Logic, information and the world mind

 John O. Campbell

This is an excerpt from the book: Einstein's Enlightenment.

Logic is the branch of philosophy which studies valid reasoning. When Aristotle introduced the subject of logic to philosophy, one of his most significant contributions was the logical syllogism where the truth of some statements is obvious merely due to the form of the statements. For example:

1) All men are mortal

2) Socrates is a man

3) Therefore, Socrates is mortal

It is obvious, given the first two statements, that the third must be true.

Later three basic logical operators were identified: ‘and’, ‘or’ and ‘not’. These operators could be used to describe relationships between logical variables which may have the value of either ‘true’ or ‘false’. All possible relationships between logical variables may be described using these operators leading to the field of Boolean Algebra. In turn logical relationships cast in terms of Boolean Algebra serve as the foundations from which all mathematics may be derived. This astonishing understanding shows that all mathematics is but the implications held within binary true/false relationships.

A more concrete example of the power of logic is that the three logical operators may be cast in the form of electronic circuits and used to construct a computer. General purpose computers or universal Turing machines are capable of computing all mathematically computable functions.

Therefore, logic is a central discipline at the basis of mathematics, computation and much of science.  Charles Sanders Peirce, the great American philosopher, made a number of fundamental advances in these fields and was able to envision the central role played by logic within philosophy. He understood logic primarily as the rules by which the ‘world mind’ composing the universe evolves, an observation very much in the spirit of Einstein’s Enlightenment. A first step towards this conclusion is Peirce’s contention that logic forms the rules of thought or mind (1):

The term ”logic” … in its broader sense, it is the science of the necessary laws of thought

Second, Peirce viewed ‘thought’ and ‘mind’ as not necessarily associated with brains but rather as general properties of nature (1):

Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world; and one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors, the shapes, etc., of objects are really there. … Not only is thought in the organic world, but it develops there

Peirce was a first class logician, mathematician and scientist but he understood these within a context of mind or thought; logic, mathematics and science merely expressed the rules for clear thought. He portrayed mind or thought as a property of nature and thus ventured beyond the usual materialistic view of science.

To a surprising extent Peirce demonstrated many of these basic relationships between logic and mind a half century earlier than the pioneers of our current information and computer ‘revolutions’. Sadly, his work was ignored and he was left largely without credited.

Peirce was the first to prove that all logical propositions, including Boolean algebra and mathematics, could be constructed from relations between two primitive fundamental logical quantities: ‘not-and’ and ‘not-or’. He used this insight to understand that these two logical quantities could be implemented in electronic circuits and thus was the first to suggest that all logical statements could be cast in the form of electronic circuitry. He and his colleagues actually developed a wiring diagram of a ‘mechanical logic machine’ (2).

In this he very much foretold the basis of our current understanding of computation. Given his vision that the processes of logic operate within a universal property of thought or mind he also presaged the current view among physicist that the universe is primarily engaged in the computation of an evolving logic (3).

Peirce’s great understanding of the relationship between logic and thought or mind was ignored by researchers largely because of his meager status on the peripheries of academia but also because he was so far ahead of his time. It was not until 1943 that Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts rediscovered the same fundamental relationships underlying logic and thought (4):

Many years ago one of us, by considerations impertinent to this argument, was led to conceive of the response of any neuron as factually equivalent to a proposition which proposed its adequate stimulus. He therefore attempted to record the behavior of complicated nets in the notation of the symbolic logic of propositions. The "all-or-none" law of nervous activity is sufficient to insure that the activity of any neuron may be represented as a proposition. Physiological relations existing among nervous activities correspond, of course, to relations among the propositions; and the utility of the representation depends upon the identity of these relations with those of the logic of propositions.

This seminal understanding of logical propositions is fundamental to both the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology.

The philosophy developed by Peirce puts logic at its core, it insists that the world acts logically. This logic is played out through semiotic, the relationship among object, sign, and an interpretant or receiver of the sign.

In Peirce’s philosophy, it is the shunting of signs between objects and interpretants - which themselves may act as signs - that causes the universe to learn and evolve. Our minds are described as subsumed within this greater world mind. According to his philosophy, information bearing signs are perhaps the most fundamental entity in the universe (5):

all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs

Figure 4: Peircean semiotics describes logic and information transfer as a triadic relationship among objects, signs which signify the objects, and interpretants which draw conclusions when receiving signs. In the case pictured, the fire is the object, the smoke is a sign signifying the fire and a human who sees the smoke is the interpretant who interprets the smoke as signifying a fire. Peirce consider semiotics as the basic rule governing the relationship of entities.

This view is remarkably similar to that of the current ‘information revolution’; the understanding, across many branches of science, that information is perhaps the most fundamental entity in our universe. How could Peirce have scooped current researchers by over fifty years? Why doesn’t our information age rhetoric acknowledge the contributions made by Peirce’s philosophy? The answer is that Peirce’s philosophy was ignored, in fact it was nearly lost.

Upon his death, Peirce’s widow sold his largely unpublished papers to Harvard’s library. There they moldered for many years and many still remain unpublished. Although currently gaining in recognition Peirce’s work is still largely unknown. Perhaps Peirce was simply too far ahead of his times to be understood.

Instead it was the mathematical description of information, developed by Claude Shannon (6) in 1948, which would form the foundation of information theory. The business of Bell Labs, where Shannon was a researcher, was to understand the nature of information and Shannon’s work is widely regarded as the foundation of our modern understanding of information and its context.

In his description, information is related to probability; information is a function of probability, if a high probability is assigned to a possible outcome of an event and if it happens to be the actual outcome then there is not much information gain but if a low probability is assigned to an actual outcome then a lot of information is received. A complete set of possible outcomes may be assigned probabilities and the resulting distribution constitutes a probabilistic model of the event. 

The information contained in evidence regarding the actual outcome implies a recalculation of all the probabilities making up the model. The model is updated in accord with Bayes’ theorem. In this understanding information does not exist in isolation, something must be informed and that something is a model. This view of information’s reliance on a model is analogous to Peirce's view of a sign’s reliance on an interpretant.

Only now is an important implication of Shannon’s theory becoming apparent, that although information may be a fundamental component of the universe it is far from simple. Information does not exist outside of the complex context of a probabilistic model (7). Long before Shannon, Peircean semiotic captured that notion, that information or signs do not have an existence outside of a context of objects which generate the sign and interpretants which interpret them.

One of the many technical contributions which Peirce made to logic was his development of existential graphs. This system of logical notation serves to greatly simplify complicated logical expressions and his work initiated a program within the study of logic towards notations which would reveal the underlying simplicity of logical expressions. After all, in the end, once all the values of variables are stated, every logical expression is simply either true or false.

The program for the simplification of logical notation which Peirce initiated was concluded in 1969 with the publication of George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form (8). Spencer-Brown developed an ultimate simplification of logical notation which uses only one symbol. As Louis Kauffmann explains (9):

Using this symbol two types of logical operations may be described, the first a type of repetition with two marks in succession, the second adding no new information. We may think of the mark as the crossing of a distinction; from that view the first operation merely states that to twice state a position in regard to a distinction is the same as only stating it once. The second logical operation is a type of negation with one mark inside another which cancel each other to nothing. From the view of distinction, we can interpret this to say that if we cross a distinction twice it is the same as not crossing it at all.

The mark may be conceived of as a type of negation and our two operations as two types of double negatives. The first is redundant as in ‘I cannot, I cannot go to sleep’, the second ‘cannot’ is redundant and provides no further meaning than does ‘I cannot go to sleep’. The second type of double negative is cancellation as in ‘I cannot not go to sleep’. Here the negatives cancel and the meaning is ‘I will go to sleep’.

Spencer-Brown used two relationships between the marked symbols to indicate these two types of negation, the first a repetition and the second a cancellation:

Using this deceptively simple notation it is possible to almost immediately see the solution to some very complicated logical puzzles. For example, Spencer-Brown demonstrates the solution to a famous puzzle posed by Lewis Carrol (10):

This amazing ability of Spencer-Brown’s system to simplify complicated logical problems is just one aspect of its power. It has been demonstrated that it can also be used to derive the axioms of Boolean Algebra and hence all of mathematics. It is an amazing fact that all of mathematics may be derived merely from the nature of a binary distinction (10).

The great mathematician and physicist Louis Kauffman has made extensive investigations into Spencer-Brown’s research and has concluded (8):

It remained for Spencer-Brown (some fifty years after Peirce and Nicod) to see the relevance of an arithmetic of forms underlying his notation and thus putting the final touch on a development that, from a broad perspective, looks like the world mind doing its best to remember the significant patterns that join logic, speech and mathematics.

Indeed, the image of a ‘world mind’ at the basis of the universe appears almost inescapable in the philosophical systems of both Peirce and Spencer-Brown. This may be disturbing to some as it denies a long-held scientific assumption that materialism is the basic property of the universe but this would seem unavoidable once one concedes that information is also a basic constituent. After all mind may only be a euphemism for information processing which, it now seems clear, is a basic natural operation.

We should remember that Spencer-Brown’s powerful system is based upon only two simple observations concerning the nature of distinctions. We should also remember that the bit, the fundamental unit of information, is merely the unit of information which records a binary distinction.

Figure 5: George Spencer-Brown

Some researchers have marveled at ‘the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences’ (11); why are so much of the natural sciences so well described by the patterns of mathematics? We may perceive the outlines of an answer:

1)    Information is perhaps the most fundamental component of reality.

2) Information is composed of yes/no binary distinctions.

3)     Any effective description of reality, such as mathematics, must be derivable from the nature of binary distinctions.  

Inherent to Spencer-Browns conception of ‘distinction’ is both a ‘mark’ to mark the distinction and an ‘observer’ to interpret it. The concluding sentence of Laws of Form, is:

We see now that the first distinction, the mark and the observer are not only interchangeable, but, in the form, identical.

It has been noted that Spencer-Brown’s paradigm meshes well with Peircean semiotics (8) if we equate distinction with object, mark with sign and observer with interpretant. The choice of the word ‘observer’ should be understood here in the Einsteinian manner as a generalized entity able to react to measurements or data or some other instantiation of a sign. I suggest the word ‘model’ be used to guard against anthropocentric interpretations which may be attached to ‘observer’.

Spencer-Brown’s logic should be understood as an extension of Peirce’s philosophical program, one which presages Einstein’s Enlightenment. Although the model of logic and semiotics developed by Peirce and Spencer-Brown may be suggestive of a world mind capable of processing and building knowledge it lacks details. Clearly it offers some insight into the relationship between models (interpretants) and that which is modeled (objects), a relationship which might be considered to be knowledge, however details of the mechanisms which relates object to sign and sign to model are lacking.

If semiotics is to serve as a useful paradigm for knowledge it should be expected to encompass science. Indeed, science, understood as a process of Bayesian inference, may be cast in a triad form compatible with semiotics: phenomena, data, and model. The inclusion of Bayesian inference brings a particular strength to the semiotic paradigm. Bayesian experimental design provides a mechanism for extracting data (signs) from the phenomena (object) so as to maximize the expected knowledge gain of the model (interpretant). It also provides the mechanism for using data to most effectively update models in the form of the Bayesian update.

Probability distributions employed as models within Bayesian inference have the property of information entropy; the amount of information which separates the model from certainty. If the log of the probabilities used in the inference is to base 2 then this information is measured in bits. Bits are the basic unit of distinction. The model’s entropy is the number of binary distinctions which separate it from certainty. While models treated within Bayesian inference may be separated from certainty by any finite number of distinctions, the special case of one bit separations from certainty is the case where Bayesian inference becomes equivalent to classical logic. In Spencer-Brown’s terms single bit models are ‘observers’ of the first distinction.

Models within Bayesian inference are moved towards certainty by incorporating the implications of data (sign) into the model (interpretant); through the process of Bayesian updating. Mathematically this is the unique method of moving a model towards certainty (12); that is of increasing knowledge. 

Bayesians have frequently committed the error of assuming that knowledge is a human property and that Bayesian inference is solely descriptive of human activities. Spencer-Brown did not indulge in this misconception; he maintained a focus on the world mind (10):

Thus we cannot escape the fact that the world we know is constructed in order (and thus in such a way as to be able) to see itself.

This is indeed amazing.

Not so much in view of what it sees, although this may appear fantastic enough, but in respect of the fact that it can see at all.

But in order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at least one state which is seen. In this severed and mutilated condition, whatever it sees is only partially itself.

Like Peirce, Spencer-Brown did not have a large impact on the scientific community. His work is provocative and its reception was varied but muted. Some extreme claims have been made for its mathematical importance. The book jacket of some editions of Laws of Form contains an endorsement from Bertram Russell “Not since Euclid’s Elements have we seen anything like it’. The book jacket of my edition contains excerpts from reviews in Nature and the British Journal of the Philosophy of Science; both describe it as ‘a work of genius’. Others however have dismissed it as a work of mysticism with little mathematical content. That view has not been mitigated by Spencer-Brown’s subsequent claim to be the reincarnation of the Buddha and not just any old Buddha but rather the Buddha who comes only once every 2500 years. Perhaps as a result his work has been largely shunned within the mathematical community.

A ‘world mind’ may at first seem more akin to a supernatural rather than a scientific concept but it is clearly resolved within a scientific context if we accept that:

1)      Information is a fundamental component of the universe.

2)     The universe evolves through numerous nested Darwinian processes (universal Darwinism).

3)     Darwinian processes are isomorphic to Bayesian inference. The process of evolution accumulates information into knowledge through an evidence-based processes.

This scientific context describes a continual universal process of evolution which processes information into knowledge. This is a process, aptly described as that of a ‘world mind’, in which the world comes to better know itself.

This view, initiated by Peirce, places logic or the ‘necessary laws of thought’ guiding the world mind at the foundation of metaphysics or the study of the nature of reality.

Bibliography

1. Peirce, Charles S. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. 1906. p. 101. Vol. 6.

2. Wikipedia. Charles Sanders Peirce bibliography. Wikipedia. [Online] [Cited: 1 10, 2016.] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce_bibliography.

3. Lloyd, Seth. Programming the Universe. s.l. : Vintage; Reprint edition, 2007.

4. A Logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity. McCulloch, Warren and Pitts, Walter. 1943, Journal of Mathematical Biophysics, Vol. 5.

5. Peirce, C.S. Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce: The basis of pragmatism. 1906. Vol. Voume 5.

6. A mathematical theory of communications. Shannon, Claude. 1948, Bell System Technical Journal.

7. Campbell, John O. Darwin does physics. s.l. : CreateSpace, 2015.

8. The Mathematics of Charles Sanders Peirce. Kauffman, Louis H. 2001, Cybernetics & Human Knowing, Vol.8, no.1–2, pp. 79–110.

9. Kauffman, Louis. Laws of Form - An exploration in mathematics and foundations. s.l. : Unpublished rough draft.

10. Spencer-Brown, G. The Laws of Form. New York : E.P. Dutton, 1979.

11. The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences. Wigner, Eugene. 1960, Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics 13, pp. 1–14.

12. Jaynes, Edwin T. Probability Theory: the logic of science. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2003.

The Evolution of Knowledge

John O. Campbell

 

This is an excerpt from the book: Einstein's Enlightenment.

John A. Wheeler, one the greatest American physicists of the twentieth century, reminisced that his career had unfolded through three fundamental paradigms  (1):

I think of my lifetime in physics as divided into three periods. In the first period, extending from the beginning of my career until the early 1950's, I was in the grip of the idea that Everything Is Particles. I was looking for ways to build all basic entities - neutrons, protons, mesons, and so on - out of the lightest, most fundamental particles, electrons, and photons. …

I call my second period Everything Is Fields. From the time I fell in love with general relativity and gravitation in 1952 until late in my career, I pursued the vision of a world made of fields, one in which the apparent particles are really manifestations of electric and magnetic fields, gravitational fields, and space-time itself.

Now I am in the grip of a new vision, that Everything Is Information. The more I have pondered the mystery of the quantum and our strange ability to comprehend this world in which we live, the more I see possible fundamental roles for logic and information as the bedrock of physical theory.

His experience may have been usual among physicist at the time but now our biggest quibble might be with his repeated use of the word ‘Everything’. Although it is almost universally conceded today that information has a profound role in the workings of the world, few would insist on a uniquely primary role. After-all the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the premier experimental apparatus of an era, is understood largely in terms of particles and fields. These concepts have not been displaced from physics.

We might understand the ‘Everything’ as due to an excitement with novelty and the focus it commands. However, the real challenge of the information revolution is to develop a more prosaic understanding of the relationships among information and the other important physical entities.

Unfortunately, Einstein missed out on the last of these paradigms. The information revolution came upon us only since his death. He did however play a fundamental role in developing the first two paradigms. Atomic theory was accepted by many physicists, due to a paper Einstein wrote in his miracle year of 1905 on Brownian motion. He demonstrated that the precise microscopic jiggling observed of pollen grains floating in water could be explained using the atomic theory. This was sufficient to convince many of the existence of atoms and other types of fundamental particles. He also used an understanding of fields to assist in the construction of his general theory of relativity.

It is unfortunate that he missed out on information theory because it is likely that he would have put his own stamp on it by creating another elegant fundamental theory. One feature of information which would not have escaped him is that it describes an aspect of nature which seems non-materialistic. Many of history’s great thinkers have argued that there is more to nature than material or substances. Foremost in this list may be Plato, Spinoza, Peirce and Einstein. At last the introduction of information as a fundamental component of reality provides a means of framing some of their ideas in scientific terms.

Einstein’s understanding that (2):

the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought.

reveals that he sometimes considered nature to have properties akin to mind. This notion fit well with his belief, along with Spinoza, that God and nature are equivalent. In this view nature may more closely resemble God then material. Einstein might well have been open to any addition to the physicist’s conceptual toolkit which would support an alternative to strict materialism.  

The relationship between information and other aspects of reality appears to be a deep one and one that is only beginning to be explored. Although the information revolution has swept practically every scientific discipline, no widespread agreement has emerged that they are even taking about the same thing except at the most abstract level. For instance, few biologist or physicists have noted much similarity between the genome and the wave function.

In this section I will build on the explanation discussed earlier that information is only information if it informs something. That something is a model and when a model is informed by information or evidence it is updated so that its knowledge is increased. It is this knowledge which supports the existence of complex entities; the more complex the entity the more knowledge is necessary for its existence.

The mass of our solar system, including the sun, the planets and their moons total 1.0014 solar masses (3). In other words, the sun contains 99.9% of the of the matter in the solar system. Although the sun and other stars are complex entities ultimately responsible for forming all atoms more complex then helium, they are chemically quite simple; they are composed only of atoms. Stars are so hot that their atoms are ionized, they do not allow the binding of electrons to the atomic nucleus and they are far too energetic for even more complex chemical forms such as molecules.

Only in interstellar space and on those bodies orbiting stars, where temperatures are much cooler, can the delicate bonds joining atoms into molecules form. Even then, naturally-occurring inorganic molecules seldom combine more than a hundred atoms. Only in exceptionally rare circumstances does even this level of chemical complexity exist. In the end the complexity of chemical forms is governed by quantum forces, chemical structures are constrained to those quantum possibilities which environmental circumstances allow.

Central to the evolution of life was the invention of chemical forms orders of magnitude more complex. Indeed, the essence of life is its ability to design and choreographer intricate chemistry. Organisms are only chemistry, but an astonishingly complex chemistry, one which, as far as we know, does not exist anywhere else in the universe. Organic molecules may be composed of almost a million atoms. Life’s ability to achieve this amazing leap in complexity does not violate chemistry’s quantum laws, rather it achieves this complexity by placing chemistry in unique circumstances or environments which resemble chemical factories. Many fundamental chemical reactions carried out in these ‘factories’ employ organic catalysts known as enzymes. These molecules, may for example, bind to one or more ‘substrate’ molecules and cause them to participate in chemical reactions that would not be possible without the action of the enzyme. In this manner enzymes control much of the specialized chemical pathways which take place in living things. As Wikipedia describes this process (4):

Enzymes accelerate, or catalyze, chemical reactions. The molecules at the beginning of the process are called substrates and the enzyme converts these into different molecules, called products. Almost all metabolic processes in the cell need enzymes in order to occur at rates fast enough to sustain life. The set of enzymes made in a cell determines which metabolic pathways occur in that cell. Enzymes are known to catalyze more than 5,000 biochemical reaction types

Even this wizardry of enzymes cannot defy physics, and in many biochemical reactions the products are more energetic than the substrate from which they were formed; physics requires an input of energy. The means of supplying this energy is the same in all types of life, and involves another enzyme: ATPase. This enzyme uses the energy rich molecule ATP as a substrate to inject energy into reactions involving other substrates (5):

ATPases are a class of enzymes that catalyze the decomposition of ATP into ADP and a free phosphate ion. This dephosphorylation reaction releases energy, which the enzyme (in most cases) harnesses to drive other chemical reactions that would not otherwise occur. This process is widely used in all known forms of life.

Again the energy of ATP must come from somewhere and that somewhere is a subcellular body called a mitochondrion. Each biological cell contains hundreds or thousands of mitochondria which function to convert the energy from food into the electro-chemical energy of the ATP molecule. Mitochondria create an electric polarization by pumping protons across an impermeable membrane, and use this to energize ATP molecules which, in turn, may be used to perform biological work under the direction of ATPase enzymes.

Our bodies process 50 to 75 kilograms of ATP a day; each molecule is recycled and reenergized over 500 times. The stunning magnitude of the process is made even starker if we consider the rate at which our bodies must pump individual protons across mitochondrial membranes. As the bio-chemist Nick Lane explains (6):

Their job is to pump protons, and together they pump more than 10²¹ of them – nearly as many as there are stars in the known universe – every second.

I have attempted to hint at the mind-boggling jump in complexity which biological processes have achieved over inorganic chemical processes. This complexity is largely due to genetic design which, in turn, has evolved continuously since the first life. It is this genetic knowledge which allows the complex chemistry which is life to exist.

Biological evolution is an interplay involving genetically recorded knowledge and the environment in which it finds itself.  The knowledge is of designs for individual organisms which may have an existence in that environment. It is also knowledge for the execution of those designs and the construction or development of individuals from that knowledge. The differential success in maintaining an existence enjoyed by the individuals of each generation is the information which updates the knowledge repository as to what works and what doesn’t. This is a basic form of the evolution of evidence-based knowledge.

The knowledge involved is extremely specific. For example, each of the 5,000 enzymes which catalyze a chemical reaction pathway may be composed of up to 2,500 amino-acid building blocks and each of these building blocks is coded for by a 3-character sequence of DNA. Over evolutionary time small variations, in the form of mutations, may be introduced to this code and individuals with slightly unique enzymes are given an experimental try-out in the environment. The successes are recorded and live on within the species’ genome but the failures do not. In this manner knowledge of successful designs form powerful models and accumulate in the genome. Thus behind each of those vast number of enzymes is an informational plan for its structure, construction and use. In this instance the information is at least equally fundamental as is material in the form of the enzyme.

The entire realm of the biosphere is formed from the interactions among a vast number of experimental designs. Each of these individual organisms are mortal and have but a short life span; it is the knowledge repository or model from which they spring that is more nearly immortal. In this unusual perspective the vast system of interacting organisms composing the biosphere appears less significant than the timeless knowledge which forms them. As phenotypes, we strut and fret our hour upon the stage but these experiments in living may signify only little to the repository of enduring knowledge.

This view of a reality beyond materialism and the world of appearances is supported by a current scientific revolution in which information is understood as at least equally fundamental as mass and energy. It harkens back to Plato and his understanding that the world of appearances is but a shadow world, a mere reflection of an underlying realm of ‘ideas’.

The scientific duality of matter and information is deeply entwined; all information is recorded in material form and all matter is formed under the direction of information. Their relationship in our understanding is not an exclusive one where either matter of information will displace the centrality of the other, rather it is a synergy. This synergy appears to be the only method which nature has found capable of accumulating knowledge.

Science itself is a case in point. Although we normally take it for granted, the rise of science was one of the key moments in the history of both our species and of our planet. Agricultural science transformed the planetary landscape as it developed processes capable of feeding seven billion people. Geologists are about to name a new geological epoch, as the Anthropocene, the geological era in which human activity is the dominant force shaping our planet. As seen from space our planet is unique as the only one to shine the light of its own internally-generated energy.

This transformation of the planet by humans began long before the formal study of science but it may be argued that even those early forms of human knowledge owe their power to a vague similarity to refined science. For example, the transformation of the earth’s surface through agriculture, which began in a so-called prescientific era, undoubtedly occurred through a dynamic between human ideas of what might work and the retention of experimental evidence of what did work.

Among all organisms, humans are uniquely adapted to take nature’s ancient method of knowledge accumulation to a new level. Perhaps the most unique of our biological adaptations is our big brain. While much of our brain design is shared with closely related animals, our prefrontal cortex is hugely outsized. 

This is the section of the brain which supports imaginative and sometimes even rational thinking (7):

This brain region has been implicated in planning complex cognitive behavior, personality expression, decision making, and moderating social behaviour. The basic activity of this brain region is considered to be orchestration of thoughts and actions in accordance with internal goals.

A striking feature of our uniquely imaginative mind, despite its great power is its surprising lack of accuracy. We can imagine practically anything; our imaginations know no bounds. What use are such thoughts if they are likely wrong?

Fortunately, we have also inherited a sensory cortex that is little changed from of our near animal relatives. This part of the brain, which provides us with senses and perceptions, is an ancient one and has been evolving for hundreds of millions of years. Its purpose is to provide animals with accurate information about what is actually going on in the world around them. Poor experimental designs of this brain area are quickly erased from the evolutionary record and hence it now provides us with highly detailed, reliable and accurate models of reality.

Humans and other animals exploit a synergy between the abilities of the prefrontal and sensory cortexes. The prefrontal cortex can provide hypothetical models of what is going on in the world and these can be judged and selected using our accurate sensory information. This synergy is used for the purpose of ‘orchestration of thoughts and actions in accordance with internal goals’ but such resulting behaviours may be seen in terms of experiments; behavioural actions are attempts to achieve goals but are not always successful, hopefully we learn from the evidence of those successes and failures.

This is essentially nature’s ancient method of knowledge accumulation which has achieved new vistas with the substantial increase in power of the human prefrontal cortex. It is most highly refined in the practice of science. We learn scientific models from the community of past and present scientists. No two people have exactly the same models so there is some variation among them. These various models are tested by experiments which collect sensory evidence and this evidence is used to calculate the models’ relative plausibility in light of that evidence. The most plausible models are selected. This is exactly the Darwinian paradigm of heredity, variation and selection. Indeed, many philosophers of science describe science as a Darwinian process (8; 9; 10).

At the core of science is reproducible evidence. A new variation to a scientific model will only gain support if evidence, usually from experiments, is gathered, and it can be seen that the sum of the evidence more clearly supports the new model rather than the old. Scientific evidence must be reproducible by others to guard against the possible bias, errors or delusions of a single researcher. Evidence which may be freely reproduced can be considered a technology. For example, our cell phones may be considered as providing reproducible evidence; each time we use them and they work, we are adding support to the vast number of scientific models used in their design.

In this light the vast technological landscape we inhabit is similar to the biosphere; its members are short-lived experiments and are but the temporal expression of a more timeless process of knowledge accumulation.

While we might be willing to view our cultural and perhaps even our biological selves as material or substance orchestrated by an ancient knowledge, can we extend this paradigm to the mind-bending possibility that it also applies to physical reality itself?

At the basis of a scientific understanding of reality is the quantum/classical divide. Our best science tells us that at bottom there is only quantum phenomena yet our experience of the world is that it is almost exclusively classical. It turns out that quantum reality is vast and contains many possibilities such as things being both here and there at the same time which we never experience. We experience only a classical reality where things are either here or there. Classical reality is only an extremely small subset among the vast quantum possibilities. What makes it special and how is it selected as the physical reality we inhabit?

A leading authority on the nature of quantum interactions, Wojciech Zurek, has proposed an explanation he calls quantum Darwinism (11). In this theory classical reality is selected from the quantum possibilities through a Darwinian process.

To appreciate the significance of this theory, we should first consider that at the basis of a scientific understanding of reality is information exchange. The four fundamental forces of nature operate through the exchange of information. With forces, such as electro-magnetism, one entity provides information to another as to what it should experience, for example, how it should move. Without such forces or information exchange the most fundamental particles would be isolated and unable to bond to or have any effect on other particles. There would be no reality at all, in the sense of containing complex entities whose components have mutual information about one another, one which could come to know itself. It is only through the process of information exchange that reality exists, that any entity may experience a reality beyond itself.

In Zurek’s view the quantum nature of reality is constrained to isolated particles but when these particles pass information to entities in their environment it is only classical information which can survive and reproduce. As the nature of reality is dependent upon the information which is exchanged we experience only a classical reality.

The nature of the information which quantum system pass to their environments are in the form of hard physical facts including force, position and momentum. Our understanding of it may morph between considering it as information or as physical entity. Of course the type of information which may survive is highly dependent upon the environment, for example some environments may support information concerning position and others information concerning momentum.

At the core of quantum theory is the understanding that quantum reality is in the form of information. The quantum wave function is a knowledge repository which fully describes quantum entities and any information which may be received from it by any other entity is contained within the wave function. Quantum Darwinism demonstrates that the only type of information capable of surviving the rigors of transfer is classical information.

When information transfer occurs a remarkable transformation of the wave function takes place; it ‘jumps’ to a state that corresponds to the information it has transferred. Even though the information which was transferred may have been selected from a vast array of quantum possibilities, after the transfer the quantum possibilities are reduced to only that information. For example, if the information transfer takes the form of a measurement then quantum theory assigns a probability to each possible outcome. The actual outcome may have been assigned only a low probability. However, if another identical measurement is repeated immediately following the first, the same result is predicted with probability 1. Thus the updating of the quantum model keeps it in sync with the information transferred to the environment.

Another way of looking upon this is to view the information or physical entity which the quantum system transfers to its environment as an experiment designed to gather information concerning its environment and the forms which may survive there. This evidence then updates the knowledge repository of the wave function. In the light of quantum Darwinism those forms which can survive also do evolve, quarks evolve into nucleons, nucleons into atoms and atoms into molecules. At each step the quantum wave function is the knowledge repository which continuously explores environmental possibilities through experimental probes.

Again we have the same paradigm, this time portraying the fundamental physical constituents of the universe, such as quarks, atoms and molecules, in terms of short lived experimental probes which update a more timeless knowledge repository as to what can exist.

Bibliography

1. Wheeler, John A. Geons,black holes & quantum foam. [ed.] Kenneth Ford Norton. 1998.

2. Einstein, Albert. Science and Religion. s.l. : New York Times magazine, http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm, 1930.

3. Wikipedia. Solar System. Wikipedia. [Online] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System.

4. —. Enzyme. Wikipedia. [Online] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enzyme.

5. —. ATPaes. Wikipedia. [Online] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATPase.

6. Lane, Nick. The Vital Question. s.l. : W. W. Norton & Company, 2015. ASIN: B00OD8Z4JW.

7. Wikipedia. Prefrontal cortex. Wikipedia. [Online] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefrontal_cortex.

8. Blind variation and selective retension in creative thought as in other knowledge processes. Campbell, Donald T. 1960, Psychological Review, Vol. 67, pp. 380 - 400.

9. Popper, Karl. Objective Knowledge. s.l. : Claredon Press, 1972.

10. Hull, David L. Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science. Chicago and London : The University of Chicago Press, 1988.

11. Quantum Darwinism. Zurek, Wojciech H. s.l. : http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v5/n3/abs/nphys1202.html, 2009, Nature Physics, vol. 5, pp. 181-188.

12. Ford, Kenneth. John Archibald Wheeler: Doer and Visionary. s.l. : As viewed on http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/ArticleDetail/tabid/68/id/5491/Default.aspx September 24, 2010, 2010.

Einstein and Lennon

This is an excerpt from Einstein's Enlightenment

Einstein and Lennon

John O. Campbell

Many of the greatest challenges that life presents us take the form of choosing the type of person we will be. Clearly, these choices are tightly constrained, largely by the cultural circumstances in which we are born; we all learn the language of our parents as well as countless other attributes specified by our culture. However, all cultures provide some wiggle room; some choices are individual ones and may be chosen from the menu which our culture makes available.

Thus we copy from among the cultural beliefs, attitudes and ways of being which the evolution of our culture has made available and make this selection our own. This allows for some individual variations as the copying is never perfect; we all exhibit some small variations in the cultural traits we adopt.

Still, how do we best chose or select from those choices available to us? Social scientists studying cultural evolution understand that a common and successful strategy is to make the same choices we observe being made by the most successful individuals in our group (1).

This is a brilliant selection mechanism as it allows one to adopt the best of the cultural traits which their culture has evolved. It also furthers cultural evolution in that the most successful cultural traits tend to become mainstream or conventional.

I will just note in passing that this description of cultural evolution is in terms of a Darwinian process: one with copying, variation and selection.

A related strategy for individuals, one which minimizes the stress of agonizing over such weighty decisions, is to choose the culture’s conventional answers, those adopted by the majority. Conventional traits are likely to be relatively successful and so this provides an easy way of arriving at a near-optimal choice.

However, there may be good reasons for not always taking this easy path. What has proved successful in the past, may not be as successful now or in the future. As well, there may be new successful opportunities that have not yet been widely recognized or adopted by the wider culture. Thus the adoption of non-conventional cultural traits can result in a big payoff but unfortunately, this is unlikely; most unconventional traits are unsuccessful and are ultimately rejected by the wider culture.  Yet from the perspective of cultural evolution it is the few non-conventional but successful traits that provide evolutionary progress, which allow for the expansion of the conventional wisdom.

Again I will note in passing that this is similar to the evolutionary process in biology where most mutations are harmful but it is the rare beneficial ones that are adopted by the population and which contribute to its evolution.

It is difficult to think of an individual who originated more successful non-conventional traits than Albert Einstein. His unconventional understanding of scientific subjects is widely considered brilliant and is a legend. I will argue that, as well, his non-conventional understanding of religion and humanism, although less well known, are equally brilliant. Those unsatisfied with selecting their life choices from the conventional may do well to consider the alternatives which Einstein has bequeathed us.

Einstein was able to synergize between two of his most brilliant eccentricities to create a blazingly radical vision of human society. The first is his unequalled ability to develop a logical chain of thought including its many implications and the second is his great powers for free-thinking, brilliantly original and unconstrained by conventional bias. He thought, in big brush strokes, about what human society was and what it could be.

He died an isolated man. Although his insights had transformed all of physics and formed the starting point for the generations of physicists following him, he left behind no devoted group of followers.  During the last half of his career, he conducted a futile quest to unify General Relativity with the quantum forces. His other scientific legacy during this period was sniping at the consensus claim of quantum theory that it was a complete description of micro-reality and the numerous attempts he made to demonstrate this incompleteness. Among those in the consensus, his non-believer stance contributed to a widespread view that the old man had lost his marbles.

Outside of physics Einstein’s legacy is practically unknown, his philosophical and sociological views remain obscure. At the time of his death in 1955, one of those waves of conservative fanaticism that periodically sweep America was well underway. 

Conservative elements had whipped the citizenry into a nationalistic frenzy through false claims that their government and society was riddled with the agents and spies of their great enemy, the communists. The hitherto obscure US senator, Joseph McCarthy was rocketed to national prominence by speeches he made fanning this paranoid frenzy:

The State Department is infested with communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.

Fortunately, these periodic waves of witch hunting do eventually pass and in late 1954 McCarthy was censured by the Senate for his excesses. His personal popularity quickly faded and President Eisenhower, who had always despised McCarthy, quipped that McCarthyism was now "McCarthywasm"

Einstein did not find McCarthyism amusing. In the 1930s he had direct experience of Hitler and the Nazis, they had raided his apartment, confiscated his belongings, denounced his science, and chased him out of Germany to America. He was neither cowed nor deceived by the likes of Hitler and wrote to a friend (2):

A group of armed bandits in Germany has successfully silenced the responsible segments of the population and imposed a kind of revolution from below which will soon succeed in destroying or paralyzing everything that is civilized in society.

He was certainly not cowed by the pathetic antics of McCarthyism. Although under scrutiny himself, Einstein argued that those called before the committee should assert their rights (3):

Invoking the Fifth Amendment was problematic, Einstein wrote, because “the individual is offered no legal middle ground for him to defend his actual rights.” In closing, he pointed to a more “revolutionary” tactic - non-cooperation, like Gandhi used with great success against the legal powers of the British Authorities.”

Later that year, Einstein also counselled fellow physicist Al Shadowitz to refuse to provide testimony at the McCarthy hearings—not by invoking the Fifth Amendment, but by asserting that the questioning was in violation of the First Amendment.

However, Einstein’s sociopolitical views were considered “verboten” by the American authorities for some time after his death as Cold War fervour and lingering McCarthyism maintained their hold on the nation. American society was reduced to frantic demonstrations of flag saluting and loyalty pledges. In this milieu, Einstein’s more rational pleas for world government and democratic socialism fell largely on deaf ears. During this era, it was unsafe to hold such political views; many were imprisoned and even more lost their jobs. Some of the victims of this purge were homosexuals, as somehow right-wing logic understood that ‘sexual perverts’ are by nature politically subversive.

Wikipedia describes some of the more shameful persecutions of this era (4):

It is difficult to estimate the number of victims of McCarthyism. The number imprisoned is in the hundreds, and some ten or twelve thousand lost their jobs. In many cases simply being subpoenaed by HUAC or one of the other committees was sufficient cause to be fired.  Many of those who were imprisoned, lost their jobs or were questioned by committees did in fact have a past or present connection of some kind with the Communist Party. But for the vast majority, both the potential for them to do harm to the nation and the nature of their communist affiliation were tenuous. After the extremely damaging "Cambridge Five" spy scandal (Burgess, Maclean, Philby, Blunt, et al.), suspected homosexuality was also a common cause for being targeted by McCarthyism. The hunt for "sexual perverts", who were presumed to be subversive by nature, resulted in thousands being harassed and denied employment. Many have termed this aspect of McCarthyism "The Lavender Scare".^[

Einstein himself was in danger. For the last 23 years of his life, the FBI amassed a 1,427-page file on him and colluded with the Department of Immigration to bring deportation proceedings against him.  The New York Times reported on this bizarre episode of official paranoia regarding Einstein (5):

For many years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies spied on him, acting on suspicions as disturbing as a tip that he had been a Russian spy in Berlin; as vague as an unease with his support of civil rights and pacifist and socialist causes; and as goofy as claims that he was working on a death ray or that he was heading a Communist conspiracy to take over Hollywood.

America did not fully emerge from this wave of fanaticism until a younger generation began questioning the contradictions between the officially espoused notions of liberty, freedom, and equality on the one hand and the reality of segregationist laws making second-class citizens of Blacks on the other. A little later in that decade this same generation of Americans also protested the actions of their country (the so-called champion of revolutionary and anti-colonial movements) in subjugating the Vietnamese and in the process causing the death of between 1.5 and 3.6 million south-east Asians (6).

 

 

American cities burned, and the ideals of the counter-culture emerged to become a major influence in the culture’s evolution. Environmentalism, feminism, gay rights, and anti-racism enjoyed a rebirth during this period and have since become more or less accepted standards of American society.  This new generation dealt the final death blow to McCarthyism when Jerry Rubin and his Yippee collaborators appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in revolutionary garb complete with toy assault rifles. The jig was up; the ridiculousness of McCarthyism suddenly became clear, the Emperor had no clothes.

Figure 4 : Jerry Rubin and the Yippies demonstrated that the House of Un-American Activities Committee was a sham and a laughing stock.

Perhaps some of the headiest aspirations of this movement were encapsulated in the near saintly status bestowed upon the great musical prophet John Lennon. The lyrics to ‘Give Peace a Chance’ were chanted at many mass demonstrations against America’s war machine.

Figure 5: Lennon's Give Peace A Chance campaign was an integral part of the American anti-Vietnam war movement.

Just as the FBI had sought to quell Einstein’s influence through deportation, they used the same strategy to counter the huge popularity of John Lennon’s radicalism. A file was maintained on him that was used by the Nixon administration to initiate deportation hearings. In many ways, it is understandable that the FBI saw both these men in a similar light, for Lennon’s political idealism and demands for social justice are a close reincarnation of Einstein’s views.

Perhaps the principles of the counter-culture achieved their most direct and poetic expression in Lennon’s song Imagine.  Those lyrics envision an ideal world, a world with no religion, no nations, no possessions, no greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man. They describe a world very much like the one advocated by Einstein.

However, Einstein’s radical societal views were set forth in his usual logical manner which tended to lack the poetic punch achieved by Lennon. Nevertheless, his vision, while perhaps more thoughtful, was equally humanitarian and cosmic.HoHoH

Lennon’s lyrics start with an invocation to imagine a world with no religion.

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…..

Likewise, the religion advocated by Einstein was the religion of Spinoza and did not envision heaven or hell nor any type of personal God.

Perhaps of greater interest is Lennon’s dream that instead of living our lives in the hope of a better life after death, it is best to focus on the lives we have now, here on earth. This notion of the value of life is central to the philosophy of Humanism. Wikipedia describes it (7):

Humanism is a philosophical and ethical stance that emphasizes the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers critical thinking and evidence (rationalism, empiricism) over established doctrine or faith (fideism). The meaning of the term humanism has fluctuated, according to the successive intellectual movements which have identified with it.  Generally, however, humanism refers to a perspective that affirms some notion of human freedom and progress. In modern times, humanist movements are typically aligned with secularism, and today "Humanism" typically refers to a non-theistic life stance centred on human agency, and looking to science instead of religious dogma in order to understand the world.

Einstein fully endorsed Humanism and lent his great influence to promote humanist organizations. His dedication to this movement is documented in the Wikipedia article on Einstein’s religious beliefs (8):

Einstein was a Humanist and a supporter of the Ethical Culture movement. He served on the advisory board of the First Humanist Society of New York. …. He was an honorary associate of the British Humanist organization, the Rationalist Press Association and its journal was among the items present on his desk at his death.

Clearly, Einstein and Lennon were kindred spirits in their views concerning religion and humanism.

The second verse of Imagine envisions a future where war is obsolete, where the main causes of war, nationalistic fervour, and religious belief, have been left behind.

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

Many of Einstein’s writings echo these sentiments to a surprising degree. He recognized nationalism as a great evil and advocated for a world government as the only possible means of avoiding future wars (9).

Einstein was plagued throughout his life by religious believers who thought that given his spiritual nature he must believe in a religion similar to their own and in 1954, shortly before his death, he wrote to an offending Rabbi, spelling out in the clearest possible terms, his non-belief in conventional religions (10).

For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.

Imagine’s chorus stresses human agency, especially the possibility that humanity could choose a cooperative and peaceful world society.

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

This same vision of a world society was shared by Einstein (9):

The UN and world government eventually must serve one single goal – the guarantee of the security, tranquility, and the welfare of all mankind.

The last verse of Imagine is considered by many to be it's most radical. In a few lines, Lennon outlines a society that has out-grown competition and has endorsed sharing.

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

Lennon’s socialist vision is close to the democratic socialism advocated by Einstein (9).

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals…. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.

Einstein was not naive, he had a sophisticated view of socialism and acknowledged the many potential problems entailed with centralized bureaucracy:

Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of the bureaucracy be assured?

Nevertheless, for Einstein, these problems were not ‘show stoppers’ but rather obstacles to be overcome on the path to a cooperative and sharing world society, a world society very much like the one John Lennon envisioned thirty years later.

Bibliography

1. A framework for the unification of the behavioral sciences. Gintis, Herbert. s.l. : http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/FrameworkForUnificationOfBehavioralSciences.HGintis2007.pdf, 2007, BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES.

2. Einstein, Albert. Letter to Paul Langevin. 1933.

3. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American HIstory. Albert Einstein on the McCarthy hearings and the Fifth Amendment, 1953. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American HIstory. [Online] [Cited: 1 10, 2016.] http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/fifties/resources/albert-einstein-mccarthy-hearings-and-fifth-amendment-1953.

4. Wikipedia. McCarthyism. Wikipedia. [Online] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism#Victims_of_McCarthyism.

5. Overbye, Dennis. New Details Emerge From the Einstein Files; How the F.B.I. Tracked His Phone Calls and His Trash. The New York Times. May 7, 2002.

6. Wikipedia. Vietnam war causalties. Wikipedia. [Online] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties.

7. —. Humanism. Wikipedia. [Online]

8. —. Religious View of Albert Einstein. Wikipedia. [Online] [Cited: April 9, 2015.] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Albert_Einstein.

9. Einstein, Albert. Essays in Humanism . s.l. : Philosophical Library/Open Road , 2011.

10. —. Letter written to Eric Gutkind . 1954.

11. —. Letter written to Raymond Benenson. January 31, 1946. Vols. Einstein Archives 56-505.

12. —. Letter written to Margot Einstein. 1951.

13. —. Letter written to Ugo Onofri. 1954. Einstein Archives 60-758.