise of living systems. The staggering organization of life and mind is but a microscopic fraction of the immense organization transmitted by the sun to the earth.

At this point, I will digress to preach about the meaning of entropy, negentropy, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Very few people grasp these concepts. Even after earning my master’s degree, I still had to spend years wrestling with the concepts to develop a firm understanding of what they meant. The physics community has been applying these concepts to cosmology with much success, and we’re seeing some interesting ideas here. Part of the problem that the non-science community has lies in the confusing terminology. The quick translation of “entropy” is “chaos” or “disorganization”, although these terms have an absolutist connotation that doesn’t fit well with the arithmetic nature of entropy. That is, any given system can be characterized as having more or less entropy, and the amount of entropy in any given system can change with time. We seldom think of “chaos” as existing in different degrees.

Even worse is the confusion arising from the term “complexity”. If all the people in a room crowd together in one corner, the spatial distribution of the crowd has LOW entropy, whereas if the people are milling about randomly throughout the room, then the spatial distribution of the crowd has HIGH entropy, even though we would characterize the latter situation as being more complex than the former situation. We think of complexity as demanding lots of information to specify, and that a situation requiring little information to specify as simple. Yet, we also think of complexity as entailing large amounts of order (negentropy). These two interpretations of complexity are contradictory.

For example, consider two bodies of text. One is, say, an encyclopedia; the other is an equally large amount of utterly random characters. The encyclopedia is clearly more organized than the random text — it has more negentropy. But it takes more information to specify the random text than the encyclopedia. If we compress both files, the compressed random text will be much larger than the compressed encyclopedia. I therefore suggest that you refrain from using the word “complexity” in your considerations of life — it will only lead to confusion. Better to think in terms of information content: negentropy.

Therefore, there’s nothing surprising about the rise of life on earth. Suppose that you were to fly an airplane over random locations on the earth, releasing huge quantities of hundred-dollar bills at these random locations. 70% of the bills would fall into the ocean and be lost; others would fall into Antarctica, the Sahara Desert, and other unpopulated locations where the money would have no effect. But in some places, the money would fall onto lots of poor people, and they in turn would use it to greatly increase their standard of living. So it is with negentropy. The sun blasts out huge quantities of negentropy, most of which falls on infertile soil (empty space). But some of it is lucky enough to hit a location with potential: earth. It is no more a surprise that life arises on the earth from the sun’s negentropy than that the people who get lots of money get rich.

Natural selection and genetics are part of the mechanism of the development of life, but the underlying driving force is the negentropy of sunlight. Turn off that sunlight and life on earth withers and dies.

Rifkin – My advocacy for cosmological natural selection was to further stimulate the idea that CNS is a powerful and logical scientific hypothesis to explain the existence of complexity and life in the universe as we know it.

Crawford – I have explained that the concept of negentropy explains the existence of life more clearly and more rigorously than CNS. The CNS hypothesis is not necessary to explain life; we have had that answer for a long time. Moreover, neither Mr. Smolin nor Mr. Susskind use CNS to explain the origin of life — at least, not in the discussion I read.

Rifkin – Black hole-generated variant universes (each its own Big Bang) is Smolin’s proposed mechanism for how CNS may occur. But the mechanism itself is not what I am advocating. (There are other speculative mechanisms, including a Big Crunch cyclic oscillating universe where each bang is a phase transition from a metastable state into another more stable state accompanied by a release of energy, with the laws of nature varying slightly in each round, the ones more conducive to star formation more likely to reproduce variants of those laws). My argument was not for any particular mechanism. It was for the underlying process of cosmological natural selection as a logical naturalistic explanatory foundation. So often in science, the mechanistic explanation and supportive evidence come long after the hypothesis. So arguing against the mechanism does not, to me, make one throw out the underlying idea itself. Will it forever be physically impossible to get contributory empirical evidence for or against CNS? Have we reached a physical limit of what can be known here? We’ve heard that before in the history of ideas. As I wrote, “it will come down to evidence. Our minds expand, while the God of the gaps gasps.”

Crawford – I have difficulty with that assertion; I cannot think of a single major scientific hypothesis that was NOT presented as a mechanism. Copernicus presented a detailed geometric mechanism. Darwin presented a detailed mechanism supported by a surfeit of examples. Special relativity began with the statement that the speed of light is constant for all observers regardless of their relative velocities; that seems a mechanism to me. General relativity was based on the observation that an observer in a box could not tell the difference between being accelerated and being in a gravitational field; that strikes me as a mechanism. I suspect that your definition of “mechanism” differs from mine. I’ll ask you to expand on the concept as you understand it.

As to the second statement regarding the lack of empirical evidence for CNS, I suggest that we base our conclusions on what we actually have, not on what we might (or might not) have in the future. The rational approach would conclude that the CNS hypothesis is untenable at present, and should be rejected at present. If at some future time, supporting evidence appears, we can reconsider the hypothesis at that time. To simply assume that the evidence will appear in the fullness of time is not rational.

Rifkin – Modern physics shows that black holes and the Big Bang have common physical attributes. In both, the curvature of space-time approaches the infinite. Our current scientific understanding is that our universe is felt to have emerged from a singularity (the Big Bang) and then formed singularities (black holes). If the singularity that was the Big Bang could create our universe, the hypothesis that the singularities that are black holes produce their own big bangs is certainly intriguing. But, again, the point in my original article and subsequently was to explore the explanatory power and logic of CNS, not any particular mechanism.

Crawford – Your point here relies on the equation of the two kinds of singularities — an assumption that has some appeal but remains quite a stretch. The fact that black holes create singularities and the Big Bang began with a singularity does not imply that the two singularities are of the same nature. The singularity that produced the Big Bang lasted an instant; the singularity produced by a black hole lasts almost forever. This raises the obvious question: does a newly created black hole continue to spew forth new universes every second? Every microsecond? Whenever it gains or loses mass? Or does a black hole generate a single universe upon its first formation, and then retain everything it had without observable change? Recall that black holes do not appear to lose anything (other than the slow loss of mass to the surrounding space) during their existence. If they’re spawning new universes, those universes aren’t coming from anything inside the black hole.

You have repeatedly declared that you are unconcerned with such mechanical objections to CNS, arguing that what is interesting and valuable is the notion of new universes being created with somewhat altered fundamental constants. I would argue that a phenomenon without a plausible mechanism is unworthy of consideration. Sure, it would be great fun to discuss a hypothesis in which the sun will slightly cool in the next few decades, exactly countering global warming so that humanity doesn’t have to suffer the consequences of its foolishness. But without any plausible mechanism for this to happen, the speculation is a waste of time.

Rifkin – If, as Mr. Crawford suggests, a good scientific hypothesis must be “simple” and “clear,” I suppose quantum mechanics and general relativity were not good hypotheses? In any event, the underlying mind-blowing powerful algorithm of biological natural selection is simple, clear, and elegant! It is the genetic mechanisms, the non-genetic influences, and ecological environments that are complicated. The logic of CNS, right or wrong, is also simple, clear, and elegant. The proposed mechanisms are not.

Crawford – Larry, you should learn what quantum mechanics and general relativity are. They are both based on simple, clear, and elegant notions. General relativity is particularly simple: Einstein asked whether a person inside an isolated box would be able to tell the difference between being in a gravitational field and being accelerated. The obvious answer — no — leads to all manner of complicated calculations that in turn reveal a great deal about the universe. Yes, the math is complicated. The hypothesis is not.

Similarly, quantum mechanics is based on the simple hypothesis (actually a conclusion from a variety of experiments), that it is not possible to measure both the position and momentum of a particle with arbitrary precision. That is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which itself turned out to be of little computational value, but when the concept was re-expressed in the form of wave mechanics, we had an extremely powerful computational device. You are certainly correct that the mathematical expressions that are consequential to the initiating formulations are horridly complex. However, the initiating formulations are indeed clear, simple, and elegant.

Rifkin – I agree about the pervasive and fundamental explanatory power of “negentropy” (the idea goes by many names, and involves energy flows, non-equilibrium systems, etc.). I believe Kauffman phrased it something like this: A universe that maximizes entropy at the fastest rate possible will evolve toward a state that is increasingly complex, organized, alive, and intelligent.”  The general idea is that complex life optimizes its ability to extract energy efficiently, and therefore facilitates overall entropy production. Disorder is the selection pressure for self-organized systems. All this is hugely fundamental and powerful. A book I highly recommend that explores these ideas is “The Romance of Reality” by Bobby Azarian.

Actually, living systems optimize their ability to extract negentropy, not energy. The energy carries the negentropy. Think in terms of money. A dollar bill is not intrinsically valuable. It carries or represents value. Value is what we work to obtain. Whether that value is represented by a dollar bill, four quarters, a number in a checking account, or an identification number on a smartphone is irrelevant. What is relevant is the value, not its representation. Negentropy, not energy, is the source of life.

Rifkin – What I believe Mr. Crawford misses is that while “negentropy” likely explains the formation of autocatalytic sets and simple peptides, current evidence suggests that no matter how much or what type of energy is then added, including sunlight, it does not create anything more complex. Simple molecules and nucleic acids are a far cry from the mind-boggling complexity of cells, to say nothing of bodies and minds. The explanation for the formation (not the continuation) of this next level of increasing complexity needs to go beyond an underlying non-equilibrium free-energy explanation.  So far, only natural selection (differential replication based on variation and fitness) can explain the coming into being of that more complex scale, phase, and level of non-designed organized complexity.

Crawford – Wow! That’s quite a statement! I must ask, if sunlight is not fundamentally necessary to the development of complex systems, then why is it that depriving the Earth of sunlight would result in the termination of almost all life on Earth? If I understand you correctly, your argument is that natural selection, not negentropy from the sun, drives the development of all life on earth. I certainly agree that natural selection is the higher-order mechanism for evolution, but natural selection is itself fueled by negentropy from the sun. All living systems derive the CAPACITY to engage in the behaviors necessary to drive natural selection from the negentropy they absorb that initially came from the sun.

Rifkin – The existence of the complex laws of nature themselves allow for the creation of matter and allow for the ability for high-level complex material phenomena to form in the first place, and the apparent exquisite fine-tuning of the parameters of nature that are necessary for these laws and their effects to occur, need a naturalistic explanation beyond the underlying dissipative entropy flow that sustains them.

Crawford – The flow of negentropy from the sun is entirely adequate to explain everything about the development of life on Earth. The peahen is capable of sexually selecting the peacock with the most flamboyant tail because the peahen expends negentropy in the brain processes that evaluate the beauty of peacock tails. The peahen has a brain capable of making such evaluations because it has absorbed enough negentropy from the food it has consumed to assemble the chemicals necessary to construct that brain.

One other thing: there is no need to invoke magical explanations for the particular combination of values of fundamental physical constants that permit life to develop in this universe. Let us imagine another universe in which the strong force is weaker than in our universe. In such a universe, large nuclei would not be able to form, and so the periodic table would be smaller. Indeed, we could go so far as to imagine a universe in which the only atoms that could form were hydrogen atoms. In such a universe, life as we know it could not exist. But who is to say that life could not form in some other fashion?

Indeed, imagine a scholar in some alternate universe possessed of different fundamental physical constants. Suppose we present that scholar with the values of fundamental physical constants in our own universe, and challenge that scholar to determine from those numbers the kind of life that might evolve in such a universe. Do you really think that our alien-universe scholar would be able to predict kangaroos? Pterodactyls? Crabs? Venus fly traps? I very much doubt that such predictions would be possible. So if we turn the tables around, and challenge our best scholars to predict the nature of life in a universe in which the fine structure constant is 10% smaller, or the speed of light is 100 meters per second, we should expect them to throw up their hands and declare the task impossible.

The fact that we cannot imagine the nature of life in other circumstances does not imply that such life cannot exist.

Crawford (Leonard Susskind) and Rifkin (Lee Smolin) On Cosmic Natural Selection Part 3

As a follow-up to our recent discussion, Chris Crawford offers a brief summary of the debate between the eminent theoretical physicists  Lee Smolin and Leonard Susskind  on the topic of cosmic natural selection.

by Chris Crawford

Yesterday I decided that it might be helpful if I happened to know something about the topic, so I set to work digging up material on this issue. After some digging, I stumbled upon a twenty-year-old exchange of messages between Lee Smolin and Leonard Susskind, his strongest critic. Reading that exchange was most edifying.

The most important lesson I learned is that this question is way over my head. I entered graduate school 50 years ago and I got my master’s and was pretty much up on the physics of the day. In succeeding years I occasionally noted new developments in the world of physics, but didn’t bother to keep up with the hard stuff. You know, in 50 years, physics has come a long way. This really struck home when I considered the fact that 50 years before 1973 was 1923. The physics of 1923 was, by the standards of 1973, primitive. They hadn’t discovered quantum mechanics. Nuclear physics was in its infancy. Little was known about radioactivity. Astronomy was really primitive. So if I compare the difference between 1923 physics and 1973 physics with the difference between 1973 physics and 2023 physics… well, I gotta admit that I’m very much in the dark. You philosophers have one huge advantage over physicists — the ancient philosophers are still relevant.

All this said I have figured out a number of things about Mr. Smolin’s thesis. It is based on a very complicated and very lengthy series of calculations involving string theory, quantum gravity, and all manner of other horrors of modern physics. My impression is that nobody really follows his calculations, because they are so esoteric and rely on a broad range of assumptions and interpretations of recent developments, many of which remain controversial. However, Mr. Smolin was able to establish falsifiability by showing that his calculations relied on assumptions that implied that the largest physically feasible neutron star would have a mass of 1.6 solar masses. He later amended his calculation to show that the largest such neutron star would have a mass of 2.0 solar masses. Then somebody found a neutron star with a mass of 1.96 solar masses and another with a mass of 2.07 solar masses. Technically, that falsified Mr. Smolin’s thesis, but open-minded physicists would be willing to cut him some slack. Still, these discoveries do undermine his hypothesis.

As I understand his arguments, Mr. Smolin is not claiming that his other universes DO exist; he claims only that they COULD exist. Mr. Susskind argues that they CANNOT exist. In the nearly 30 years since he published his hypothesis, it has garnered little support among physicists. From my shallow digging of the material on the web, I suspect that, while a small number of people remain enthusiastic about the hypothesis, the general community of physicists does not find his reasoning compelling.

My overall conclusion is that the hypothesis is entirely speculative, enjoying nothing in the way of empirical support. It relies upon a big hairy mess of calculations and assumptions that only Mr. Smolin seems to grasp in its entirety. It is certainly the antithesis of the desideratum that a scientific hypothesis is ideally clear, simple, and elegant.

Some other observations: the Second Law of Thermodynamics has absolutely nothing to do with the law of conservation of mass/energy, even in its most modern versions.

“Cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is, in principle, capable of explaining the non-designed existence of organized complexity.”

No. The best explanation for non-technical people is Schroedinger’s three-lecture series in Dublin in 1943 entitled “What is Life?” You can download a PDF of the published content by searching on “Schroedinger What is Life? Dublin” Many of its technical details have been corrected by subsequent research (Schroedinger had no way of knowing about DNA), but the fundamental point — that living systems are merely the expression of high quantities of negentropy — is clear.

There is a great deal of modern material explaining how self-organizing systems arise in environments loaded with lots of negentropy. It has always bothered me that this clear and simple explanation of how life arose just doesn’t seem to have penetrated the consciousness of our civilization. Indeed, when you grasp the implications of negentropy, it becomes obvious that the huge quantities of negentropy that the sun pours all over the earth made the development of life all but inevitable.

Reply by Lawrence Rifkin MD

Why is there a universe of matter and stars, and why do the laws of nature allow energy to organize matter into staggering complexity, including life and mind?

My advocacy for cosmological natural selection was to further stimulate the idea that CNS is a powerful and logical scientific hypothesis to explain the existence of complexity and life in the universe as we know it.

Black hole generated variant universes (each its own Big Bang) is Smolin’s proposed mechanism for how CNS may occur. But the mechanism itself is not what I am advocating. (There are other speculative mechanisms, including a Big Crunch cyclic oscillating universe where each bang is a phase transition from a metastable state into another more stable state accompanied by a release of energy, with the laws of nature varying slightly in each round, the ones more conducive to star formation more likely to reproduce variants of those laws). My argument was not for any particular mechanism. It was for the underlying process of cosmological natural selection as a logical naturalistic explanatory foundation. So often in science, the mechanistic explanation and supportive evidence come long after the hypothesis. So arguing against the mechanism does not, to me, make one throw out the underlying idea itself. Will it forever be physically impossible to get contributory empirical evidence for or against CNS? Have we reached a physical limit of what can be known here? We’ve heard that before in the history of ideas. As I wrote, “it will come down to evidence. Our minds expand, while the God of the gaps gasps.”

Modern physics shows that black holes and the Big Bang have common physical attributes. In both, the curvature of space-time approaches the infinite. Our current scientific understanding is that our universe is felt to have emerged from a singularity (the Big Bang) and then formed singularities (black holes). If the singularity that was the Big Bang could create our universe, the hypothesis that the singularities that are black holes produce their own big bangs is certainly intriguing. But, again, the point in my original article and subsequently was to was explore the explanatory power and logic of CNS, not any particular mechanism.

If, as Mr. Crawford suggests, a good scientific hypothesis must be “simple” and “clear,” I suppose quantum mechanics and general relativity were not good hypotheses? In any event, the underlying mind-blowing powerful algorithm of biological natural selection is simple, clear, and elegant! It are the genetic mechanisms, the non-genetic influences, and ecological environments that are complicated. The logic of CNS, right or wrong, is also simple, clear, and elegant. The proposed mechanisms are not.

I agree about the pervasive and fundamental explanatory power of “negentropy” (the idea goes by many names, and involves energy flows, non-equilibrium systems, etc.). I believe Kauffman phrased it something like this: A universe that maximizes entropy at the fastest rate possible will evolve toward a state that is increasingly complex, organized, alive, and intelligent.”  The general idea is that complex life optimizes its ability to extract energy efficiently, and therefore facilitates overall entropy production. Disorder is the selection pressure for self-organized systems. All this is hugely fundamental and powerful. A book I highly recommend that explores these ideas is “The Romance of Reality” by Bobby Azarian.

What I believe Mr. Crawford misses is that while “negentropy” likely explains the formation of autocatalytic sets and simple peptides, current evidence suggests that no matter how much or what type of energy is then added, including sunlight, it does not create anything more complex. Simple molecules and nucleic acids are a far cry from the mind-boggling complexity of cells, to say nothing of bodies and minds. The explanation for the formation (not the continuation) of this next level of increasing complexity needs to go beyond an underlying non-equilibrium free-energy explanation.  So far, only natural selection (differential replication based on variation and fitness) can explain the coming into being of that more complex scale, phase, and level of non-designed organized complexity.

The existence of the complex laws of nature themselves that allow for the creation of matter and allow for the ability for high-level complex material phenomena to form in the first place, and the apparent exquisite fine-tuning of the parameters of nature that are necessary for these laws and their effects to occur, need a naturalistic explanation beyond the underlying dissipative entropy flow that sustains them.

Cosmological Natural Selection: Crawford and Rifkin Part 2

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What follows is a continuing and enlightening discussion between two distinguished interlocutors about cosmological natural selection.

Cosmological Natural Selection: A Critique Part 2 – by Chris Crawford

Thank you for your comments, Dr. Rifkin. I am in a weak position, not having read any of the source material, so my comments are unavoidably speculative. Still, I cannot imagine any possible evidence for what happens inside a black hole; the entire notion of an “event horizon” does render physically impossible any actual evidence. I realize that there have been a great many attempts to determine the internal state of a black hole from strictly mathematical calculations and a variety of assumptions. Particularly interesting have been the efforts to determine the information content of a black hole as well as its internal entropy. But these remain entirely speculative, as they cannot be based on any empirical evidence.

You argue against my claim that other universes are meaningless (because they cannot affect us) by pointing out that the future cannot affect us, either. In other words, these other universes are no less meaningless than our own future. But there’s a crucial distinction that your argument misses: our future is, to some extent, predictable, and, to an even greater extent, subject to anticipation. A man who jumps off a cliff has not died yet, but his future is clear enough as to be meaningful to him. We know that the sun will eventually exhaust its reserves of hydrogen and go through changes that will result in the destruction of earth; that is meaningful to us even though it is billions of years in the future. We can use our knowledge of the current state of the universe to make meaningful statements about some aspects of our future.

But we can never see beyond the event horizon of a black hole. We can never have any idea of anything in those universes. Indeed, we cannot even know that such universes exist. We have lots of fascinating speculations — and that’s all we have. No data — just speculation.

And by the way, the very notion that a black hole could somehow spawn a universe does grossly violate the conservation of mass/energy. We put a few stars’ worth of mass into a black hole and an entire universe of zillions of stars spews out of the other side? Why shouldn’t it spew forth an immensity of candy bars, thundering herds of unicorns, or a teenage boys’ fantasy of millions of large-breasted nubile nymphs?

You argue against my suggestion that other universes might produce other forms of life by noting that my suggestion “… is not consistent with what current biology or physics now supports.” That’s certainly true — but it misses my point. Yes, another universe with different values of the fundamental constants would not produce life just as we know it. Indeed, even a universe with exactly the same values of the fundamental physical constants would not produce the same life we have. See Steven J. Gould’s discussion of the highly contingent nature of life on earth, especially his observations that the evolution of Homo Sapiens was dependent upon a wide range of accidents unlikely to be replicated in an imaginary replay. In other words, the evolution of Homo Sapiens was a fluke. Consider, for example, the ramifications of a certain small asteroid arriving in the vicinity of the earth 65 million years ago one second later than in a previous history. We’d have a dinosaur in the White House.

Lastly, I want to emphasize that this entire discussion runs beyond the extremes of speculation. We are arguing over what kind of hats angels might wear, or whether ghosts can have pimples, or how long leprechauns grow their hair. There is absolutely nothing in the way of empirical information to work with.

Reply by Lawrence Rifkin MD (author of the original post) – Part 2

Evidence for scientific theories can support or disprove. Cosmological natural selection is amenable to falsification. So even if it forever continues to be the case that it would be “physically impossible” to scientifically obtain any kind of empirical evidence for what happens inside a black hole, a lack of positive confirmatory evidence does not by itself render a falsifiable theory purely speculative.

As for the conservation of mass/energy, the second law of thermodynamics only holds for an isolated system. It is not known if it holds for our universe as a whole. Or if what happens inside a black hole is an isolated system.

As for meaning, I suppose it comes down to definitions. I would say a world of branching or oscillating universes conducive to life, and the possibility that life could continue forever is meaningful – powerfully so.

Of course, if we ran the movie of life again on Earth, the specific outcomes would be different (although there is evidence for some convergent evolution trends). That is not the point. The point is if the physical parameters of the universe were slightly different, life (indeed, emergent complexity), itself would itself be unlikely, at least according to most physicists.

The explanation for why the laws of the universe allow for organized complexity and life is perhaps the biggest and most wondrous question of all. Cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is, in principle, capable of explaining the non-designed existence of organized complexity. It may not be true, but it is not purely fanciful.  As I wrote in my article, “If evidence proves any one of the cosmological alternatives—or an entirely new idea altogether—we will embrace reality, no matter where it leads.”  For many, supernatural explanations, the “well if we weren’t here we couldn’t ask,” the “we can never know,” and the “it just happened to happen” explanations don’t satisfy. I suspect Darwin might agree?