Posted by:
Henry Bemis
(
)
Date: September 22, 2022 01:38PM
From this link:
“For the better part of a year and a half, I've been keeping a notebook about what I call autonomous agents. An autonomous agent is something that can act on its own behalf in an environment. Indeed, all free-living organisms are autonomous agents. Normally, when we think about a bacterium swimming upstream in a glucose gradient, we say that the bacterium is going to get food. That is to say, we talk about the bacterium teleologically, as if it were acting on its own behalf in an environment. It is stunning that the universe has brought about things that can act in this way. How in the world has that happened?”
COMMENT: Of course, at the apex of this “autonomous agent” phenomena is the thoughts and free (autonomous) actions of human beings. In short, Kauffman wonders how all his cognitive complexity could have arisen-—from physical, biological and evolutionary principles alone. Kauffman says it could not and proceeds to provide a detailed description of the nature of emergent complexity in the biosphere in terms of the 'adjacent possible' and the natural creativity of the universe.
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“All of this says to me that my tentative definition of an autonomous agent is a fruitful one, because it's led to all of these questions. I think I'm opening new scientific doors. . . . We don't have any answers to these questions; I'm not sure how to get answers. This leaves me appalled by my efforts, but the fact that I'm asking what I think are fruitful questions is why I'm happy with what I'm doing.”
COMMENT: What is unique about Kauffman is that here is an eminent evolutionary biologist who is claiming, with mathematical rigor that evolution cannot be the whole story with respect to biological complexity. Thus, he is sympathetic to the questions and concerns of intelligent design theorists, although he denies that a supernatural agent is involved. Instead, he believes that within nature there are laws that explain the creative processes in the universe, the nature, mechanistic character, and origin of which are completely unknown and mysterious. This is where Kauffman gets the title for his 2008 book *Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason and Religion.*
Here are a few quotes from this book, with a brief comment:
“Teleological language has long been a contentious issue among scientists and philosophers, many of whom consider it unscientific. I strongly disagree. Agency is emergent and real, but not reducible to physics, I shall argue, because biology is not reducible to physics. The biosphere, I will argue is laden with agency, value, and meaning. Human life, which is certainly laden with agency, value, and meaning, inherits these qualities from the biosphere of which it is a part.” {Kauffman 2008:12}
COMMENT: The limited scope of the autonomous agency of lower forms of ‘life’ (e.g., bacterium) is one thing. The massive scope of the autonomous agency of conscious, human beings is another. Explaining such agency within the parameters of natural law while admitting that it is beyond physics and reductionism, is a monumental challenge indeed.
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“In the new scientific worldview I'm describing, we live in an emergent universe of ceaseless creativity in which life, agency, meaning, consciousness and ethics . . . have emerged. Our entire historical development as a species, our diverse cultures, and our embedded historicity, have been self-consistent, co-constructing, evolving, emergent, and unpredictable. Our histories, inventions, ideas, and actions are also parts of the creative universe.” {Kauffman 2008:231}
COMMENT: Kauffman thinks that this ‘creative universe’ is part and partial of the laws of the universe, which laws transcend the laws of physics, and are unknown except through its effects. He is getting dangerously close to theology here, where emphatic denial of the possibility of a personal God starts to sound like just lip service to his materialistic colleagues.
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“From the perspective of this book, conscious awareness, moral responsibility for act undertaken, and fully human agency are all ontologically real, for their evolutionary emergence cannot be reduced to or derived from physics alone. . . . In Chapter 6, I discussed the emergence in the universe of agency, and with it, values, meaning, doing, action, and purpose. We have seen that biology cannot be reduced to physics. Agency, an expression of life, cannot, therefore, be reduced to physics. . . .{Kauffman 2008:263}
COMMENT: If values, meaning, doing, etc. cannot be reduced to physics, they also cannot be reduced to biology or neuroscience. So, then, what can they be reduced to? According to Kauffman, they cannot be reduced to anything at all, they are just ‘emergent’ properties of a creative universe. This sounds like theology, not science.
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"In this view, much of what we have sought from a supernatural God is the natural behavior of the emergent creativity in the universe. If one image can suffice, think that all that has happened for 3.8 billion years on our planet, to the best of our knowledge, is that the sun has shed light upon the Earth, and some other sources of free energy have been available, and all that lives around you has come into existence, all on its own. I find it impossible to realize this and not be stunned with reverence." {Kauffman 2008:282}
COMMENT: There is no justification for religious reverence in natural processes—unless such processes are illusive to human science and take on a transcendent character. The “all on its own” assumption rings hollow in the face of such transcendent mystery.
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"Then there is the brute fact that we humans (at least) are conscious. We have experiences. We do not understand consciousness yet. There is no doubt that it is real in humans and presumably among many animals. No one knows the basis of it. I will advance a scientifically improbable, but possible, and philosophically interesting hypothesis about consciousness that is, ultimately testable. Whatever its source, consciousness is emergent and a real feature of the universe. {Kauffman 2008:4}
COMMENT: There is no substantive theory or hypothesis about consciousness in this book, beyond the claim that it is an emergent property of the creative forces in the universe. It is hard to know just what such a theory would be like absent known materialist science.
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“We live in a universe, biosphere, and human culture that are not only emergent but radically creative. We live in a world whose unfoldings we often cannot prevision, prestate, or predict -- a world of explosive creativity on all sides. This is a central part of the new scientific worldview."
"Let me pause to explain just how radical this view is. My claim is not simply that we lack sufficient knowledge or wisdom to predict the future evolution of the biosphere, economy, or human culture. It is that these things are *inherently* beyond prediction. Not even the most powerful computer imaginable can make a compact description in advance of the regularities of theses processes. There is no such description before hand. Thus the very concept of a natural law is inadequate for much of reality.”Science itself is more limited by the un-prestatable, unpredictable creativity in the universe than we have realized, and, in any case, science is not the only path to knowledge and understanding. . . . [S]cience cannot explain the intricate, context-dependent, creative, situated aspects of much of human action and invention, or the historicity that embraces and partially defines us. These, however, are just the domains of the humanities, from art and literature to history and law. Truth abides here, too." {Kauffman 2008:7-8}{Kauffman 2008:5-6}
COMMENT: Yes, once we abandon scientific materialism, and invoke the transcendent, mysterious creativity of the universe, we get art, literature, human values, morality, etc. for free, just as the religious get these things from the transcendent, mysterious, and creativity of God. What is the difference beyond simply the denial of a personal God as the explanation of such creativity?
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“The use of the word *God* is open to angry misinterpretations, for we have reserved this word in the Abrahamic tradition to refer to the Creator God. How dare we use the word *God* to stand for the natural creativity in the universe? Yet I say yes, we can and should choose to do so, knowing full well that we make this choice. No other human symbol carries the power of the symbol, God. No other symbol carries millennia of awe and reverence. . . . God is our name for the creativity in nature. Indeed, this potent symbol can help orient us in our lives. Using the word *God* to mean the creativity in nature can help bring to us the awe and reverence that creativity deserves.” {Kauffman 2008:284}
COMMENT: Okay, if it makes you feel better—i.e. more religious—go ahead and use it.