Biocosm: The New Scientific Theory of Evolution: Intelligent Life is the Architect of The Universe

by: James N. Gardner read in 2019

xxvi "As Darwin's example shows, plausible and deliberate speculation plays an essential role in the advancement of science."
38 "All we can say for certain at this stage is that the universe appears to be life-friendly (at least for life as we know it) if and only if there are exactly three extended dimensions of space and one dimension of time." No. That's just our current best guess. There is nothing "certain" about it.
39 "...in a cosmos with five or six extended spatial dimensions...stable planetary orbits would be impossible..." Not true. Stable orbits could exist in a 4D manifold.
43 ""The theory yields a lot, but it hardly brings us any closer to the secrets of the Old One. In any case I am convinced that He does not throw dice."" Quoted from A. Einstein
44 Wheeler: "To endlessness [infinite regress] no alternative is evident but loop." Another alternative is finitude. (Matryoshka dolls)
46 "Wheeler's startling scenario is generally disfavored by mainstream scientists. However, his key insight may turn out to be correct: that living and thinking creatures are, in at least some manner, vital participants in the inconceivably vast process of cosmic evolution." I agree with Wheeler on this issue.
50 "Hugo De Vries, who proclaimed that what really interested him was not the survival of the fittest but the arrival of the fittest."
50 "[I]s a force of self-organization the silent but indispensable partner of Darwin's force of natural selection, performing the role of nature's creative experimentalist by offering up a dizzying array of diverse living forms and processes upon which Darwinian evolution may operate?" I think so.
50 "Kauffman's first book, The Origins of Order" Buy this book.
51 Kaufman: "It is not that Darwin is wrong but that he got hold of only part of the truth. For Darwin's answer to the sources of the order we see all around us is overwhelmingly an appeal to a singular force: natural selection. It is this single-force view which I believe to be inadequate, for it fails to notice, fails to stress, fails to incorporate the possibility that simple and complex systems exhibit order spontaneously" I agree.
51 "Kauffman concluded, three key questions must be answered:
- What are the spontaneous sources of order?
- How do the forces driving systems to spontaneous order enable and collaborate with the forces of natural selection?
- What properties of complex living systems confer upon them the capacity to adapt and evolve?" My answers: 1. A hyperspatial TDB, 2. At least thru a 2-way-communication brain/mind link, and maybe thru direct quantum interaction tweaking, 3. A transponder enabling the mind/body link (the claustrum).
56 "If we are, in ways we do not yet see, natural expressions of matter and energy coupled together in nonequilibrium systems, if life in its abundance were bound to arise, not as an incalculably improbable accident, but as an expected fulfillment of the natural order, then we truly are at home in the universe." And exactly who, do you suppose, is the "expector"?
57 Kauffman: "A candidate fourth law: As an average trend, biospheres and the universe create novelty and diversity as fast as they can manage to do so without destroying the accumulated propagating organization that is the basis and nexus from which further novelty is discovered and incorporated into the propagating organization."
57 "Darwin, like Kauffman, always assumed that natural selection had a handmaiden, a silent partner, a generative order-building force that operated in tandem with the destructive force that weeded out less fit individuals and species."
58 Darwin: "I placed in a most conspicuous position-namely, at the close of the Introduction-the following words: 'I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification.' This has been of no avail. Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure." I wish I had known this during some of my Internet debates on my genetic code essay.
92 "...some version of intelligent design theory might not supplant orthodox Darwinism but rather subsume it to a more fundamental explanatory paradigm in much the same way that Einstein's theory of relativity subsumes but does not supplant Newton's theory of gravity." TDB/SG does exactly that.
94 "IDers must strive to construct a solid intellectual model of "what happened" that either contrasts with or, better yet, subsumes Darwinian theory." TDB/SG does that too.
98 "German biologist Ernst Haeckel..."Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.""
105 "...we must first ask how far the twin processes of evolution (including cultural evolution) and emergence could, at least in principle, propel the phenomenon of complexification in theory." Yes, answering that question could help illuminate the distant future, but it does nothing for explaining the pre-biotic past. TDB/SG does.
117 "Dawkins's open-ended replicator hierarchy suggests that the natural processes of self-organization, emergence, and natural selection, governed by laws whose existence is hypothesized (but not yet definitively formulated) by complexity theorists as well as by theoretical approaches derived from Darwinian theory, are fully capable of yielding such a capability without any requirement of supernatural intervention or supervision." This is an unnecessary self-limiting hypothesis. The knee-jerk aversion to everything "supernatural" is simply a semantic convention. The current scientific paradigm insists that the word 'natural' be limited to those phenomena within reach or observation of our scientific instruments. Thus, anything outside our 4D space-time manifold is deemed "supernatural". The historical limitation has been good for science up to now, but if, as I suspect, our 4D manifold is embedded in a higher-dimensional space-time, then as part of reality, that higher-dimensional space-time should be considered natural and the domain of science should be enlarged to include it. Of course, this would require suitable adjustments to Occam's Razor and to Popper's criteria.
122 "...the novel interpretation suggested by the Selfish Biocosm hypothesis is that the life-friendly quality of the physical laws that dominate our cosmos is a causal and fully naturalistic consequence of the fact that highly evolved life and intelligence constitute the duplicating machine that is responsible for the replication and re-creation of universes like ours." That might explain future evolution, but not the origin or the pre-biotic past. You would need something like multiple temporal dimensions.
122 "...it is rather that highly evolved life (and its by-product intelligence) is the hypothesized causal agent that gave birth to our universe" Now you have to explain the origin and evolution of "that highly evolved life". TDB/SG does that.
123 "Clearly, the scenario depends solely on hypothesized natural processes. What is startling is not the basic nature of those processes but rather the potential magnitude of their predicted eventual impact over immense stretches of cosmic time" It might be "startling" but it doesn't make it any more "natural" nor does it help with the problem in note 122. You need to admit the existence of real higher dimensions.
136 "...the oddly life-friendly suite of laws and physical constants that prevail in our particular universe serve a function precisely analogous to that of DNA in earthly creatures: they furnish a recipe for the ontogenetic development of the mature organism and a blueprint that provides the plan for construction of offspring." OK. But a recipe or a blueprint is not sufficient to make a cake or a building; you also need ingredients and a cook, or materials, site, an engineer, and a builder. It is not clear that the counterparts to these necessities are supplied by the DNA in organisms.
137 "...the cosmos may be quintessentially a great unfolding life." I agree.
142 "...assumption made by Freeman Dyson: that life and information processing could not possibly survive a cosmological scenario pursuant to which the universe begins to recontract and eventually ends in either a Big Crunch or a Big Bounce" This assumption depends on the assumption that "life and information processing" inheres in our 4D manifold. I claim that it does not, but instead is lodged in higher dimensional structures which, logically, could survive the fate of our manifold
142 "What I was seeking was a plausible cosmological scenario that would yield not merely the indefinite persistence of life and intelligence, but something far more dramatic: a final state of the cosmos that would be physically consistent with a capacity for maximal computational capability. I decided to provisionally call that hypothesized final cosmic state the "eschaton." The term eschaton was a neologism I selected because of its relationship to the word eschatology, a theological doctrine dealing with the topic of last or final things. The eschaton, I concluded, would be the hypothetical entity capable of functioning as a von Neumann duplicator in the context of the Selfish Biocosm hypothesis." My TDB/SG is your eschaton.
143 "The flatness puzzle (i.e., why is the observable universe so close to being spatially flat?)" My answer: Because the observable universe is an embedded manifold and that local "flatness" is a mathematical feature of manifolds.
143 "The homogeneity puzzle (i.e., what is the origin of the original density fluctuations that are responsible for tiny variations in the nearly uniform cosmic microwave background radiation...)" My answer: It was by design-the 'D' in TDB/SG.
143 "The inhomogeneity puzzle (i.e., what is the origin of the original density fluctuations that are responsible for tiny variations in the nearly uniform cosmic microwave background radiation...)" My answer: It was by design-the 'D' in TDB/SG.
256 "The canonical assumption has been that any scenario pursuant to which the universe "ends in fire" (i.e., a Big Crunch) precludes the possibility of the persistence of information processing (or life, for that matter) through the Big Crunch era." This ignores the possibility of hyper-dimensional structures outside the collapsing 4D manifold of the visible universe. Such structures could very well preserve the information from the erstwhile BB/BC "universe".
151 Michael Shermer: "God is typically described by Western religions as omniscient and omnipotent. Because we are far from possessing these traits, how can we possibly distinguish a God who has them absolutely from an ETI who merely has them copiously relative to us? We can't. But if God were only relatively more knowing and powerful than we are, then by definition the deity would be an ETI."
156 "The Selfish Biocosm hypothesis suggests that highly evolved life and intelligence play a central role in the process of cosmic replication." That's fine, but let's hear about the process of evolution that led to and produced that "highly evolved life and intelligence", and then let's hear a description of its ultimate origin.
157 Fred Hoyle: ""A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question." I agree completely with Fred. The challenge should be to explain that "superintellect", i.e. its origins and its development
271 "Fred Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe: A New View of Creation and Evolution" Buy this book.
157 "The unknown superintelligence that preceded us, Hoyle believed, put together as a "deliberate act of creation" a universe that was suitable for carbon-based life and the evolution of intelligence. Hoyle stressed that the superintellect of which he was speaking was not a supernatural deity but a natural entity whose essence we could ultimately aspire to understand. Far from being religiously inspired, the idea that such a naturally occurring superintellect might have existed and might have been responsible for the deliberate engineering of the basic laws of nature was, in Hoyle's view, deeply antithetical to the proreligion bias of Western civilization and Western science. He stated, "The idea that the intelligence that designed carbon-based life is squarely within the Universe of normal cause and effect is one that has had an uncomfortable reception in the contemporary western world because in conformity with Judaeo-Christian tradition it seems to be the real wish of western astronomers to invoke supernatural ultimate causes from outside the Universe." I disagree slightly with Hoyle here: the "supernatural" objection is not substantial but merely semantic. The real reason religion rejects the idea is that it destroys such notions as omniscience, infinity, omnipotence, perfection, completeness, omni-benevolence, and eternity. The reason science rejects the idea is that they are infected with the psychological disorder described by E. Abbott, and which prevents them from accepting the reality of astronomically sized hyper-spatial and temporal dimensions. They are stuck with the unnecessary restrictions on thought imposed by Occam and Popper.
158 "Hoyle's view was that we could not only know the mind of the author of nature but that "we are the intelligence that preceded us in its new material representation-or rather, we are the reemergence of that intelligence, the latest embodiment of its struggle for survival."" I agree with Hoyle completely and would go even further: I believe we are right now in a position to discover the ultimate origin and the evolutionary development of that "author of nature" whose mind we represent.
159 "Louis Crane[:]...In the first place, the origin and evolution of life [can] no longer [be viewed as] a mere accident. Rather it is deliberately coded into the fine tuning of the physical laws. Since the development of life and of the universe are joined into a unified evolutionary process, they can be viewed from the point of view of purpose, just as it makes sense to speak of the purpose of an organ of a developing animal, even though the development of the animal is entirely within the scope of physical law. Secondly, intelligence and its ongoing success are no longer a small and unimportant accident in an enormous universe. Rather they are the precondition for the existence and reproduction of the universe. The world around us was created by something like us, and is structured, as if deliberately, to produce us and nurture us. We have a larger purpose which goes beyond ourselves of sustaining and recreating the universe."
159 "[Louis Crane:] If this [scenario] is eventually demonstrated to be true, it should have cultural implications beyond the sphere of science itself. The traditional spheres of religion and science will fuse, but on a new basis, and with no mystical illusions." Yes!
205 "...the heart of the [Selfish Biocosm] hypothesis is that the progressive, self-complexifying processes of biological evolution and emergence, yielding ever more complex life and ever more competent intelligence as a natural, predictable and robust consequence, are written into the very logic of the universe and its physical laws and constants." Written?? By whom? or by what?
216 "The new paradigm implies that the cosmos actually creates and renews itself as an enormous self-organizing and self-renewing system, and, further, that each living creature, at each juncture in the cosmic life cycle, is responsible for a small but possibly indispensable contribution to the overall process of cosmic growth, evolution, and eventual renewal." I agree.
218 "...to at least some limited degree, we and our descendants are the "intelligent designers" who are consciously and unconsciously shaping the fate of the universe. With apologies to Pogo, we have met the creator of the cosmos and the cosmic creator is us." I agree.
226 "The messy science/religion/philosophy interface should be treasured as an incredibly fruitful cornucopia of creative ideas-a constantly coevolving cultural triple helix of interacting ideas and beliefs that is, by far, the most precious of all the manifold treasures yielded by our history of cultural evolution on Earth." Interesting observation. It is reminiscent of Penrose's three worlds.

Summary: This book is a good synthesis of disparate current ideas, but it doesn't add much that is new. The two major failings, as I see them, are that it lacks a parsimonious cosmogony, and that it lacks any speculation on the mechanism of cosmic evolution (other than the incomplete, thus inadequate, mechanism of Darwinian Natural Selection). I humbly offer for consideration my TDB/SG Theory, which supplies both a hint at a parsimonious cosmogony and a logical mechanism. (See A Proposal for an Expanded Paradigm for an introduction to TDB/SG.)



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