RADICAL EMERGENCE

12. Evolution yields new adjacent possible niches which alter and ENABLE NEW DIRECTIONS OF FUTURE EVOLUTION: this is RADICAL EMERGENCE. (no conscious mind needed for this radical emergence).
13. Same for econosphere and culture: Turing machine enabled Eniac, created a niche for hence enabled main frame whose wide sale into a new market niche created a further new market niche that enabled Steve Jobs to envision the personal computer in that new niche, an enabling opportunity he saw and seized, whose wide sale created a new market niche for word processing, an enabling opportunity that Bill Gates (and others) saw and seized, whose wide sale and use created a niche for sharing files whose niche enabled the creation of the World Wide Web, which enabled selling things on the web and eBay emerged, enabling more content on the web creating a niche enabling browsing the web and Google and Yahoo emerged, then Facebook enabled the Arabic Spring and new forms of social movements, which enable.....
14. The above leads to a profound new issue: Is this becoming of life and our lives entailed by some law - the reductionist view? I will argue NO. No law entails the becoming of the biosphere or human life.
15. Max Weber’s statement: “With Newton we became disenchanted and entered Modernity.”
...
21. Uses of screw drive alone or with other objects or processes are indefinite and unorderable. Thus NO EFFECTIVE PROCEDURE TO LIST THEM ALL. No algorithmic way to list all the uses of a screw driver.
22. Cellular screw drivers and other process and parts may ‘FIND A USE” IN AN UNPRESTATABLE DARWINIAN PREADAPTATION, which is heritable and enhances fitness so is selected by natural selection OPERATING AT THE LEVEL OF THE KANTIAN WHOLE, so is grafted into evolution.
23. This selection at the level of Kantian whole IDENTIFIES THE UNPRESTATABLE BUT NEWLY RELEVANT VARIABLES IN THE EVOLVING CELL OR ORGANISM.
24. Thus, with Longo, we cannot prestate the EVER CHANGING PHASE SPACE of life as it evolves. We do not know the ever new relevant variables.
25. Need settled semantically laden concepts for mathematization. Law of pendulum, Newton’s laws of motion.
26. We do not have settled semantically laden concepts for evolving biosphere, so we cannot mathematize it, we cannot write down equations of motion of biosphere evolving. A fortiori so too for evolving econsphere, culture.
27. Without a predefined phase space, we do not know the adjacent possible niche which is the boundary conditions on selection, eg for worm evolving to live in swim bladder, so even if we had, which we don’t, the laws of motion, we could not integrate them. It would be like trying to integrate for billiiard balls on a table whose shape is unknown and ever changing.
28. Thus NO LAW ENTAILS THE BECOMING OF THE BIOSPHERE, OR LIFE IN GENERAL.
Preserved on 2011-11-01 from
NECSI and MIT/ESD Seminar
Stuart Kauffman
The End Of A Physics Worldview: Heraclitus and the Watershed of Life







