Fire in the Mind
Viking 1996
pg 12
Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the mind abhors randomness. Automatically we see pictures in the stars above us; we hear voices in the white noise of a river, and music in the wind. As naturally as beavers build dams and spiders spin webs, people draw maps, in the sky and in the sand.
....(they) speculate about this most basic of human drives: the obsession to find and impose order. Whether the order we invent are geographic, religious, or scientific, inevitably, it seems, we come to identify the map with the territory, to insist that the lines draw a real.
pg 17
.... Elaborating the conceptual filters we use to sift order from randomness and make sense of the world.
In searching for the most economical way of mapping the universe, scientists have slowly eliminated earth, air, fire, and water as fundamentals, converging on the 20th-century vision in which all is made of mass-energy interaction in arena of space and time.
The pinnacle of this quest is often said to be quantum mechanics, which provides such precise forecasts of the way subatomic particles behave, but which seems to suggest that observers are necessary to conjure our rock solid world of classical Newtonian physics out of the uncertainty of the quantum realm. In quantum theory, a particle exists in a juxtaposition of possible states; only when it is measured does it take on definite qualities, like position or momentum.
Repelled by the potentially mystical overtones of this ani-Copernican twist, some physicists, like Wojciech Zurek of Los Alamos' Theoretical Division, have gone looking for a less anthropocentric aproach. The problem, they believe, is in carving up the world scientists have omitted in important ingredient: information.
Once this new piece is added to the puzzle, along with mass-energy, some of the spookiness may be expelled from quantum theory.... They are trying to recast quantum theory in a way that doesn't require the existence of observers.
pg 18
Los Alamos is also at the forefront of research in non-linear dynamics - chaos.... Mathematicians are trying to use the tools of chaos theory to find hints of order behind phenomena are once dismissed as random. The new science of complexity seeks to explain why, against all odds, order seems to arise in the universe.
An important question is to what degree the orders we observe are out in the world and to what degree they are imposed by our nervous systems, the invisible spectacles that refract everything we see. To some extent, complexity may be in the eye of the beholder. But many of the scientists at the Santa Fe Institute believe they can divine fundamental rules that apply to complex systems of all kinds - cells, organisms, brains, societies, galaxies. All might obey the same universal laws.
Computer scientists and biologists... gather to demonstrate their prowess as creators of simulated ecologies in which beings made of pure information evolve. A few - taking to heart the heretical notion that information is as fundamental as a matter and energy - go so far as to say that the simulated beings in their simulated worlds really are alive.
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