Abstract
The rich experiences of an intentional, goal-oriented life emerge, in an unpredictable fashion, from the basic laws of physics. Here I argue that this unpredictability is no mirage: there are true gaps between life and non-life, mind and mindlessness, and even between functional societies and groups of Hobbesian individuals. These gaps, I suggest, emerge from the mathematics of self-reference, and the logical barriers to prediction that self-referring systems present. Still, a mathematical truth does not imply a physical one: the universe need not have made self-reference possible. It did, and the question then is how. In the second half of this essay, I show how a basic move in physics, known as renormalization, transforms the “forgetful” second-order equations of fundamental physics into a rich, self-referential world that makes possible the major transitions we care so much about. While the universe runs in assembly code, the coarse-grained version runs in LISP, and it is from that the world of aim and intention grows.
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Notes
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- 2.
Making this article completely self-referential, the first book shipped from Amazon was by Douglas Hofstadter and the Fluid Analogies group at Indiana.
- 3.
A more complicated relationship might obtain when hiring a taxi: the first mile is more expensive compared to the second mile, because you’re usually charged a flat rate, or “flag drop”. But if you try to get a taxi to take you from, say, Pittsburgh to Chicago, you’ll find that you end up negotiating a much higher per-mile fee than you’d expect, since the driver won’t be able to get a return fare. We’ll focus here on the cases where every marginal cost specifies a unique unit amount—these also obtain for sensible physical laws, and our toy example of the drug firm. The technical term is that the Lagrangian is “non-degenerate”.
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Marr, a neuroscientist, described three levels for the analysis of human visual processing: the “computational” (what purpose is the system achieving—recognizing faces, say), “algorithmic” (how does the system break that task into subtasks that fit together? can you write down the psuedocode of that process?), and “implementation” (how the brain actually gets things done, with Potassium ions and depolarization waves) [25].
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DeDeo, S. (2018). Origin Gaps and the Eternal Sunshine of the Second-Order Pendulum. In: Aguirre, A., Foster, B., Merali, Z. (eds) Wandering Towards a Goal. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75726-1_5
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