Parallel Universes

[Finster]

Re: Parallel Universes

Well, at least you caught the brass ring - Finster doesn't seem to want to play outside the medieval ring wall . . . .

I have not spent nearly as much time & energy on these ideas as I should have when I first ran across them, got sidetracked I suppose, this thread jogged my memory.

Oy, Cob ... I have not spent enough time and energy in the field of biology to play there on your level. The best I can offer is a reading reco: Stuart Kauffman's At Home In The Universe. Kauffman is a pioneer in complexity theory, especially as applied to the field of biology. If you like Rosen, you will like this.

[cjppjc]

Re: Parallel Universes

As you're probably aware, to Einstein's objection that "God does not play dice.", Bohr (perhaps apocryphally) retorted "Stop telling God what to do!" I have the feeling many of these scientific pioneers did feel they were somehow looking for, if not God himself, then his handiwork, the set of rules by which everything would work. It's hard to study fundamental physics, for me anyway, without coming away awestruck, as if having glanced the dust of creative Genius.

From Einstein: His life and Times

Very moving to me



The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms -- this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men

[cobben]

Re: Parallel Universes

"I have not spent enough time and energy in the field of biology "

Finster, Rosen has done imho some breakthrough thinking in how theoretical mathematics & realworld science connect. True, he was nominally a biologist, but his ideas apply all over. Not being current on this stuff I don't want to try to take it further just now. Will take a look at Kaufman, it was several years ago I became interested in complexity theory, and I have not kept up with what may be going on there now.

[Finster]

Re: Parallel Universes

"I have not spent enough time and energy in the field of biology "

Finster, Rosen has done imho some breakthrough thinking in how theoretical mathematics & realworld science connect. True, he was nominally a biologist, but his ideas apply all over. Not being current on this stuff I don't want to try to take it further just now. Will take a look at Kaufman, it was several years ago I became interested in complexity theory, and I have not kept up with what may be going on there now.

You could say much of the same for Kauffman. The biology connection comes largely from the standpoint that it's one or two levels up from physics in terms of reductionism. That is, there is the idea that physics is the most fundamental of the sciences, but that there is an "emergent" level of organization as you work up the chain to chemistry and biology that can't be accounted for in terms of the laws of physics alone.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Parallel Universes

Unfortunately, Church's thesis is not true [Rosen 91].

I don't have the book yet to verify this, but I doubt that Rosen disproves Church's thesis.

There is a decent discussion of some typical confusions regarding Church's thesis at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/church-turing/ which might explain this.

My more simple minded explanation is that I expect Rosen suffered from a variant of a fallacy that is more familiar to me. I don't know if this is still a common fallacy these days, but back when I last studied these matters, nearly a half-century ago (), it was common to extrapolate from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle some sort of justification for Moral Relativism (a convenient position for immoral youth), or to extrapolate from Godel's Incompleteness Result some sort of Mystical Unknowable Universe (a convenient position for heretic youth.) Both extrapolations extend fairly esoteric results in specific formal logic or physics systems into arenas far outside their applicability. Such extrapolations are really little more than metaphors, not mathematical proofs or physics calculations.

I suspect Rosen is doing something similar, in reverse. Having found more general forms of organization in biology that are not Turing computable, he might be (I should wait to read the book before asserting this) then claiming that this disproves Church's Thesis of the equivalence of certain formal definitions of computability. Church's Thesis and its variants and descendents apply in a specific area of formal logic that is at the foundations of mathematics. The Thesis does not comment on whether there are other forms of organization outside that area of formal logic, and the existence of such non-Turing computable forms of organization in no way disproves Church's Thesis.

On a more positive note, what little I've read of Rosen so far reminds me vaguely of another author I enjoyed immensely -- Susanne K. Langer. She began her career in the Math and Philosopy departments at Harvard (likely with Quine) and culminated her life with a three volume magnum opus Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (this link is to just the third volume; I don't know offhand where to obtain the first two.) Langer was also engaged in the great pasttime of philosophers over the millenia -- discerning what made life or in particular humans distinct from simpler forms of being. She like (from what I can tell at first blush) Rosen focused on the organization of forms.

[cobben]

Re: Parallel Universes

"the great pasttime of philosophers over the millenia -- discerning what made life or in particular humans distinct from simpler forms of being."

Somewhere I read this: "Humans are the only animals capable of suicide."

So much to do, so little time . . . if I thought I could predict the markets (and become feelthy rich, of couse) by deciding Church's thesis I would drop everything and go right to it . . . but as it is we are moving house back to Latvia from Sweden tomorrow, so I shouldn't even be here now.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Parallel Universes

but as it is we are moving house back to Latvia from Sweden tomorrow, so I shouldn't even be here now.

Ah dear, life does intrude sometimes. Have a good move.

Actually, on investigating Amazon's suggested alternative books to Rosen, I might get Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion by Stuart Kauffman instead. He seems a bit more disciplined and less arrogant than Rosen, and he seems to be probing in the direction and from a viewpoint (roughly pantheist, such as Spinoza) that better matches my interests and views. Rosen seems to engage in a form of name dropping in his invocations of results from the foundations of mathematics. His abuse of such results, conflating proof with metaphor, annoys me.

From what I can gather from the reviews on Amazon, serious biologists (when they aren't busy moving) might enjoy Kauffman's earlier more technical book The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution.

[Finster]

Re: Parallel Universes

Ah dear, life does intrude sometimes. Have a good move.

Actually, on investigating Amazon's suggested alternative books to Rosen, I might get Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion by Stuart Kauffman instead... Kauffman's earlier more technical book The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution.

Hmmm ...! That makes three book recos for Kauffman in one thread ... guy must be good ...

Oy, Cob ... I have not spent enough time and energy in the field of biology to play there on your level. The best I can offer is a reading reco: Stuart Kauffman's At Home In The Universe. Kauffman is a pioneer in complexity theory, especially as applied to the field of biology. If you like Rosen, you will like this.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Parallel Universes

Hmmm ...! That makes three book recos for Kauffman in one thread ... guy must be good ...

Gosh darn. Here I had reading recommendations from one of iTulips finest and I had to go off to rummage through the recommendations of the rabble on Amazon instead. .

[cobben]

Re: Parallel Universes

Good new ideas tend to appear spontaneously as if by chance at odd places around the world independently of each other.

Admittedly I have not read Rosen (just assorted parts of Kiersey's site), and I am by the way not a biologist, just one of those rabid theoretical math types by nature & habit, though I have had serious exposure to genetics.