Received a nice letter from Don Steehler in follow-up to my two part series Understanding Humanity in Universe (1), (2).
Don Steehler
Timothy:
I began reading your material during the evening of April 5. As a matter of serendipity, that was the day that you wrote Understanding Humanity in Universe . I was pleasantly surprised (“astonished” might be a more apt verb) to find that the “worldview” that you articulate in your material parallels what I’ve been doing for awhile. Here’s an analogy: with a line integral, integration gives the same result, regardless of the detailed paths taken between the beginning and end “points.” Likewise, it appears that you and I may have arrived at a similar understanding about things, while the details of our individual paths to understanding probably differ with regard to our experiences and sources of influence.
As an example of what I mean, consider Arthur Young’s “arc of process“
Although, at first glance, the two diagrams do not appear to correspond, it appears to me that they are attempts to illustrate essentially the same thing (from alternate “perspectives”). By “stretching” and “compressing” the corresponding terms into equivalence categories:
Young | Chaission |
Light, particles | Particulate |
Atoms | Galactic, stellar, planetary |
Molecules, plants, animals | Biochemical |
Humans | Cultural, Ethical |
The diagrams appear to be alternate expressions of a common underlying viewpoint. Young and Chaisson are (I believe) expressing similar views.
Something else about Young’s diagram (and your explanation) reminded me of another reference. I scanned two figures from Kuntz’s essay “The Metric of the Living Orders” in Integrative Principles of Modern Thought (1972), and included the narrative. You should be able to see fairly easily that Kuntz has conceived something resembling Young’s conception of degrees of freedom at levels 5 and 6 of process (1∞ for plants, 2∞ for animals). But Kuntz’s motivating concern is with symmetry breaking in “physical” space.
From: “The Metric of the Living Orders” by F. L. Kuntz in Integrative Principles of Modern Thought, Henry Margenau (ed.), 1972
Figure 35 A tree, as well as the forms of other plants, has a stationary habit and tends to a vertical position of the axis of symmetry. That axis is the seat of a characteristic motion of the plant, namely, development and growth. It is here appropriate to drop one of the crystalline space planes, the horizontal. Over that plane there is no symmetry. We may regard the growth axis as the characteristic axis of symmetry in plant space-time.
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Despite Young’s and Kuntz’s differing orientations, they appear to have achieved essentially the same insight (1∞ of freedom in plants, 2∞ of freedom in animals).
Here is something else that I think may interest you. In “Understanding Humanity in Universe” you wrote:
Life begins within the molecular stage of process. The primal power of life is memory. Memory is the power on which all other living powers depend.
Several years ago, I noticed a similar observation in Gerald Edelman’s Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind . Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 20 ( “Symmetry and Memory: On the Ultimate Origins of Mind”) of the book (which I believe you may find interesting and useful):
Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, pp. 204-207
What may we offer as a new principle underlying the evolutionary development of mind and intentionality in this set of events? I submit that the new principle is one of memory, one that takes many forms but has general characteristics that are found in all Its variations. I am using the word “memory” here in a more inclusive fashion than usual. Memory is a process that emerged only when life and evolution occurred and gave rise to the systems described by the sciences of recognition. As I am using the term memory, it describes aspects of
heredity, immune responses, refex leaming, true learning following perceptual categorization, and the various forms of consciousness (figure 20-2). In these instances, structures evolved that permit significant correlations between current ongoing dynamic patterns and those imposed by past patterns. These structures all differ, and memory takes on its properties as a function of the system in which it appears. What all memory systems have in common is evolution and selection. Memory is an essential property of biologically adaptive systems. This extension of the term may seem hopelessly broad. But let us see what all these phenomena have in common, for it is actually quite specific. What they have in common is relative stability of structure under selective mapping events. To make myself clear, I shall say something here about structure, stability, and mapping. The physical law concerned with structure and stability is the second law of thermodynamics. This law states that entropy, a measure of the disorder of a system, must spontaneously increase or remain the same but never decrease in a closed system. (By a closed system I mean one in which energy and matter neither enter nor leave.) The most orderly possible system is that of a perfect crystal (one with absolutely identical spacing of its atoms in a symmetrical lattice) at a temperature of absolute zero. Since the earliest evolution of the universe its entropy has been increasing. But in parts of the universe that are open systems (ourselves, for example), entropy can actually decrease locally as a result of the transfer of matter and energy. Various chemical interactions give rise to stable structures, including those of molecules in living forms. The stability of structures and their energetic transactions are governed by the laws of thermodynamics, including the second law. It is now clear that stable chemical structures can exist in the absence of life or living forms. indeed, even in outer space, evidence has been found of organic molecules that are similar to those in our bodies-molecules formed by the collision of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon, for example. The conditions of their formation and dissolution, of their stability, are determined by energy and entropy. However stable these molecules may be, they lack a hereditary principle. They do not show any ability to replicate themselves-to make molecules that might be called their progeny by using their own structure as a template. I want to be clear about how I am using the word stability in connection with memory. After all, periodic crystals exist in nonliving domains (for example, in rocks) that add atoms to their structures to become larger, following the same rules of symmetry. Such crystals do not replicate ; they grow . What is the difference? In a replicating system, there is an aperiodic structure that undergoes a kind of mapping; think of the sequences of DNA in chapter 6. A chemical reaction faithfully copies the aperiodic structure, resulting in daughter structures. But this fidelity is not absolute; mutant structures arise that are also copied. The result is a variant population. Finally, the stable aperiodic structure maps through additional chemistry to make other kinds of structures that contain it, so that favorable variants have a selective advantage when further copies are made. This abstracted description corresponds to that of a living system: a self-replicating system undergoing natural selection (see chapter 6). The aperiodic structure is DNA or RNA, and the container to which they map is made of various protein products. But notice that the main process, which is lacking in nonliving forms, is the hereditary principle. Notice also that this hereditary principle, which allows an increase in the population of favored variants over time, depends on the stability of chemical bonds. ln the case of DNA, these are the covalent bonds linking different nucleotide bases together to make a genetic code of linked triplet codons, each one corresponding to one of twenty amino acids that make up protein chains. The energy and entropy conditions in the temperature range under which life flourishes assure that a hereditary process takes place. But it is historical selection events that result in the actual sequences found in the population. The appearance of this hereditary process is a new kind of event-a form of memory. Aside from variations introduced into the sequence that have proven favorable, it is the ability to retain much of the order or mapping of the parent aperiodic structure that enables these systems to continue. They have stability of structure under selective mapping events. But notice that this “memory” is not perfect (as it must be, by contrast, in computer messages). Indeed, to some degree, it must contain errors (changes in entropy) or mutants for the system to be a selective one-to be one that is able to respond adaptively to unforeseen environmental events because there is population variance. As these structures evolved and cellular populations formed into animals with many linked cells and with nervous systems, a new kind of memory appeared. This occurred as a result of synaptic changes in the nervous systems of these animals. Because of neuronal group selection, behaviors that proved adaptive were stabilized by selection within a single animal’s lifetime. Memory based on synaptic change is essential for such behaviors. In vertebrates, the requirement that their immune systems make the distinction between self and nonself resulted in the selection of individuals who had a variant of the gene for the neural cell adhesion molecule, N-CAM. By introducing somatic variation into what were to become immunoglobulin (antibody) molecules and by combining that process with the faithful replication of cells selected by foreign molecules, a new recognition system appeared (see figure 8-1). This system had immune memory: The selection of lymphocytes by antigens led to changes that were retained for the entire lifetime of the individual. Yet again, the evolutionary elaboration of sensory receptors and motor sheets in animals with increasingly sophisticated brain maps made memories based on perceptual categorization possible. With the appearance of conceptual capabilities and even more sophisticated mapping, synaptic change in response to novelty occurring within populations of neuronal groups led to additional kinds of memory. Each memory reflects a system property within a somatic selection system. And each property serves a different function based on the evolution of the appropriate neuroanatomical structure. These higher-order systems are selective and are based on the responses to environmental novelty of populations of neuronal groups arranged in maps. They are recognition systems. At some transcendent moment in evolution, a variant with a reentrant circuit linking value-category memory to classification couples emerged. At that moment, memory became the substrate and servant of consciousness. With the emergence of language in the species Homo sapiens, the iteration of this same principle in specialized linguistic memories made higher-order consciousness possible. And within culture, higher-order consciousness eventually gave rise to a scientific description of nature, one that allows us to study the origins of our own existence in the universe. This description of the development of memory is so different from the previous one describing the development of the cosmos following symmetry principles as to seem incommensurate with it. The biological story is a Iocal saga so far told only on Earth: It is historical, it occurs in a very narrow temperature range, it is extraordinarily complex and specific to particular structures, it takes unexpected and different forms, and it is dizzying to consider in detail. But the saga begins in a world governed by symmetry. Only with symmetry breaking, only with the formation of chemistry, only with the appearance of large, stable molecules, only with the appearance of irreversible selection events, only with the evolution of means described by the sciences of recognition, could memory lead to the appearance of mind. Symmetry principles govern the possibility that memory can arise, but only after symmetry breaking occurred, leading to chemistry and to living and evolving organisms, could memory develop. |
My purpose in providing the preceding comparisons has been to indicate the similarity of insights that we seem to have reached from our independent efforts.
Synergetically,
Don Steehler