From the Big Bang to the Human Conscience, the Emergence at Work in the Cosmos

The Xavier Zubiri Foundation (Madrid, Spain) is a private philosophical research center created in 1989 to safeguard the intellectual legacy of the 20^th century Spanish philosopher Xavier Zubiri. Among its many courses, the fourth course on “Science and Philosophy” will be devoted this year to the topic “Nature and Emergence: How Novelty makes its Way in the Cosmos”. Seven lecturers will address the topic of emergence from combined scientific and philosophical perspectives in a hybrid on-site (in the headquarters of the Foundation in Madrid) and on-line course in Spanish. From March to May, the topics will cover from physics, chemistry and biology to transhumanism, artificial intelligence, ethics and philosophical topics. For more information and inscription, click here.

Here we will introduce the topics that we will discuss in the first two lectures on physics and on biology, which will draw from the contemporary gripping picture of the history of the cosmos, from the big bang to the human conscience. We will emphasize the instances of the emergence of novelty in this historical development as well as their interpretations and implications. Finally, we sketch in brief some tentative ideas about emergence in artificial intelligence agents.

In a first approximation (and as physicists usually understand it) “emergence” is the appearing of new behaviors in systems made up by interacting parts. But what is a system? According to Xavier Zubiri, reality (which includes the physical world) is structural, and it is composed by a function of “notes-of”, all forming a structure—and this structure is connected to other structures.

Under the above framework, we can understand our observable universe as a system composed of galaxies as their many parts interacting. We know that each galaxy is formed by trillions of interacting stars, not counting other objects such as black holes, planets, comets, and asteroids. Moreover, if we focus on dimensional scales smaller than these larger objects, we pass to length scales including atmospheric gases, rocks, human beings, genes, molecules, atoms, elementary particles, etc.

Given this “macro to micro” landscape (which also can be plotted in temporal terms, starting from the big bang and extending to our present), the system of our observable universe is not formed by unique irreducible parts, but rather by interacting subsystems, which in turn are made up by other less complex (i.e. with less information or fewer causal connections) sub-subsystems, and so on. Intriguingly, this scenario raises the question of whether more complex systems can (in practice, or in principle) be reduced to less complex fundamental systems. Traditionally, physicists have answered this question in the affirmative, although in recent decades we have witnessed a gradual shift in perspective. For example, during the time of the quantum physics revolution, scientists such as Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac and Erwin Schrödinger understood emergence from a purely epistemological perspective (weak emergence), although Wolfgang Pauli, in connection with the psychology of Carl Gustav Jung, came to understand it from an ontological perspective (strong emergence). Nowadays, scientists such as George F.R. Ellis, Stuart Kauffman, Robert Laughlin, and others lean towards ontological emergence.

It is rare to find strong emergentist positions among physicists, although this is to be expected. Physics is an area of study that, since the Copernican Revolution, has exploited reductionist methodological schemes to the utmost, embodying invariant physical laws, linear causalities, isolated local entities, and so many other aspects that, in practice, tell us more about useful approximations in very specific contexts than about comprehensive explanations of the real world. Moreover, we note that the rise of inter-, multi- and trans-disciplinary approaches within physics, especially those overlapping with artificial intelligence and machine learning, has led to new approaches in physics and a new awareness of the true complexity of the physical world.

If the history of the big bang shows how widespread complexity and emergence phenomena are throughout the cosmos, there is a particular point in the universe, the planet Earth, where complexity pushes emergence to a new level: biology. So far we do not know of any other place in the cosmos where biological processes occur, although since antiquity many have considered obvious that life must exist somewhere else. Ancient Greeks and Romans already fantasized with human-like inhabitants of other planets.

The ancients also knew that we are composed of the same stuff than the dust of the Earth: “For dust you are and to dust you will return” (Gn. 3:19, NIVUK). However, it was during the 19^th and 20^th centuries that the precise atomic composition of organic matter was discovered and showed which particular elements comprise human flesh. Everything in us is also found somewhere else in nature, with the important difference that living organisms are composed of a selection within Periodic Table (elements C, H, O, N, S, P, etc.). What was more difficult to explain was how these elements could become living matter in the first place. A traditional “vitalist” answer could follow another Bible text “Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” (Gn. 2:7, NIVUK).

Darwinian evolution transformed the scala naturae (the great chain of being) from a simple to complex orderly classification (as in Linnaeus’ taxonomy) into a real genealogically branched historical tree of life, replacing an earlier interpretation by Lamarck in terms of progressive transformism. What was left unanswered was the origin of life.

From the origin of life to the origin of human conscience, there is a history of life characterized by the succession of different stages of emergence. We will list here some of the greatest steps: self-replicative molecules, cells, complex cells (endosymbiosis), multicellular organisms, specialized tissues, nerve systems, brains and human conscience. The latest likely appeared three times if not more: Neanderthals, Denisovans and Sapiens (us).

Although Darwinian evolution is a blind process, the result seems very specific in terms of a clear increase of complexity over the ages with the above succession of emergent processes, which raises the question of the teleological interpretation of the evolutionary history. This led authors such as Bergson and Teilhard to speculate with directionality in evolution, which can be extrapolated to an eschatological future reaching a high metaphysical state of conscience called the Omega Point. Among scientists, Monod defended the pre-eminence chance, against other views of a more deterministic evolution. This kind of debate was reframed in the turn to the 21^st century in the debate between Stephen Jay Gould (favoring the contingency of evolution) and Simon Conway Morris (defending the dominance of the convergence with a view of evolution as constrained by the laws of nature).

Another place of interface between biology, philosophy, and religion regards the actual explanation of life itself. For the ancients, even if they intuitively recognized in the human flesh the same composition than in the dust, they also introduced the existence of an immaterial reality (the soul) to explain the emergent properties of living beings, and in particular humans, which were considered otherwise as machines (as characterized by Descartes and others). From the 18^th century onwards, strong materialistic currents have defended that life is just dust, and the mind a secretion of the brain, while in the 20^th century more sophisticated responses were given to account for both, the reality of the human body and the undeniable existence of a human mind. In recent years, we have become aware not only that extinct hominins also had most likely minds, but that different animals seem to have minds which share many features with ours. Today we wonder if, in the near or distant future, artificial intelligence may begin to exhibit a mind also.

Although no life has been found outside the Earth, there is plenty of water and complex organic molecules throughout the universe that feed the hypothesis of an early natural origin of life, in the Earth or somewhere else, which could have later been transferred to our planet (panspermia was strongly defended by the late Fred Hoyle). This illustrates the contemporary connection of the speculations about the origin of life on Earth and the potential existence of life elsewhere in the universe. Is terrestrial life an exotic phenomenon in the history of the universe, or a cosmic inevitability resulting from the physical-chemical laws which must be found also somewhere else? While extra-solar planets have been discovered in the latest decades, the search for extraterrestrial life still goes on.

Zubiri was aware of these scientific findings as well as the long history of philosophical and religious debates surrounding them, which deeply influenced his thought. Going beyond physics and biology, we now observe signs of emergence in artificial intelligent agents, realized in features such as adaptability, interactivity, and autonomy, being irreducible to fundamental physical levels. As interacting “notes-of”, according to Zubiri’s description of structures, artificial intelligence systems exhibit behaviors, and produce novel results, indicative of their sensitivity to surrounding systems. AI models can respond dynamically to varied input data from both artificial and human agents, and consequences of their own exploratory actions, among others.

We are preparing enthusiastically for this course, in which we will have the chance to discuss all these interesting themes. We hope you will join us.