BRAVE NEW WORLD—embrace it or lose it
“Two weeks ago I met senior mathematician Giuseppe Longo, of the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, who gave a stunning lecture. Physical laws, he said, are based on fundamental symmetries: Nother’s famous theorems show that the fundamental laws of conservation of energy, momentum and angular momentum derive from the symmetries of time, space and rotation. But, said Longo, the evolution of the biosphere evades such symmetries and forever constructs an ever changing “phase space”, or space of the possibilities into which it becomes and which we cannot pre-state. Thus, in physics itself, we may assume, for the time being, that physical matter may be theoretically analyzed in pre-determined phase spaces (at least, this is what classical, relativistic, quantum physicists do … let’s assme that they are right). But this cannot be done in biological evolution, where we cannot pre-state the ever-changing phase space.
A fortiori so too the econosphere, culture and history. Life may be a necessary, surely a sufficient condition for this. As I argued in the last post, we do not know the very niche selective boundary conditions that play a role in evolution. Yet Newton taught us that entailment requires initial conditions, laws, and boundary conditions. Yet we cannot pre-state or deduce the boundary conditions afforded by the new adjacent possible empty niche yielded by the advent of the Darwinian pre-adaptation of the swim bladder. Thus we cannot have even entailment and law for the detailed becoming of the biopshere. Nor was that swim bladder niche, as a new empty adjacent possible niche, even subjected to natural selection. The biosphere is building, beyond even Darwin, beyond sufficient law, the new adjacent possible niches it will become. So too the economy, culture and our history.
We are beyond Newton, Einstein, Darwin and even Schrodinger because the becoming of the biosphere is partially quantum acausal mutations, and yet non-random, in the 11-fold evolution of the eye and the convergent evolution of the Tasmanian marsupial wolf and mammalian wolf. The mixture of quantum and classical is here neither deterministic, after Newton and Einstein, nor quantum random, after Schrodinger and von Neuman. The world is new.”