Lubos Motl don't like this at all.
God is the creativity of the universe
Stuart Kauffman in BEYOND REDUCTIONISM, Reinventing The Sacred 2006, and he says: I would like to begin a discussion about the first glimmerings of a new scientific world view — beyond reductionism to emergence and radical creativity in the biosphere and human world. This emerging view finds a natural scientific place for value and ethics, and places us as co-creators of the enormous web of emerging complexity that is the evolving biosphere and human economics and culture. In this scientific world view, we can ask: Is it more astonishing that a God created all that exists in six days, or that the natural processes of the creative universe have yielded galaxies, chemistry, life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness, culture without a Creator. In my mind and heart, the overwhelming answer is that the truth as best we know it, that all arose with no Creator agent, all on its wondrous own, is so awesome and stunning that it is God enough for me and I hope much of humankind.
Thirty-five years ago, he developed the Kauffman models, which are random networks exhibiting a kind of self-organization that he terms "order for free." He asks a question that goes beyond those asked by other evolutionary theorists: if selection is operating all the time, how do we build a theory that combines self-organization (order for free) and selection? The answer lies in a "new" biology.
But this 'order for free' is coded information, stored entropy, or as we usually say, negentropy. Some kind of inherent memory. Not random at all.
Lubos say: entropy cannot be negative.
Outlaws in a creative universe? An open Universe? Lonely Gods sitting in their own Universes?
Kauffman says: If there is order for free — if you have complex systems with powerfully ordered properties — you have to ask a question that evolutionary theories have never asked: Granting that selection is operating all the time, how do we build a theory that combines self-organization of complex systems — that is, this order for free — and natural selection? There's no body of theory in science that does this. There's nothing in physics that does this, because there's no natural selection in physics — there's self organization. Biology hasn't done it, because although we have a theory of selection, we've never married it to ideas of self-organization. One thing we have to do is broaden evolutionary theory to describe what happens when selection acts on systems that already have robust self-organizing properties.
What is the difference between physical evolution and biological evolution? A brick stone like Darwin? An other way to ask the same thing is 'Is evolution unavoidable?' A force by its own? Not a result of any Selfish gene, as Richard Dawkins believe. What directed the world before there were any genes? The creativity of the Universe?
Reductionism, wrought by the successes of Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Planck, and Schrodinger, and all that has followed, preeminently in physics, has left us in world of fact — cold fact with no scientific place for value, says Kauffman. "The more we know of the cosmos, the more meaningless it appears", said Stephen Weinberg in Dreams of a Final Theory.
So meaning and value, ethics is the discussion? We are living in a meaningless world in our post modern world, seen in the area of politics. Money and personal gain is not enough. It give rise to disgust? Reason: lack of value.
Matti Bergström wrote about that long ago. Politicians are becoming politicians because they are value-poor and want to have also the values of other people, gained in elections. So the medicine is then to take our personal value back? perhaps that is what they are doing when people don't wote. Because it is meaningless. Politicians and doctors, 'the system' has taken too much value from the people, so the people themself are left with no meaning?
The result of that has always been revolution.
God is meaning and value, says the priests. But they are not convincing. Only by force, seen in fundamentalistic religions as Islam and 'Intelligent Design' in US. Also the Church(es) has taken too much value from the people.
Kauffman continues: We secular humanists have paid an unspoken price for our firm sense that (reductionist) science tells us what is real. Can science give us humanity?
The two cultures, science and humanities, remain firmly un-united. And equally important, we have been subtly robbed of our deep capacity for spiritualism. We have come to believe that spirituality is inherently co-localized with a belief in God, and that without such a belief, spirituality is inherently foolish, questionable, without foundation, wishful thinking, silly.
Well, now he is definitively up to something. I believe in 'God' but not in the God of church, but the God of Nature, or Universe. A fundamental law.
We lack a global ethic to constitute the transnational mythic value structure that can sustain the emerging global civilization. We tend to believe in the value of democracy and the free market. We are largely reduced to consumers, also in our personal education, even in our enjoyment of the wild, we are reduced to consumers. We need our myths, our value-history, our archetypes, said also Joseph Campbell in The power of Myth, and Carl Jung, who said that the archetypal world, our collective unconsciousness can change and demand revolution and war.
So the values are in our unconscious world. It is something that we have but we don't know of it. Matti Bergström said: The little child has only one thing; value. Take it away and it will die. The child needs love as a fundamental force. Love and hope are fundamental values?
The same in a marriage. The husband may be rich and his carrieer goes well, but his value is to a very large degree not depending on this, but his success to have a good family-life. Often the wife has a bigger value than the successful husband. This tells the value is a weak force? Money is a bad value. Humans need more, much more.
We are hard-wired for faith, said Candice Pert in 'Molecules of emotions'. She meant religion, but what is faith? Is it trust, company, a group-thinking, even althruism? (in fact we have a gene for althruism, that 'talks' when things go bad. Why not when things are good?
Roughly, reductionism is the view that, as Nobelist Stephen Weinberg eloquently puts it, the "explanatory arrows always point downward", from society to small groups to individuals to organs to cells to chemistry to physics and ultimately to something like Weinberg's 'Dreams of a Final Theory', a single set of laws, a TOE. In biology is said that 'the sums of the parts can never make úp the whole, because it is always more'. Is something emergent here? Needs the holistic wiev something emergent? As a God? Or can it be created?
Can a TOE also be a theory of God? Or is God always outside?
Kauffman says: The reduction requires the truth of the "ergodic hypothesis" and there is some evidence that it might be false. The physicists who hold out for a firm reductionism are, like Weinberg himself, largely high energy particle physicists, seeking that final theory — say string theory. Also biologists are said to very reductionistic. But is the reductionism unavoidable? Doubts are arising in the realm of string theory, he says. But at present, it appears that there are as many as 10 to the 500th power string theories. Hope for a single theory is fast fading and a number of high energy physicists are abandoning reductionism in the sense of finding such a single theory. No wonder, because they have missed the point, the collapsing, the criticality, the finiteness of reality. Every probality is not realized.
Muliverses are the solution, an attempt to explain the roughly 23 physical constants in physics like the speed of light, the ratio of electron to proton mass, and so on. No one knows where these constants come from or how to explain them. I must say that this alone means that the physics are far from done, that there is also new physics. Stringists add to the constants by adding an anthropic factor. An almost final theory of everything, saw I. Only those with constants that support the evolution of intelligent life would have such life to wonder at the values of the constants. Intelligence is the driving force? Sounds like Intelligent Design. By our earlier definition intelligence is far from value and ethics that are unconscious.
Kauffman: In its stead a new scientific world view is just starting to come into view: Emergence.
- complex systems are too complex to be explained by reductionistic practices
- new entities with their own properties and causal powers arise
The first sound ad hoc, in the second; what would arise? What part is such that could arise? The meaning? The value? But the value is inherent in a baby, in a money, in a vote? The value can be transfered. The value can be sold. The value can be given. The value is relative, like an entropic force. It can't be created?
In the bottom lies the problem of numbers. Are numbers real, are derivates of numbers real, are primes real? What is the foundation for math? Can a number be emergent? Yes, phi or PHI, pi are emergent. But what do they mean? Simply a cutoff? A border for different patterns, informations? Are there more cutoffs, more basic information? p-adics are, as used in TGD. But they are not emergent. Spacetime is not emergent in TGD. Erik Verlinde says it is.
References
http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/02/entropy-information-and-mixed-states.html#more
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kauffman06/kauffman06_index.html
http://www.ibi.ucalgary.ca/people#Kauffman
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2009/12/breaking_the_galilean_spell_an.html
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2010/02/law_or_not_at_the_quantumclass.html
http://tgd.wippiespace.com/public_html/index.html TGD
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=2714&cpage=1#comment-53059
http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.0785 Erik Verlinde
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