The big unsolved questions

The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent research institute located in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The institute was founded in 1984 by a group of physicists, mainly from the nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is best known for its central role in helping develop the first atomic bomb. Murray Gell-Mann and George Cowan were two of the co-founders. The SFI tries to tackle the big questions in an interdisciplinary way, by bringing together scientists from different disciplines in one place.

After they have shattered matter to the smallest possible pieces to find the elementary particles, the physicists who founded the institute wondered how particles can interact to give rise to complex forms of matter. Let us say we found the smallest building blocks of matter, whether fermions and bosons or quarks and leptons, then the question is how do more complex forms emerge on top of it? How do complex forms emerge from simple rules in general? Is glass for example an amorphous solid or a supercooled liquid? The question of emergence came up. It is related to the principles of swarm intelligence – how macroscopic patterns result from microscopic interactions – and the question of downward causation in the other direction from top to bottom.

The lectures at the institute are about these questions:

• Does culture evolve?
• Is Free Will an Illusion?
• Is time travel possible?
• How do complex societies emerge (and collapse again)?
• Will civilization collapse?
• What are the principles of collective behavior?

Readers of this blog will have noticed many of these fundamental questions have been discussed here as well. So is there is a mysterious principle of swarm intelligence or strange form of emergence which explains how simple rules and elements result in complex patterns?

Well, there are simple rules that explain simple patterns of swarm behaviour, like “stay close to the group but keep a distance from individuals” which is enough to form a group. We know the strange attractors from chaos theory that can be observed in certain types of non-linear systems. Overall the number of different strange attractors is limited, though, and their complexity as well. We know only a handful of attractors like the Rössler attractor or the Lorenz attractor which arise from different ways orbits in phase space are merged and folded.

If we look at Wolfram’s cellular automata rules [1] than the more regular ones like rule 50 display a stable blinking pattern which does does not change much because it constantly repeats itself, while the more complex forms like rule 110 display an unstable patterns which changes frequently. Swarms of animals like flocks of birds or fish swarms form quickly but also dissolve quickly again.

Swarms are fascinating to us because they are flexible like a liquid and yet made of solid elements. The swarm as a whole seems to be possess qualities – like the flexibility to change its shape and to adapt the shape to the environment – that can not found in its individual components, but rather arise from their interaction. It is the combination of elements and rules, of particles and forces, of actors and interactions, that results in more complex form of organization. But in the end a swarm is just a group of individuals, and while it may be smarter then the individuals it can not understand language or write a book about the history of maritime life in the ocean. It will usually take some kind of spherical form in one way or another, and as quickly as such a swarm can form, it can also dissolve again.

Stronger forms of emergence which are more complex AND durable seem to require a new code or language, either in the bio-chemical language of DNA or in other forms of languages. As I try to explain in my book [2] these codes exist in form of hidden genes which are not alway recognized as what they are. Most of them are simply laws we obey or rules we live by [3] which have become so familiar that we no longer think about them and take them for granted. As I wrote earlier in one of the articles about free will the solutions to the biggest questions can often be found in the most ordinary things hiding in plain sight – which is no accident, because our deepest believes and oldest institutions reflect to a certain degree our most fundamental problems.

Our oldest institutions are an answer to the big unsolved questions we as humans have tried to solve for thousands of years. The theaters and cinemas which solve the question of time travel and subjective experience – what it is like to be someone else (in a different place or at a different time). The temples, mosques and churches solve the question of mortality and meaning. They form groups out of loosely coupled individuals, allowing them to find meaning as part of a larger group and to find comfort in the face of inevitable death.

[1] Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science
[2] Jochen Fromm, Hidden Genes
[3] Lorraine Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By

( Swarm pictures are from Unsplash users Hioko Yoshii and Claus Giering )