By Ian Kimber 17 December 2003
You have probably heard and seen recent press statements and television programmes about the "Theory Of Everything". These describe how a set of simple physical laws and constants can define how the whole universe that we occupy originates and operates.
"So what!" I can hear you saying. "This doesn't have much to do with my complicated life" or "how I get on with my neighbours". Well no it doesn't, but these simple physical laws are the drivers for another set of simple rules that are currently being discovered. These are the rules of how simple elements can work together to build a more complex whole. This process is frequently called emergence. Emergence is the bridge between the simple laws of physics and the complexity of life that is all around us and within us. It is these rules of emergence that are the real theory of everything because they would apply in any universe, whatever the physical laws happened to be.
Note that I have used the word rule rather than law because these rules are not absolute and give no precise predictions, but. Like all good "rules of thumb" they give vital guidance on what is likely to happen given a range of circumstances. So, knowledge of them can be important when the time comes for us to make difficult decisions.
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Let us now look at the origin and development of these rules starting with the evolution of life today and extending outwards to cover the origin and end of life the universe and everything.
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Well before recorded history, mankind with its own creative and designing skills had recognised what it saw as the hand of a creator and designer in the way the world works. People viewed this with such awe and reverence that the first scientists to suggest that this could possibly be a natural process were regarded as sacrilegious.
Nowadays, most people accept the concept of the evolutionary development of life. From its simple beginnings through the diversity of our global ecosystem to our own complex information driven society.
Darwin's theories are often stated simplistically as "the survival of the fittest" and nature is often seen as "red in tooth and claw". These statements seem a far cry from the "love your neighbour as yourself" that is a core tenet of most of the world's great religions. But in fact both of these statements form a critical part of these rules of emergence.
At first sight the statements appear only to apply to people and/or other living things. The great leap of faith is to interpret them into the inanimate world and realise that they can apply just as effectively there. This idea is the thin strand that I propose to weave into the bridge between the fundamental laws of physics and our everyday lives.
Although the evolutionary development of life is fully accepted by all but a small fringe of fundamentalists, the evolutionary origins of life are less well accepted. However, scientific research can now show us most of the route that the origins of life on this planet took. This work is confidently expected to be fully complete well by the end of our new century. The main outcome of this is that "simple" life evolves quite quickly as soon as conditions are suitable for it. So it is clear that something about the universe we live in predisposes this emergence.
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Before we go further, it is important to mention one other law of nature that gives some students of this branch of cosmology a serious problem. That is The Second law of Thermodynamics. This states that everything in the universe is gradually "cooling down" to a state of disorder and uniformity. This is undoubtedly true, but everywhere we see order around us. The important thing to remember is that this law does not define how long it will take to achieve this bland disordered uniformity this, in certain circumstances can be a very long time.
This gives us a lead to the first and most fundamental of our rules of emergence. This is that, any process that extends the longevity of an interaction between elements or entities within the universe is favoured strongly. The most common process that extends the time it takes for things to decay away to chaos, is that of recycling. An electron orbiting an atomic nucleus; a planet orbiting a star; the cycle of the sea, clouds rain and rivers on our planet and even the birth development and death of plants animals and us are all important examples of recycling.
The second of these rules is that of negative feedback. Any process that tends to damp down changes in the environment is strongly favoured. The most famous example of this is James Lovelock's "daisy world" in which, preferential development between white and dark daisies controlled the temperature of his model world and kept it habitable as external conditions changed. This led to his concept of Gaia a living world that controls its internal environment. It now seems likely that certain bacteria do this for the earth and we disturb them at our peril!
The third and final rule that I wish to talk about in this short essay is that any process that involves the co-operation of different elementary or simpler structures to achieve the first two rules is strongly favoured. This, in some ways, is the most fundamental rule that links the stark and simple laws of physics to our everyday live and completes this bridge between Science and Religion.
This co-operation is clearly seen in the evolution of life on earth. The simplest bacterial cells co-operated and grouped together to form the complex nucleated cells that form most of the life we know. These then grouped together and co-operated to form animals and plants that evolved onto our everyday ecosystem. Mankind gains its power from its ability to group together, co-operate and communicate, to share tasks, from villages develop industries and finally create countries. We are now learning how to co-operate together to manage our isolated global ecosystem and if we fail we will surely perish rapidly.
In many ways this stress on co-operation appears to be the antithesis of the "survival of the fittest" stated earlier, but it is all because of our own selfishness that we see it as such. For without predators there would be too many prey and without prey there would be no predators a negative feedback process that recycles and improves the qualities of both predator and prey.
So as in another group of the worlds great religions, we have to accept the essential recycling properties in human life. Not wishing for an individual eternity, but happily giving our place to others, knowing that we have done the best we can to co-operate with others, to help to form a stable and ecologically balanced world. This is to be our own contribution to the extension of life in our own small universe.
By Ian Kimber 17 December 2003
Useful background
This is checklist of modern philosophical thinking. This is the contents page of Modern Philosophy an Introduction and survey by Richard Scruton as a way of checking how my evolutionary phliosophy thinking ties in with this I intend to put some of my own notes and responses under these headings
1. The Nature of Philosophy
2. Scepticism
3. Some More-isms
4. Self, Mind and Body
5. The Private Language Argument
6. Sense and Reference
7. Descriptions and Logical Form
8. Things and Properties
9. Truth
10. Appearance and Reality
11. God
12. Being
13. Necessity and the a priori
14. Cause
15. Science
16. The Soul
17. Freedom
18. The Human World
19. Meaning
20.
Morality21. Life, Death and Identity
22. Knowledge
23. Perception
24. Imagination
25. Space and Time
26. Mathematics
27. Paradox
28. Objective Spirit
29. Subjective Spirit
30. The Devil
31 Self and Other