Does the Idea of “Autopoeitic” Include Self Organization; If So How?

_{Barry Arrington

November 17, 2012

Intelligent Design}

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In another post Mung points out this interesting quote to Kantian Naturalist (an atheist): “That crude matter should have originally formed itself according to mechanical laws, that life should have sprung from the nature of what is lifeless, that matter should have been able to dispose itself into the form of a self-maintaining purposiveness – that [is] contradictory to reason.” Immanuel Kant

Kantian Naturalist replies:

[Recently] I read “Bio-agency and the problem of action” by J. C. Skewes & C. A. Hooker (Biology and Philosophy 24 (3):283-300, 2009). I won’t get into all the details right now; suffice it to say that the way they set up the problem in what I find to be a deeply compelling fashion. Namely, the Aristotelian-Kantian notion that organisms are centers of their own causal activity is not compatible with linear effective causation — what you might call a “domino” theory of causation. So, what they propose to do is reject the domino theory of causation. Put otherwise, they reject mechanism. In its place they argue that dynamical systems theory can explain how autopoeitic systems arise. Anyway, that’s why I agree with Kant.

“Autopoeitic” is from the Greek“self” and “creation,” and literally that which creates itself. The term was coined by biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. From Wikipedia:

A canonical example of an autopoietic system is the biological cell. The eukaryotic cell, for example, is made of various biochemical components such as nucleic acids and proteins, and is organized into bounded structures such as the cell nucleus, various organelles, a cell membrane and cytoskeleton. These structures, based on an external flow of molecules and energy, produce the components which, in turn, continue to maintain the organized bounded structure that gives rise to these components (not unlike a wave propagating through a medium).

Here’s the interesting part of the Wiki article for our purposes today: “Though others have often used the term as a synonym for self-organization, Maturana himself stated he would ‘never use the notion of self-organization, because it cannot be the case… it is impossible. That is, if the organization of a thing changes, the thing changes.’”

Are Skewes, Hooker and Kantian Naturalist using “autopoeitic” in a different way than Maturana or do they just disagree with Maturana’s statement? And what does it mean to reject “domino causation”? Is that just another way of spewing the nonsense of “emergence”? See “Materialist Poofery” for what I think of that nonsense.

Comments

naturalism holds that life ‘emerges’ from some configuration of material particles and that life will cease to exist if that configuration is sufficiently disrupted, whereas theism holds that life, i.e. the soul, of a living organism (any living organism, not just man) existed prior to the living organism and will continue to exist afterwards.
A disagreement about certain metaphysical views regarding the soul -- whether it exists and whether it is the sort of thing that survives the death of the body -- seems to me to quite different from a disagreement about autopoiesis as a theory of what makes something an organism, as opposed to inanimate matter. Also, "non-local" does not mean "beyond space and time". It just means, "not restricted to particular spaces and particular times". A physical variable can be non-local in that sense without being transcendent to all space and all time. One might, just conceivably, construe non-local physical variables as lending support to pantheism, but that's a long ways away from lending support to a transcendent deity. I've only skimmed "The Unbearable Wholeness of Beings" but I didn't see anything I objected to. What I saw is pretty much how Kant explicates the difference between teleological systems and mechanistic systems, and on my reading, lends aid and comfort to autopoeisis. Now, there's an interesting debate going on amongst design theorists and their supporters as to whether design theory treats organisms as machines. Dembski acknowledges that design theory uses mechanistic analogies but seems to construe that as a heuristic tactic for arguing against Darwinism (which he seems to regard as fully committed to a mechanistic biology). Steve Fuller, on the other hand, is completely explicit about this (in his Science v. Religion? Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution): on his view, design theory just is the claim that "biology is divine technology", and technology is mechanistic if anything is. My point is that if we accept the views of Kant, Talbott, and Varela -- that there's at least an epistemological difference between organisms and machines (Kant) and perhaps also an ontological difference as well (Talbott, Varela) -- then design theorists should resist Fuller's way of explicating design theory more strongly than they have (to my knowledge, anyway).Kantian Naturalist_{November 18, 2012
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Of related interest: The Unbearable Wholeness of Beings - Steve Talbott Excerpt: Virtually the same collection of molecules exists in the canine cells during the moments immediately before and after death. But after the fateful transition no one will any longer think of genes as being regulated, nor will anyone refer to normal or proper chromosome functioning. No molecules will be said to guide other molecules to specific targets, and no molecules will be carrying signals, which is just as well because there will be no structures recognizing signals. Code, information, and communication, in their biological sense, will have disappeared from the scientist’s vocabulary. http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-unbearable-wholeness-of-beings The predominance of quarter-power (4-D) scaling in biology Excerpt: Many fundamental characteristics of organisms scale with body size as power laws of the form: Y = Yo M^b, where Y is some characteristic such as metabolic rate, stride length or life span, Yo is a normalization constant, M is body mass and b is the allometric scaling exponent. A longstanding puzzle in biology is why the exponent b is usually some simple multiple of 1/4 (4-Dimensional scaling) rather than a multiple of 1/3, as would be expected from Euclidean (3-Dimensional) scaling. http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/~drewa/pubs/savage_v_2004_f18_257.pdf “Although living things occupy a three-dimensional space, their internal physiology and anatomy operate as if they were four-dimensional. Quarter-power scaling laws are perhaps as universal and as uniquely biological as the biochemical pathways of metabolism, the structure and function of the genetic code and the process of natural selection.,,, The conclusion here is inescapable, that the driving force for these invariant scaling laws cannot have been natural selection." Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. 78-79 https://uncommondescent.com/evolution/16037/ 4-Dimensional Quarter Power Scaling In Biology - video http://www.metacafe.com/w/5964041/bornagain77_{November 18, 2012
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Naturalism and theism may have different views about the existential significance of life, or human life in particular (as in “the meaning of life”), but that’s completely different from the task of describing what it is for something to be a living thing,
That is not correct, naturalism holds that life 'emerges' from some configuration of material particles and that life will cease to exist if that configuration is sufficiently disrupted, whereas theism holds that life, i.e. the soul, of a living organism (any living organism, not just man) existed prior to the living organism and will continue to exist afterwards. Dr. Moreland commented on that particular distinction at the 9:20 mark of the video I listed in my previous post.,, Moreover, whereas I can't make heads or tails out of any of your reasoning, I can find evidence precisely for that distinction. i.e. Do we have scientific evidence for something that transcends time-space, matter and energy in living organisms? notes: In fact it is found that a ‘non-local’ quantum, beyond space and time, cause is needed to explain protein folding: Physicists Discover Quantum Law of Protein Folding – February 22, 2011 Quantum mechanics finally explains why protein folding depends on temperature in such a strange way. Excerpt: First, a little background on protein folding. Proteins are long chains of amino acids that become biologically active only when they fold into specific, highly complex shapes. The puzzle is how proteins do this so quickly when they have so many possible configurations to choose from. To put this in perspective, a relatively small protein of only 100 amino acids can take some 10^100 different configurations. If it tried these shapes at the rate of 100 billion a second, it would take longer than the age of the universe to find the correct one. Just how these molecules do the job in nanoseconds, nobody knows.,,, Their astonishing result is that this quantum transition model fits the folding curves of 15 different proteins and even explains the difference in folding and unfolding rates of the same proteins. That’s a significant breakthrough. Luo and Lo’s equations amount to the first universal laws of protein folding. That’s the equivalent in biology to something like the thermodynamic laws in physics. Finding the ‘quantum transition model’ to be a ‘universal law’ of protein folding is no small matter since a ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, cause must be supplied to explain quantum entanglement within proteins (and DNA). Theism has always postulated a beyond space and time cause for life. Reductive materialism, upon which neo-Darwinism is built, has no beyond space and time cause since it postulates that material particles are self-sustaining from which life simply ‘emerges’: supplemental notes: Does DNA Have Telepathic Properties?-A Galaxy Insight – 2009 Excerpt: DNA has been found to have a bizarre ability to put itself together, even at a distance, when according to known science it shouldn’t be able to.,,, The recognition of similar sequences in DNA’s chemical subunits, occurs in a way unrecognized by science. There is no known reason why the DNA is able to combine the way it does, and from a current theoretical standpoint this feat should be chemically impossible. Coherent Intrachain energy migration at room temperature – Elisabetta Collini & Gregory Scholes – University of Toronto – Science, 323, (2009), pp. 369-73 Excerpt: The authors conducted an experiment to observe quantum coherence dynamics in relation to energy transfer. The experiment, conducted at room temperature, examined chain conformations, such as those found in the proteins of living cells. Neighbouring molecules along the backbone of a protein chain were seen to have coherent energy transfer. Where this happens quantum decoherence (the underlying tendency to loss of coherence due to interaction with the environment) is able to be resisted, and the evolution of the system remains entangled as a single quantum state. https://www.scimednet.org/sapphire/main.php?url=%2Fquantum-coherence-living-cells-and-protein%2F Quantum states in proteins and protein assemblies: The essence of life? – STUART HAMEROFF, JACK TUSZYNSKI Excerpt: It is, in fact, the hydrophobic effect and attractions among non-polar hydrophobic groups by van der Waals forces which drive protein folding. Although the confluence of hydrophobic side groups are small, roughly 1/30 to 1/250 of protein volumes, they exert enormous influence in the regulation of protein dynamics and function. Several hydrophobic pockets may work cooperatively in a single protein (Figure 2, Left). Hydrophobic pockets may be considered the “brain” or nervous system of each protein.,,, Proteins, lipids and nucleic acids are composed of constituent molecules which have both non-polar and polar regions on opposite ends. In an aqueous medium the non-polar regions of any of these components will join together to form hydrophobic regions where quantum forces reign. http://www.tony5m17h.net/SHJTQprotein.pdf Further note: Does Quantum Biology Support A Quantum Soul? – Stuart Hameroff – video (notes in description) http://vimeo.com/29895068 Being the skunk at an atheist convention – Stuart Hameroff Excerpt: When metabolic requirements for quantum coherence in brain microtubules are lost (e.g. death, near-death), quantum information pertaining to that individual may persist and remain entangled in Planck scale geometry. http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/skunk.htm i.e. quantum information is ‘conserved’ and cannot be destroyed! further note: Case for the Existence of the Soul - JP Moreland, PhD - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SJ4_ZC0xpMbornagain77_{November 18, 2012
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I see, basically since it can’t even differentiate the completely different views of life that naturalism and Theism have, autopoeisis really is as useless as a dog chasing its tail in a circle!
This assertion rests on an equivocation about two different senses to the word "life". Naturalism and theism may have different views about the existential significance of life, or human life in particular (as in "the meaning of life"), but that's completely different from the task of describing what it is for something to be a living thing, as opposed to dead or inanimate matter. On that point -- providing a theory of what it is for something to be alive -- autopoeisis has a great deal to say (though of course it's not the only game in town).Kantian Naturalist_{November 18, 2012
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Here's a way of thinking about the contrast between descriptions and explanations that bears on the notion of "emergence". When we say that something (e.g. salt or sugar) is "soluble," we can describe solubility in relational terms: "X is soluble in L" means that if X were placed in L, it would, given various background conditions, dissolve. That gives a description of solubility, but does not explain it. The explanation lies the attraction and repulsive of differing electrical charges across the molecules of the substances involved. So solubility is an "emergent property", because whether X is soluble in L depends on the entire system of electrical properties of X-molecules and L-molecules. A few other books I keep on meaning to get around to reading: The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology Nature's Purposes: Analyses of Function and Design in Biology Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind In short, what I'm slowly groping for here is to reconstruct a philosophical and scientific tradition in which Aristotelian teleology 'evolved', as it was revived by Leibniz and Kant to correct the extremism of Descartes and esp. Spinoza, continued to influence biology well into the 19th-century (as well as speculative philosophy of nature, Naturphilosophie), went 'underground' in response to the rise of Darwinism, and which is now making an intriguing sort of comeback. This is not to say, obviously, that design theory is irrelevant to the conversation -- rather, it is to say that Nagel is right in thinking that there's a tertium quid between reductive materialism ("chance" and "necessity") and intelligent design. With respect to the dialectic of our arguments here, it means that the following argument won't work: (1) Either intelligent design is true or reductive materialism is true; (2) But reductive materialism is false because (a) it fails on empirical grounds and (b) it fails on conceptual grounds; (3) Therefore, intelligent design is true. I agree with (2), and especially with (2b), but I reject (3) because I think that (1) is false, because it's a false dichotomy -- natural teleology is a tertium quid. That was true when Aristotle proposed it as a tertium quid between Democritus' reductive materialism and Plato's intelligent design, and it remains true twenty-three hundred years later.Kantian Naturalist_{November 18, 2012
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"autopoeisis is not a theory of abiogenesis. It’s an account of what it is for something to be alive, and it’s perfectly compatible with both theistic and naturalistic metaphysics." I see, basically since it can't even differentiate the completely different views of life that naturalism and Theism have, autopoeisis really is as useless as a dog chasing its tail in a circle! :) note: Is the Soul Immortal? (J.P. Moreland) - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7nqB7SH-7sbornagain77_{November 18, 2012
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Mung, thanks for those links about the history of the concept of causation! Neil, I'll take a look at your posts later on today or sometime soon. Thanks for the alternative link to the paper. Bornagain77, autopoeisis is not a theory of abiogenesis. It's an account of what it is for something to be alive, and it's perfectly compatible with both theistic and naturalistic metaphysics.Kantian Naturalist_{November 18, 2012
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HMM, Theist: How did life start? Atheist: Autopoeitically! Theist: Can you demonstrate life originating autopoeitically? Atheist: Nope. Theist: Well how do you know that life started autopoeitically? Atheist: Because the only other alternative, i.e. God, is unthinkable! Theist: Did you autopoeitically come to that conclusion? :)bornagain77_{November 18, 2012
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KN mentions a paper "Life after Kant: ...". However, the link he gives seems to be for temporary access that has already expired. Here's an alternative link. That probably gets you to a brief abstract and a pay wall to see the full paper. I accessed it from my university campus, and was able to get to the full paper (the campus has presumably paid the subscription for electronic access to this journal). And a note to KN: I have several posts at my blog which explore a basis for natural teleology.Neil Rickert_{November 18, 2012
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Does the Idea of “Autopoeitic” Include Self Organization
Apparently the answer to this question is yes. But also in the sense in which autopoeisis applies to living organisms, not inanimate matter. Living organisms are the cause of their own organization and maintenance. They form themselves.Mung_{November 18, 2012
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Minimal living systems are thus the first entities in nature that constitute some sort of semiotic relation to their milieu in the sense that a substance (i.e. sucrose) attains a specific meaning (nutrition) for a subject (organism). Autopoietic systems thus give rise to intentionality” (Varela 1992, 7) or, as Evan Thompson puts it, “living is a process of sense-making, of bringing forth significance and value.” (Thompson 2007, 158).
Mung_{November 18, 2012
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I haven’t really thought much about causation in contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of physics . . . it occurs to me that the 17th-century standard old model of “efficient causation” might not capture what philosophers today think about causation . . . so all of a sudden I don’t know what to say.
It's the causal-box theory of philosophy! I know what you mean. Every time I start down one trail I come to another that also needs to be explored. More reading, less internet. ;) Causation and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Philosophy The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy, 1637-1739 http://spot.colorado.edu/~tooley/Causation.htmlMung_{November 18, 2012
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Also, I just found "A move beyond Kant? – The Autopoiesis School on Life and Cognition" by Annett Wienmeister -- looks very interesting, clearly written, and sets out a cogent critique of the autopoiesis approach.Kantian Naturalist_{November 18, 2012
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In re: Neil's (19), yes, you understood my meaning just fine. Whereas I talked about "the domino picture of causation," Skewes and Hooker are more precise:
The causal-thread model essentially pictures causality as a sequence of causally connected events (a thread), with each event in the sequence causing the next. Causal threads can multiply intersect,so that several preceding events may contribute to causing any one event and any one event may contribute to causing several succeeding event. Correlative to this conception is the causal box model of an agent, where an agent is considered a site (the box) into, through, and out of which pass congeries of causal event-threads. In this conception a causal action by an agent is an event-thread of caused changes extending from within the box to a change of states in the external world.
As this makes clear, the causal-thread picture of efficient causation leads to conceiving of agents as 'causal boxes', and that impedes our appreciation of the basic Aristotelian/Kantian point that organisms are self-determining, self-causing to some degree or other.
We thus need to look beyond the box for a model of agent powers. In doing so we must give up the widespread post-Humean assumption that causes are events or conditions and treat organisms as genuine holistic loci of causal(-like) power.
In other words, instead of rejecting efficient causation as insufficient to explain organismal agency, they reject a particular conception of efficient causation -- though one that has a widespread influence, thanks to Hume and others. So they are not really friends of teleology. But on my reading, there's a distinction between descriptions and explanations, such that "naturalized teleology" explains in terms of efficient causation what is described in terms of final causation. That said, I haven't really thought much about causation in contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of physics . . . it occurs to me that the 17th-century standard old model of "efficient causation" might not capture what philosophers today think about causation . . . so all of a sudden I don't know what to say. Before reading this article, I had independent reasons for thinking that simple, linear efficient causation impedes our understanding of living things, but I didn't have quite the right vocabulary for describing the problem.* While we're on the topic, I also got a lot out of "Life After Kant: Natural purposes and the autopoietic foundations of biological individuality" by Webber and Varela. * Those independent reasons stemming from reading Donald Davidson about animal minds.Kantian Naturalist_{November 18, 2012
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EvilSnack:
The laws of nature should not be regarded as separable from the entities of nature; the laws are merely our conclusions about the properties of those entities.
Demonstrating that the laws are indeed separable from the entities. And thus the problem with mechanism.Mung_{November 18, 2012
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timothya:
Christians presuppose the existence of a rational creator, and can therefore rationally understand the universe. Is that your argument?
Does that even remotely resemble the argument that Jaki was making?Mung_{November 18, 2012
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Neil:
Gas pressure is an emergent property of vibrating molecules.
Is it? I think it's an emergent property of a volume! What does it mean to say that A is a property of B, or that be has property A, regardless of whether that property is 'emergent' or not? Can a single entity have an emergent property, or does emergence always require a community (e.g., gas molecules) of entities? I guess another way I could put that is to ask whether a single molecule has an emergent property that we can call pressure? If there is a large number of molecules, can we say they have an emergent property, large number of molecules? Needless to say, I don't think you've given us a valid example of an emergent property. I think that pressure can be explained without recourse to something "else in addition to" molecules in motion inside a volume with a surface.Mung_{November 18, 2012
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And what does it mean to reject “domino causation”?
Whatever happened to good old billiard ball causation?Mung_{November 18, 2012
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In further response to Neil on 'randomness', (being that randomness is suppose to the ultimate causation of creativity in the atheistic mindset), it is interesting to point out that the 'entropic' randomness of the 'particles' of this material universe is bounded by a constant, whereas, as pointed out before, the randomness in quantum mechanics is unbounded by any constant and in fact the randomness in quantum mechanics is found to be driven by a 'free choice' assumption. notes:
Boltzmann's equation: An important equation in statistical mechanics that connects entropy (S) with molecular disorder (W). It can be written: S = k log W where k is Boltzmann's constant. The Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann first linked entropy and probability in 1877. However, the equation as shown, involving a specific constant, was first written down by Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics in 1900. In his 1918 Nobel Prize lecture, Planck said:This constant is often referred to as Boltzmann's constant, although, to my knowledge, Boltzmann himself never introduced it – a peculiar state of affairs, which can be explained by the fact that Boltzmann, as appears from his occasional utterances, never gave thought to the possibility of carrying out an exact measurement of the constant. Nothing can better illustrate the positive and hectic pace of progress which the art of experimenters has made over the past twenty years, than the fact that since that time, not only one, but a great number of methods have been discovered for measuring the mass of a molecule with practically the same accuracy as that attained for a planet. (Of note: Max Planck was a Christian Theist who remained active in his church throughout his life) http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/B/Boltzmann_equation.html
And if we trace out the ultimate source/cause of entropic randomness in the 'material' universe, entropic randomness which is suppose to be the ultimate creative engine in the Darwinian mindset, we find out some very interesting things:
Evolution is a Fact, Just Like Gravity is a Fact! UhOh! - January 2010 Excerpt: The results of this paper suggest gravity arises as an entropic force, once space and time themselves have emerged. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/evolution-is-a-fact-just-like-gravity-is-a-fact-uhoh/ Thermodynamics – 3.1 Entropy Excerpt: Entropy – A measure of the amount of randomness or disorder in a system. http://www.saskschools.ca/curr_content/chem30_05/1_energy/energy3_1.htm Entropy of the Universe – Hugh Ross – May 2010 Excerpt: Egan and Lineweaver found that supermassive black holes are the largest contributor to the observable universe’s entropy. They showed that these supermassive black holes contribute about 30 times more entropy than what the previous research teams estimated. http://www.reasons.org/entropy-universe “But why was the big bang so precisely organized, whereas the big crunch (or the singularities in black holes) would be expected to be totally chaotic? It would appear that this question can be phrased in terms of the behaviour of the WEYL part of the space-time curvature at space-time singularities. What we appear to find is that there is a constraint WEYL = 0 (or something very like this) at initial space-time singularities-but not at final singularities-and this seems to be what confines the Creator’s choice to this very tiny region of phase space.” Roger Penrose - How Special Was The Big Bang?
Indeed, blackholes are certainly destructive:
Scientists gear up to take a picture of a black hole - January 2012 Excerpt: "Swirling around the black hole like water circling the drain in a bathtub, the matter compresses and the resulting friction turns it into plasma heated to a billion degrees or more, causing it to 'glow' – and radiate energy that we can detect here on Earth." http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-01-scientists-gear-picture-black-hole.html What Would Happen If You Fell into a Black Hole? - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLMiJQXsmkc
Although atheists may want to replace God as the creator with some ill defined notion of randomness, all I can say is, after looking at the destructive power noted in the 'entropic randomness' of Blackholes, Thank God that He has bounded the entropic randomness of this universe with a constant so that it is not unlimited in its effect!
Romans 8:18-21 I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.
Also of note to the 'entropic randomness' of the material universe is the fact that,,,
The Physics of the Small and Large: What is the Bridge Between Them? Roger Penrose Excerpt: "The time-asymmetry is fundamentally connected to with the Second Law of Thermodynamics: indeed, the extraordinarily special nature (to a greater precision than about 1 in 10^10^123, in terms of phase-space volume) can be identified as the "source" of the Second Law (Entropy)." http://www.pul.it/irafs/CD%20IRAFS%2702/texts/Penrose.pdf How special was the big bang? - Roger Penrose Excerpt: This now tells us how precise the Creator's aim must have been: namely to an accuracy of one part in 10^10^123. (from the Emperor’s New Mind, Penrose, pp 339-345 - 1989) Roger Penrose discusses initial entropy of the universe. - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhGdVMBk6Zo
This number is gargantuan. If this number were written out in its entirety, 1 with 10^123 zeros to the right, it could not be written on a piece of paper the size of the entire visible universe, even if a number were written down on each sub-atomic particle in the entire universe, since the universe only has 10^80 sub-atomic particles in it. Dr. Gordon discusses the initial entropy at the beginning of this video:
The Absurdity of Inflation, String Theory & The Multiverse - Dr. Bruce Gordon - video http://vimeo.com/34468027
bornagain77_{November 18, 2012
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In further response to Neil on 'randomness', (being that randomness is suppose to the ultimate causation of creativity in the atheistic mindset), it is interesting to point out that the 'entropic' randomness of the 'particles' of this material universe is bounded by a constant, whereas, as pointed out before, the randomness in quantum mechanics is unbounded by any constant and in fact the randomness in quantum mechanics is found to be driven by a 'free choice' assumption. notes:
Boltzmann's equation: An important equation in statistical mechanics that connects entropy (S) with molecular disorder (W). It can be written: S = k log W where k is Boltzmann's constant. The Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann first linked entropy and probability in 1877. However, the equation as shown, involving a specific constant, was first written down by Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics in 1900. In his 1918 Nobel Prize lecture, Planck said:This constant is often referred to as Boltzmann's constant, although, to my knowledge, Boltzmann himself never introduced it – a peculiar state of affairs, which can be explained by the fact that Boltzmann, as appears from his occasional utterances, never gave thought to the possibility of carrying out an exact measurement of the constant. Nothing can better illustrate the positive and hectic pace of progress which the art of experimenters has made over the past twenty years, than the fact that since that time, not only one, but a great number of methods have been discovered for measuring the mass of a molecule with practically the same accuracy as that attained for a planet. (Of note: Max Planck was a Christian Theist who remained active in his church throughout his life) http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/B/Boltzmann_equation.html
And if we trace out the ultimate source/cause of entropic randomness in the 'material' universe, entropic randomness which is suppose to be the ultimate creative engine in the Darwinian mindset, we find out some very interesting things:
Evolution is a Fact, Just Like Gravity is a Fact! UhOh! - January 2010 Excerpt: The results of this paper suggest gravity arises as an entropic force, once space and time themselves have emerged. https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/evolution-is-a-fact-just-like-gravity-is-a-fact-uhoh/ Thermodynamics – 3.1 Entropy Excerpt: Entropy – A measure of the amount of randomness or disorder in a system. http://www.saskschools.ca/curr_content/chem30_05/1_energy/energy3_1.htm Entropy of the Universe – Hugh Ross – May 2010 Excerpt: Egan and Lineweaver found that supermassive black holes are the largest contributor to the observable universe’s entropy. They showed that these supermassive black holes contribute about 30 times more entropy than what the previous research teams estimated. http://www.reasons.org/entropy-universe “But why was the big bang so precisely organized, whereas the big crunch (or the singularities in black holes) would be expected to be totally chaotic? It would appear that this question can be phrased in terms of the behaviour of the WEYL part of the space-time curvature at space-time singularities. What we appear to find is that there is a constraint WEYL = 0 (or something very like this) at initial space-time singularities-but not at final singularities-and this seems to be what confines the Creator’s choice to this very tiny region of phase space.” Roger Penrose - How Special Was The Big Bang?
Indeed, blackholes are certainly destructive:
Scientists gear up to take a picture of a black hole - January 2012 Excerpt: "Swirling around the black hole like water circling the drain in a bathtub, the matter compresses and the resulting friction turns it into plasma heated to a billion degrees or more, causing it to 'glow' – and radiate energy that we can detect here on Earth." http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-01-scientists-gear-picture-black-hole.html What Would Happen If You Fell into a Black Hole? - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLMiJQXsmkc
Although atheists may want to replace God as the creator with some ill defined notion of randomness, all I can say is, after looking at the destructive power noted in the 'entropic randomness' of Blackholes, Thank God that He has bounded the entropic randomness of this universe with a constant so that it is not unlimited in its effect!
Romans 8:18-21 I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.
Also of note to the 'entropic randomness' of the material universe is the fact that,,,
The Physics of the Small and Large: What is the Bridge Between Them? Roger Penrose Excerpt: "The time-asymmetry is fundamentally connected to with the Second Law of Thermodynamics: indeed, the extraordinarily special nature (to a greater precision than about 1 in 10^10^123, in terms of phase-space volume) can be identified as the "source" of the Second Law (Entropy)." http://www.pul.it/irafs/CD%20IRAFS%2702/texts/Penrose.pdf How special was the big bang? - Roger Penrose Excerpt: This now tells us how precise the Creator's aim must have been: namely to an accuracy of one part in 10^10^123. (from the Emperor’s New Mind, Penrose, pp 339-345 - 1989) http://www.ws5.com/Penrose/ Roger Penrose discusses initial entropy of the universe. - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhGdVMBk6Zo
This number is gargantuan. If this number were written out in its entirety, 1 with 10^123 zeros to the right, it could not be written on a piece of paper the size of the entire visible universe, even if a number were written down on each sub-atomic particle in the entire universe, since the universe only has 10^80 sub-atomic particles in it. Dr. Gordon discusses the initial entropy at the beginning of this video:
The Absurdity of Inflation, String Theory & The Multiverse - Dr. Bruce Gordon - video http://vimeo.com/34468027
bornagain77_{November 18, 2012
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Some quibbles: 1. The terms "auto-" and "-poetic" come from Greek, not Latin. 2. To speak of matter and the laws of nature as separable things is to speak from a design viewpoint, and rather a straw-man viewpoint at that, as if God first devised the electron, the proton, etc., and then decided what those particles would do. To draw an analogy, this is like saying that a computer programmer wrote a program and then, when the program is finished, decided what the program was going to do (insert your favorite Microsoft joke here). The laws of nature should not be regarded as separable from the entities of nature; the laws are merely our conclusions about the properites of those entites.EvilSnack_{November 18, 2012
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as to:
Christians presuppose the existence of a rational creator, and can therefore rationally understand the universe. Is that your argument?
Well, I might add that we are made in the image of God and can therefore understand the universe, but basically yes, that is the argument, indeed, that is the state of mind, attitude, of the Christians who founded modern science: Founders of Modern Science Who Believe in GOD - Tihomir Dimitrov http://www.scigod.com/index.php/sgj/article/viewFile/18/18bornagain77_{November 18, 2012
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As to Neil's quote here,,
To make matters worse, some of the contributory causes are random quantum events.
Actually tracing out the ultimate cause for randomness in quantum mechanics reveals some very interesting things,, In the following video, at the 37:00 minute mark, Anton Zeilinger, a leading researcher in quantum teleportation with many breakthroughs under his belt, humorously reflects on just how deeply determinism has been undermined by quantum mechanics by saying such a deep lack of determinism may provide some of us a loop hole when they meet God on judgment day. Prof Anton Zeilinger speaks on quantum physics. at UCT - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3ZPWW5NOrw Personally, I feel that such a deep undermining of determinism by quantum mechanics, far from providing a 'loop hole' on judgement day, actually restores free will to its rightful place in the grand scheme of things, thus making God's final judgments on men's souls all the more fully binding since man truly is a 'free moral agent' as Theism has always maintained. And to solidify this theistic claim for how reality is constructed, the following study came along a few months after I had seen Dr. Zeilinger’s video: Can quantum theory be improved? - July 23, 2012 Excerpt: Being correct 50% of the time when calling heads or tails on a coin toss won’t impress anyone. So when quantum theory predicts that an entangled particle will reach one of two detectors with just a 50% probability, many physicists have naturally sought better predictions. The predictive power of quantum theory is, in this case, equal to a random guess. Building on nearly a century of investigative work on this topic, a team of physicists has recently performed an experiment whose results show that, despite its imperfections, quantum theory still seems to be the optimal way to predict measurement outcomes., However, in the new paper, the physicists have experimentally demonstrated that there cannot exist any alternative theory that increases the predictive probability of quantum theory by more than 0.165, with the only assumption being that measurement (*conscious observation) parameters can be chosen independently (free choice, free will, assumption) of the other parameters of the theory.,,, ,, the experimental results provide the tightest constraints yet on alternatives to quantum theory. The findings imply that quantum theory is close to optimal in terms of its predictive power, even when the predictions are completely random. http://phys.org/news/2012-07-quantum-theory.html So just as I had suspected after watching Dr. Zeilinger’s video, it is found that a required assumption of ‘free will’ in quantum mechanics is what necessarily drives the completely random (non-deterministic) aspect of quantum mechanics. Moreover, it was shown in the paper that one cannot ever improve the predictive power of quantum mechanics by ever removing free will as a starting assumption in Quantum Mechanics! Henry Stapp on the Conscious Choice and the Non-Local Quantum Entangled Effects - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJN01s1gOqA of note: What does the term "measurement" mean in quantum mechanics? "Measurement" or "observation" in a quantum mechanics context are really just other ways of saying that the observer is interacting with the quantum system and measuring the result in toto. http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=597846 Needless to say, finding ‘free will conscious observation’ to be ‘built into’ our best description of foundational reality, quantum mechanics, as a starting assumption, 'free will observation' which is indeed the driving aspect of randomness in quantum mechanics, is VERY antithetical to the entire materialistic philosophy which demands that a 'non-telological randomness' be the driving force of creativity in Darwinian evolution! Also of interest: Scientific Evidence That Mind Effects Matter – Random Number Generators – video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4198007 I once asked a evolutionist, after showing him the preceding experiments, “Since you ultimately believe that the ‘god of random chance’ produced everything we see around us, what in the world is my mind doing pushing your god around?” Of note: since our free will choices figure so prominently in how reality is actually found to be constructed in our understanding of quantum mechanics, I think a Christian perspective on just how important our choices are in this temporal life, in regards to our eternal destiny, is very fitting: Is God Good? (Free will and the problem of evil) - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rfd_1UAjeIA Ravi Zacharias - How To Measure Your Choices - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Op_S5syhKI You must measure your choices by the measure of 1) eternity 2) morality 3) accountability 4) charitybornagain77_{November 18, 2012
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Neil states:
I take “domino causation” to refer to the idea of a sequence of events, each causing the next. However, the world is more complex than that. Every event has infinitely many contributing causes, and in turn contributes to infinitely many other events. That’s why physicists use differential equations, rather than simple propositional logic.
Yet Dr. Bradley states,,
Only in the 20th century have we come to fully understand that the incredibly diverse phenomena that we observe in nature are the outworking of a very small number of physical laws, each of which may be described by a simple mathematical relationship. Indeed, so simple in mathematical form and small in number are these physical laws that they can all be written on one side of one sheet of paper, as seen in Table 1. - Dr. Walter Bradley How the Recent Discoveries Support a Designed Universe - Dr. Walter L. Bradley - paper http://www.leaderu.com/real/ri9403/evidence.html The Five Foundational Equations of the Universe and Brief Descriptions of Each: http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AYmaSrBPNEmGZGM4ejY3d3pfNDdnc3E4bmhkZg&hl=en
In this following video,,,
The Underlying Mathematical Foundation Of The Universe - Walter Bradley - video http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4491491
Dr. Bradley states:
"Occasionally I'll have a bright engineering student who says, "Well you should see the equations we work with in my engineering class. They're a big mess.", The problem is not the fundamental laws of nature, the problem is the boundary conditions. If you choose complicated boundary conditions then the solutions to these equations will in fact, in some cases, be quite complicated in form,,, But again the point is still the same, the universe assumes a remarkably simple and elegant mathematical form." - Dr. Walter Bradley
And if we ask the question, 'What is the cause of these simple mathematical equations that govern the universe?' we find ourselves, once again, at the profound epistemological mystery as to why we should even be able to comprehend reality at such a deep level in the first place,,,
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences - Eugene Wigner - 1960 Excerpt: ,,certainly it is hard to believe that our reasoning power was brought, by Darwin's process of natural selection, to the perfection which it seems to possess.,,, It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind's capacity to divine them.,,, The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html Mario Livio, or the Poverty of Atheist Philosophy: A Review of “Is God a Mathematician?” Excerpt: In short, Wigner committed a treason against science. He didn’t, in an Einsteinian fashion, just declare a personal faith in a God that had only marginal relevance to his scientific studies. He went farther than that: he implied that science was impossible and inexplicable without accepting a higher reality, transcending the mind of man and its capabilities for reasoning and experimentation. The short and ostensibly innocent article faced some really violent reactions; some objected to the conclusions in it, others to the premises, and still others refused to even deal with it, pretending it had never been written. But Wigner remained right about one thing: Despite the many attempts, no one could give a rational explanation for what Wigner described as the “uncanny ability of mathematics to describe and predict accurately the physical world.” http://americanvision.org/4333/mario-livio-or-the-poverty-of-atheist-philosophy-a-review-of-is-god-a-mathematician/ Kurt Gödel - Incompleteness Theorem - video http://www.metacafe.com/w/8462821 THE GOD OF THE MATHEMATICIANS - DAVID P. GOLDMAN - August 2010 Excerpt: we cannot construct an ontology that makes God dispensable. Secularists can dismiss this as a mere exercise within predefined rules of the game of mathematical logic, but that is sour grapes, for it was the secular side that hoped to substitute logic for God in the first place. Gödel's critique of the continuum hypothesis has the same implication as his incompleteness theorems: Mathematics never will create the sort of closed system that sorts reality into neat boxes. http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/07/the-god-of-the-mathematicians Godel and Physics - John D. Barrow Excerpt (page 5-6): "Clearly then no scientific cosmology, which of necessity must be highly mathematical, can have its proof of consistency within itself as far as mathematics go. In absence of such consistency, all mathematical models, all theories of elementary particles, including the theory of quarks and gluons...fall inherently short of being that theory which shows in virtue of its a priori truth that the world can only be what it is and nothing else. This is true even if the theory happened to account for perfect accuracy for all phenomena of the physical world known at a particular time." Stanley Jaki - Cosmos and Creator - 1980, pg. 49 http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0612253.pdf Taking God Out of the Equation - Biblical Worldview - by Ron Tagliapietra - January 1, 2012 Excerpt: Kurt Gödel (1906–1978) proved that no logical systems (if they include the counting numbers) can have all three of the following properties. 1. Validity . . . all conclusions are reached by valid reasoning. 2. Consistency . . . no conclusions contradict any other conclusions. 3. Completeness . . . all statements made in the system are either true or false. The details filled a book, but the basic concept was simple and elegant. He summed it up this way: “Anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle—something you have to assume but cannot prove.” For this reason, his proof is also called the Incompleteness Theorem. Kurt Gödel had dropped a bomb on the foundations of mathematics. Math could not play the role of God as infinite and autonomous. It was shocking, though, that logic could prove that mathematics could not be its own ultimate foundation. Christians should not have been surprised. The first two conditions are true about math: it is valid and consistent. But only God fulfills the third condition. Only He is complete and therefore self-dependent (autonomous). God alone is “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28), “the beginning and the end” (Revelation 22:13). God is the ultimate authority (Hebrews 6:13), and in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3). http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v7/n1/equation#
bornagain77_{November 18, 2012
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Sorry but do I have this right: Christians presuppose the existence of a rational creator, and can therefore rationally understand the universe. Is that your argument?timothya_{November 18, 2012
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as to:
can you (or anyone) provide a simple way sensibly to parse this sequence of words?
Sorry for any lack of clarity on my part. I think Dr. Meyer explains the basic idea much more clearly than I did:
Epistemology – Why Should The Human Mind Even Be Able To Comprehend Reality? – Stephen Meyer – video – (Notes in description) http://vimeo.com/32145998
bornagain77_{November 18, 2012
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Bornagain posted this, among other things:
In fact the Christian presupposition of the universe being created by a rational Creator, and of us being made in the image of God, and that we can therefore rationally understand the universe, which was so instrumental in the founding of science
In order to support common understanding, can you (or anyone) provide a simple way sensibly to parse this sequence of words?timothya_{November 18, 2012
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Found the reference. It was Nick referring us to life as some kind of "kinetic" state based on some "autocatalytic" property. The (long) skinny is here: https://uncommondescent.com/origin-of-life/from-the-first-gene-chapter-9-inanimate-nature-cannot-scheme-to-locally-and-temporarily-circumvent-the-2nd-law/#comment-421718Eric Anderson_{November 17, 2012
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This "autopoeitic" idea was referred to us (by Nick or Lizzy, if memory serves) several months ago as an attempt to explain something about how life came about. There was a specific paper referred to, which I took time to track down and read. Bottom line, it was rather much nonsense and just another attempt to redefine away the problems with a mechanistic origins story by introducing this autopoeitic idea that complex functional systems were kind of destined out of biochemistry itself. If I get time later tonight, I'll track down the paper and post the link.Eric Anderson_{November 17, 2012
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And what does it mean to reject “domino causation”?
I'll comment on that, because the meaning seems obvious to me. Of course, KN can correct me if this is not what he means. I take "domino causation" to refer to the idea of a sequence of events, each causing the next. However, the world is more complex than that. Every event has infinitely many contributing causes, and in turn contributes to infinitely many other events. That's why physicists use differential equations, rather than simple propositional logic. But even the differential equations are simplifications. To make matters worse, some of the contributory causes are random quantum events. The effect of all of this is that there is a fluidity to nature that does not fit the way that we think about mechanism. And this fluidity is particularly relevant to biological systems.
Is that just another way of spewing the nonsense of “emergence”?
"Emergence" is not nonsense, though the term is often thrown around too casually. Gas pressure is an emergent property of vibrating molecules. There's nothing nonsensical about that. The problem arises when people seem to use "emergence" as if it were a magical explanation. Generally speaking, we should see emergence as something to be explained, rather than as an explanation.Neil Rickert_{November 17, 2012
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