Origin Gaps and the Eternal Sunshine of the Second-Order Pendulum

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.

FQXI Prize Essay 2017. 18 pages, including afterword on Ostrogradsky's Theorem and an exchange with John Bova, Dresden Craig, and Paul Livingston

References in corpus (6)

• The Algorithmic Origins of Life
• The Theorem of Ostrogradsky
• Gravity with Perturbative Constraints: Dark Energy Without New Degrees of Freedom
• Stable, Accelerating Universes in Modified Gravity
• Quantifying the Rise and Fall of Complexity in Closed Systems: The Coffee Automaton
• Major Transitions in Political Order