125 - Stuart Kauffman on Physics, Life, and The Adjacent Possible
Humans On The Loop
The Necessity of Emergence
The adjacent possible is related to this notion of niche construction. It has something to do with, at least at the human level, our ability to perceive opportunity. All of the affordances of these new combinations are in some way very dependent on the agents of that system.
This week’s guest is living legend, transdisciplinary scientist-philosopher Stuart Kauffman, whose pioneering work on self-organization and the emergence of order helped launch the field of complex systems science and has brought us to the very edge of understanding the origins and nature of life. Over his 50+ year career and six books, including this year’s The World Beyond Physics, Stu has done more than almost anyone to restore the historic union of science and philosophy, articulating a new spirituality for our secular age of systems thinking, and filing numerous patents on technologies of chemical synthesis and quantum mechanics.
It's an epic conversation with a bold and boundary-less mind. In this episode we drive right to the heart of one of humankind’s biggest and most persistent mysteries: What is life?
Stuart Kauffman’s EXTENSIVE & ILLUMINATING Google Scholar Page:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=yoPM0F8AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate
This week’s vocabulary word: “ergodic”
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ergodic
Become a Patreon supporter to listen to Part 2 of this conversation, on quantum physics and consciousness:
http://patreon.com/michaelgarfield
We Discuss:
the adjacent possible
the origins of life
niche construction & niche propagation (which i initially conflate, but he re-differentiates)
exaptation
the incomputability of the list of all possible uses of a thing
why are there hearts in the universe?
“the universe is non-ergodic and most complex things will never exist”
“there are no laws whatsoever for the evolution of the biosphere”
contingent, or inevitable? enabled, or caused?
the economy creates the possibilities into which it is sucked
Terence McKenna’s strange attractor at the end of time
constraint closure and the release of energy in fewer degrees of freedom
abiogenesis and the protocell as a model of its environment
are there constraints without work?
the number of cell types in an organism is roughly the square root of the number of genes
“information is precisely the release of energy into fewer degrees of freedom”
Paul Davies & Sara Imari Walker
Johnjoe McFadden
Giuseppe Longo
the system will spend more time in macrostates in which there are more microstates (Boltzmann)
Supplemental Materials:
Stuart Kauffman’s essay, “No entailing laws, but enablement in the evolution of the biosphere”
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.2069.pdf;alsoseeGiuseppeLongo
Stu’s co-author Wim Hordijk on autocatalysis at Orbiter Mag:
https://orbitermag.com/how-did-life-begin-part-3/
Michael’s essay, “The Future is Exapted/Remixed”
Michael’s extensive notes on the ideas of this episode, “Toward A New Evolutionary Paradigm”
https://www.patreon.com/posts/toward-new-1-0-24798022
Original intro music by Michael Garfield, “Birds Waking Up In Trees”
https://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/love-scenes-field-recordings
Show outro music by Evan “Skytree” Snyder feat. Michael Garfield, “God Detector”
https://skytree.bandcamp.com/track/god-detector-ft-michael-garfield
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