The Meaning of Life, Intentionality, Entropy, and the Thermodynamic Universe

Triolis by Al Swanson

As seemingly discrete organisms, we humans get a skewed perspective on how life works. For another way of looking at things, consider marine life. In the ocean, all critters swim in the other guys’ pee. Detritus is all-enveloping from an individual’s viewpoint. But one critter’s offal is another’s bread and butter. And there are many more, and closely packed levels of this in a watery environment than on land, so it must be impossible to ignore. It is “systems” all the way down. This blurs, massively, the distinction between “biological” and “non-biological”, between life and non-life.

At the bottom of it, all critters are generated of the same elements, of course. But way up the scale it is still hard to say where critter A leaves of and critter B (or non-critter A) begins. “Life, as we present-day humans know it, can hardly exist without our gut bacteria; mitochondria; mates and family; automobiles; newspapers and other virtual “sense organisms”; metaphors, institutions…. When you really come down to it, defining an “organism” is pretty tricky.

It comes down to privileged viewpoints, of course. We think of life from our perspective, because it is precisely that perspective that is useful to our human level of life. However, even at the biological level, a complex life—and all life is “complex”—contains many complicit layers. In other words, it is a “food chain”, as are all “economies”.

[By the way, my use of “scare quotes” serves a semantic purpose: Terms thus indicated represent metaphors that have been “stretched”, perhaps without altering their “topologies”, but this is not guaranteed.]

But let’s get outside our parochial economics. Consider things from the atomic viewpoint. Now, from an individual atom’s perspective, the function of a human, say, would seem like magic: Why should all that VAST (here I am alluding to Dennett’s allusion to Borges’ Library of Babel) number of particles work in so improbably coordinated a fashion? (And, why, indeed, are certain nearby particles excluded from that action? What defines “borders”?) There must be a terrific amount of “intentionality” emerging from a complex interaction of all those particles. Intentionality is emergent, then? Okay, but the point of emergence is, I believe, that that the whole is greater than the arithmetic sum of its parts, but that it is equal to the complicity of its parts.

But, from a calculations viewpoint, of course, complicity is quite intractable, as it involves complex feedback in a temporally dynamic setting. As I have suggested elsewhere, this leads to one way to think of “free will”. From my notebook: This has to do with uncertainty. Nothing on a given level can possibly “know” the state—the position and the velocity—of every one of its “level-mates” within time. Thus, a full knowledge of a lower level will not allow a full prediction of the state of a higher level, as such a full knowledge would require the resolution of an unresolvable temporal term. Therefore, while all levels have some sort of intentionality, no level can resolve the intentionality of a higher level. For all practical purposes, then, what happens at a higher level of organization truly is magic. (Somewhat ironically—and definitely paradoxically—if any Laplace-ian demon [to predict to workings of a supposed clockwork universe] were in any sense possible, she would have to exist somewhere around the Planck level of time—that is, where, or when, time itself is quantized: If things could just stand still long enough to be catalogued before the next downbeat….The problem is, of course, that this is the very level where physical reality is unpredictable. So, in gaining a toehold in our knowledge of deterministic certainty, we have fallen into an abyss of uncertainty….

All this, of course, goes right over our atom’s “head”. The whole concept of the atomic point of view is, in a crucial way, bogus: The atom has no sensory apparatus to be “aware” of anything outside its parochial interests—bouncing off other like particles, exchanging electrons, dealing with quantum issues, whatever. Such things represent, importantly, the only atomic reality. True, sometimes “catastrophic” events, like fission, might occur. But when that happens is unpredictable, and why is entirely unknowable.

Likewise, whatever happens at the level of biological organisms is just, well, “natural”; that is simply “how things work”.

Is it possible, then, that there is higher-order intentionality than we, at the human level, are aware of? Sure. In fact, it is, from all that I can see, inevitable, with emergence working the way it does. Life (that is, “life” as we know it) has evolved to solve problems of continuance at our (parochial) scale. Stuart Kauffman (In Investigations) views matters thusly: “I suspect that the concept of an autonomous agent as an autocatalytic system carrying out one or more [thermodynamic] work cycles defines life.” Well, I’m ignoring, in this document, the concept of autocatalysis, but no single atom, or even sets of them multiplied by any number or exponents, will ever build a 40 floor skyscraper. The odds against this, within the lifetime of the universe, are VAST. Yet, some organization of atoms has emerged to make this possible (on a depressing scale, I would, on a personal note, add; just such a monster is presently being erected across the street, blocking hours worth of our sunlight)—to, in effect, find wormholes through possibility space that would be “inconceivable” to individual atoms.

The explanation of this phenomenon is not in the parts or in the study of any subset of them, but in the organization in context—or, more properly stated, in the system’s complicity. This complicity is a non-material thing, emerging out of the complex interaction of apparently material raw parts. Moreover, this complicity works downward: The non-material organization of one level has evolved to move material matter (i.e., to perform “one or more work cycles”) at a lower level. This technique represents a terrific fish-ladder leap up the downhill flow of entropy—that is, a large bit of apparent intentionality. My intentionality in writing this document, for instance, makes my fingers move across the keyboard in ways that would be essentially impossible from an atomic perspective. The odds against any collective of atoms moving in just that way are VAST. Yet it happens regularly. (And it is a good thing, too—at our level. We want the driver in the on-coming lane to perform amazing, atomically VASTLY improbable things to avoid us.)

So, in this slightly modified conception, LIFE is not about performing one or more work cycles, but in some way causing one or more work cycles to be performed. This allows a huge increase in what we call “life”. No longer are we bound to consider carbon-based molecular structures as the only candidates; rather, whatever complicit organization that has evolved to exploit some available resource to move upstream to entropy can be thought of as “living”.

Is there LIFE, then, at a meta-biological level of organization? Why not? We might not have evolved the sensory apparatus to detect this level of organization (why should we have?); yet, it would affect us, and influence our actions in ways we could never clearly see, let alone understand. A body politic, maybe? Or “The Economy”? I see no compelling reason to exclude these from The Great Chain of Life. They are emergent phenomena having (literally) evolved to exploit an available resource to make material stuff do things VASTLY improbable. (Further, they have evolved quasi-organs to perform specialized tasks, such as attending to propagational needs.)

Now, given emergent intentionality, the phrase, “all life wants to live” no longer seems banal, but, rather, quite useful for both explanation and prediction. Economies will not care beans, of course, about individual participants, any more than we would care about the fates of our individual cells. It is Darwinian-like success at their level of organization that is important.

Carbon-based life has figured out a suite of niches—ways to seek out new routes through possibility space, fueled by the exploitation of available resources. Other life can and—if it is life—must do the same. Possibility space is VAST, and, along the lines of “in my Father’s house there are many mansions”, multi-dimensional in ways no one form of life could exploit. (Kauffman points out that the space of all possibles expands VASTLY faster than it can be explored, though I wish to point out, hold the exegesis, that this expansion depends on available, “excess” energy.)

What constitutes an exploitable resource? Earlier, I wrote of “economics” as something emerging from, and complicitly enhancing, specifically human ways to make a living. Now, I want to muse on this metaphor in a more generalized setting. The Great Chain of Life? It’s all about food chains, then. At the human level, we mostly think of food—grain, nuts, game, and so on—as, along with materials to construct shelter, “primary” resources. Money, as a direct representation of “value” deriving from the exploitation of primary resources, is a secondary, or higher-order resource. But the “primary resources” mentioned above are hardly truly primary. As animals, we are compulsive consumers of protein first converted to that form by other life. We eat the goats that eat the grass that utilize the chloroplasts that exploit the solar energy and geothermal energy left over from the formation of the solar system which grew out of energy left over from the Big Bang. Where all the energy of the Big Bang came from is, so far as I can tell, unanswerable. So, for me at least, it must be literally primary.

Notice, though, that what happens to “energy” as in moves up from the Big Bang (or flows down, as life forms in the backwaters, to use Bill Calvin’s wonderful metaphor in The River that Flows Uphill) is that it breaks symmetry, and acquires organization: Energy plus “intentionality ” (of some form—gravity, for instance, though I feel it best to defer contemplation of what intentionality “really” is and where it all comes from) equals organized structure plus some temporal remainder. Plants do not ingest raw energy; rather they exploit an energy gradient to convert existing forms of organized complex structure—molecular carbon, oxygen, water, nitrogen—into others. Animals require yet more complex molecules for their own metabolisms (most notably, though not exclusively, proteins). The important thing to observe here is that it is the organization that is utilized. Atomic carbon, oxygen, etc., do not do the trick.

So: Higher level (emergent) intentionality feeds back upon lower level actions. Complicity works across levels of abstraction—levels or organization—not just within them. Moreover, from the viewpoint of higher level (emergent) organization, lower level organization is physical matter. (Are molecules “physical matter”? Not from the atomic standpoint: They are just atoms with some magical powers. Are plants and animals physical matter from the molecular point of view? No, they are just magically organized molecules. However, it is again important to note that “organization” need not be “apparent” in any real sense: Atoms and molecules are presumably devoid of the requisite sensory apparatus.)

In other words, emergent “non-material” organization somehow “causes” thermodynamic work to be done. This process, from a lower perspective, is magical, or at least unobservable.

Back to parochial economies. A money economy is an emergent “device”, with “money” being a representation of value, not the thing itself. Yet it—the representation—is, by itself, capable of, and has the “motivation” for, causing some amount of thermodynamic work to get done. (So, too, are all doctrines and –isms, all the “memeplexes”—and they all compete in their own Darwinian jungle.)

In this way, money can be a “pump”, of sorts: Its needs can bring about great changes in how real “value” is created and operates at a lower level of organization. For an obvious example, the need for monthly cash flow (to pay the mortgage, debt service, rent, etc.) influences where a family lives, the schools the children attend, the types and quantities of food consumed, and so on.

The metaphor of “economy”, then, can be parochial; it can apply equally well to the generalized process that brings a procedural system into harmony with its contextualized dynamic.

In any case, the point is, again, that emergent systems feed back upon the constituent “raw parts” in complex and complicit ways. And systematic thermodynamic work is performed through or because of this process; hence, one important definition of “life” is met.

Of course, it is often useful to establish further conditions in our definitions. For instance, it is common, when one is discussing the process of life, to include the concept (so to speak) of reproduction (not just replication; some bit of randomness or quasi-randomness gives natural selection something to work on, and thus is a necessary ingredient in any evolutionary system). That is, a living thing, in that tighter definition, has a lineage of some sort. And, usually, that lineage enhances, over time, the lineage’s ability to continue (and “improve”) itself, subject to all the complications of any Darwinian system: competitions, arms races, etc. Further, as in the Kauffman conceptualization, this is all “autocatalytic”—self-organizing. Although I won’t discuss this here, it is my contention that many processes we think of as having no physical referent—economies, politics, religions, and so on, are not monolithic blobs of quasi-protoplasm, but more properly thought of as autocatalytic systems, and therefore fit into the extended definition.

“Memes” are often mentioned in this context. They are the referents of a metaphor worth considering. On a physical level, memes are thought of as organized patterns of neural firings and inhibitions. But it is on the level of organization (which, by the way, is what, in theory, allows the transference of memes from one “host” mind to another), not the synaptic exchange of neurotransmitters, that the Darwinian processes operate. Memes are, therefore, emergent, and, from them, likewise, meta-memes and all manner of “isms”. (Check out Richard Dawkins’ original idea in The Selfish Gene, and how far the concept has been developed since, in The Electric Meme, by Robert Aunger.)

Life, then, exists on an indefinite number of organizational levels, each one dimly aware (if aware at all) of the vital operations of those above (or even much below) it. It is at the level of competition for resources that life recognizes life. Meta-memes have “lives” in the sense that I am suggesting; yet, to us humans, the competition is at our own, biological level. Sometimes we can invoke certain higher-order concepts, like “freedom”, “democracy”, “morality”, and “technology”—for, in fact, we humans have a syntactical, semantic language—an emergent sense organ—and just somewhat enhanced capabilities to understand higher-order levels of organization. Yet, to our chagrin, our grasp of these things is apparently not hard-wired, and, therefore slow and inaccurate.

The Meaning of Life, Intentionality, Entropy, and the Thermodynamic Universe

November 22, 2005