Attractor Darwinism
Quantum Darwinism tells us how the quantum world of quantum coherence "turns into" the classical world in which we live, through a process of natural selection that Zurek calls einselection. This, roughly speaking, reflects in quantum mechanics something that reminds us of the way the natural selection produces the evolution of the species.
Essentially, as the quantum world interacts with itself, the quantum states that evolve to be the most proliferate and stable are the ones that survive, and these become pointer states. In quantum Darwinism, redundancy is operational because information about a system’s stable pointer states becomes copied into many relatively independent fragments of the environment. A state becomes effectively objective insofar as many observers can recover the same information from different fragments without disturbing the system itself.
Redundancy is therefore part of the mechanism by which one stable classical description survives.
A qualitatively comparable thing happens in the evolution of a species. In the interaction with the environment organisms are reproducing and effectively exploring a possibility space that provides the possibilities of how the organism might evolve. The interaction of a species with its environment narrows that possibility space, and the possible evolutions that survive are those that have the right balance of stability and evolvability.
In quantum Darwinism, redundancy has a technically defined information-theoretic meaning — multiple environmental fragments independently carrying information about the pointer state. In evolutionary biology, “redundancy” covers several somewhat different mechanisms: gene duplication, functional degeneracy, population replication, developmental robustness, ecological replacement and so forth.
Nevertheless, there is a common higher principle at work. That principle is that what survives is found redundantly reinstantiated through the system.
A species is not stable because every organism is identical. Quite the reverse. Its stability depends upon a large ensemble of non-identical but sufficiently equivalent realisations. Organisms need a balance of stability and evolvability.
Consider a simple biological function such as vision. There is no single indispensable physical instance of “vision” belonging to the species. The relevant organisation is redundantly realised across millions or billions of individuals, with considerable genetic and phenotypic variation. Individual instances disappear continuously, while the organisational pattern persists.
This means that what is selected by evolution can be viewed not as a particular object, but as a reproducible organisational attractor.
This high level principle is applicable to both quantum decoherence as quantum Darwinism, AND the evolution of the species.
In fact, the consideration of evolution as the evolution of attractors is applicable to any kind of evolution, whether it is the evolution of a quantum system into classical determinacy, the evolution of the cosmos, the evolution of the species, the evolution of species intelligence, the evolution of a civilisation, the evolution of a social system, and so on.
What survives is what becomes redundantly instantiated through the system. There is not one organism to a species unless it is about to go extinct. There is not just one star in the universe. There are billions. Perhaps infinitely many. There is only one particle called an "electron", but there are countless instances of it. There is globally only one spacetime, but there are countless local instances of it. Global, local, redundancy, stability, persistence, and survival, are all interrelated principles.
To fully understand what is going on requires fully understanding what "the system" is.
At the highest level of generalisation evolution can be understood as an attractor landscape. Organisational attractors concern the possibility space of any particular local system that is being considered. We might be considering quantum decoherence, or we might be considering the evolution of the species. Or we might be considering the evolution of a civilisation.
The most generalised morphology of organisational attractors for evolutions in time or spacetime can be expressed as the VGF or vast generational field that can arise from the principle of the formation of closure in infinite iteration.
This high-level abstraction can then be applied across many domains, from quantum decoherence, to the evolution of the cosmos, to the evolution of the species, and species intelligence.
Its underlying law is the stability-fidelity law. And this tells us that what survives in any evolution in which there is a distinction between what is evolving and its environment, is temporary stability. And that stability is essentially an attractor in an environment that is an attractor landscape of closure in infinite iteration.
This then gives us a universal language that can be applied across disciplines and different branches of science that are concerned with evolutions.
In science we are always legitimately looking for an understanding of structures and dynamics in a system in which different things are discriminated from each other. In other words, we are looking to understand the structures and dynamics of structures of distinctions between objects and structures. But this happens inside the otherwise unrecognised principle that all structure understood in science is also the structure of relations between distinctions. The view of nature as the structure of relations between distinctions can be handled in terms of the VGF attractor landscape.
The part of nature that is about the dynamics of structures of distinct and definite things, is only one part of nature. We already actually know this, in science itself, because quantum mechanics tells us so. What we call "quantum coherence" is already outside that scheme of things. But it is still part of nature. In fact, it's the demonstration that nature does not consist only of the kinds of stable results and the principles that classical science is used to finding.
There is a popular but mistaken idea that science is infinitely open ended so that it can just go anywhere and turn any science fiction into science fact, and it's just a question of time, so things are just going to get better and better. The truth is that science is actually a constrained method of understanding. It's constrained by scientific method itself. The only aspects of nature that can become established as scientific knowledge are the aspects of nature that, when we investigate nature, pass the scientific method test. Which means, that the results have to be redundantly confirmable. And the fact is that that's not all of nature. The current "reproduceability crisis" demonstrates this. The reproduceability crisis is not simply due to everybody being dishonest about the results, or not following proper scientific method in the race to publish papers.
The limiting factor around science is not a code that we have to crack. Which is how we now mistakenly like to think about so many things that we do not yet understand. It's there because it is in us. In the way our intelligence is working. It's in the way we currently presume nature herself to consist of nothing but what current scientific method can establish as stable and definite behaviour. In other words, as what is "objective".
When all along, what is "objective" about nature is what has survived the process of becoming "objective". In quantum mechanics we already understand that process and are coming to understand it better, as quantum decoherence and quantum Darwinism. But that's only one kind of objectivity. There are other kinds. The most salient one to mention is the objectivity of the world we sense-perceive and consciously experience. Because that's not the same thing as the objectivity derived from quantum decoherence. The latter is a structure of pointer states in quantum mechanics, a quantum-derived objectivity, or QDO. The former, the world we sense-perceive and consciously experience, is a neural-derived phenomenological objectivity, or NDPO. The NDPO is not simply just the same thing as the QPO. In evolutionary time, the NDPO comes much, much later than the QDO.
In VGF analysis we can understand evolution as an evolving attractor landscape, in which what exists in the landscape at any stage, including spacetime and quantum coherence itself, is what has survived as an attractor, in the ongoing iteration that produces the landscape.
In VGF analysis quantum coherence isn't the beginning. A density matrix in quantum mechanics is already a network of stabilisations. It is just that the density matrix shows them to be superposed, in a way that already stable, distinct things in the classical world cannot be.
In VGF analysis quantum coherence can be approached as part of the evolution of closures formed from the principle of infinite iteration - an ever ongoing process of evolution by VGF decoherence that we could call attractor Darwinism.
Essentially, as the quantum world interacts with itself, the quantum states that evolve to be the most proliferate and stable are the ones that survive, and these become pointer states. In quantum Darwinism, redundancy is operational because information about a system’s stable pointer states becomes copied into many relatively independent fragments of the environment. A state becomes effectively objective insofar as many observers can recover the same information from different fragments without disturbing the system itself.
Redundancy is therefore part of the mechanism by which one stable classical description survives.
A qualitatively comparable thing happens in the evolution of a species. In the interaction with the environment organisms are reproducing and effectively exploring a possibility space that provides the possibilities of how the organism might evolve. The interaction of a species with its environment narrows that possibility space, and the possible evolutions that survive are those that have the right balance of stability and evolvability.
In quantum Darwinism, redundancy has a technically defined information-theoretic meaning — multiple environmental fragments independently carrying information about the pointer state. In evolutionary biology, “redundancy” covers several somewhat different mechanisms: gene duplication, functional degeneracy, population replication, developmental robustness, ecological replacement and so forth.
Nevertheless, there is a common higher principle at work. That principle is that what survives is found redundantly reinstantiated through the system.
A species is not stable because every organism is identical. Quite the reverse. Its stability depends upon a large ensemble of non-identical but sufficiently equivalent realisations. Organisms need a balance of stability and evolvability.
Consider a simple biological function such as vision. There is no single indispensable physical instance of “vision” belonging to the species. The relevant organisation is redundantly realised across millions or billions of individuals, with considerable genetic and phenotypic variation. Individual instances disappear continuously, while the organisational pattern persists.
This means that what is selected by evolution can be viewed not as a particular object, but as a reproducible organisational attractor.
This high level principle is applicable to both quantum decoherence as quantum Darwinism, AND the evolution of the species.
In fact, the consideration of evolution as the evolution of attractors is applicable to any kind of evolution, whether it is the evolution of a quantum system into classical determinacy, the evolution of the cosmos, the evolution of the species, the evolution of species intelligence, the evolution of a civilisation, the evolution of a social system, and so on.
What survives is what becomes redundantly instantiated through the system. There is not one organism to a species unless it is about to go extinct. There is not just one star in the universe. There are billions. Perhaps infinitely many. There is only one particle called an "electron", but there are countless instances of it. There is globally only one spacetime, but there are countless local instances of it. Global, local, redundancy, stability, persistence, and survival, are all interrelated principles.
To fully understand what is going on requires fully understanding what "the system" is.
At the highest level of generalisation evolution can be understood as an attractor landscape. Organisational attractors concern the possibility space of any particular local system that is being considered. We might be considering quantum decoherence, or we might be considering the evolution of the species. Or we might be considering the evolution of a civilisation.
The most generalised morphology of organisational attractors for evolutions in time or spacetime can be expressed as the VGF or vast generational field that can arise from the principle of the formation of closure in infinite iteration.
This high-level abstraction can then be applied across many domains, from quantum decoherence, to the evolution of the cosmos, to the evolution of the species, and species intelligence.
Its underlying law is the stability-fidelity law. And this tells us that what survives in any evolution in which there is a distinction between what is evolving and its environment, is temporary stability. And that stability is essentially an attractor in an environment that is an attractor landscape of closure in infinite iteration.
This then gives us a universal language that can be applied across disciplines and different branches of science that are concerned with evolutions.
In science we are always legitimately looking for an understanding of structures and dynamics in a system in which different things are discriminated from each other. In other words, we are looking to understand the structures and dynamics of structures of distinctions between objects and structures. But this happens inside the otherwise unrecognised principle that all structure understood in science is also the structure of relations between distinctions. The view of nature as the structure of relations between distinctions can be handled in terms of the VGF attractor landscape.
The part of nature that is about the dynamics of structures of distinct and definite things, is only one part of nature. We already actually know this, in science itself, because quantum mechanics tells us so. What we call "quantum coherence" is already outside that scheme of things. But it is still part of nature. In fact, it's the demonstration that nature does not consist only of the kinds of stable results and the principles that classical science is used to finding.
There is a popular but mistaken idea that science is infinitely open ended so that it can just go anywhere and turn any science fiction into science fact, and it's just a question of time, so things are just going to get better and better. The truth is that science is actually a constrained method of understanding. It's constrained by scientific method itself. The only aspects of nature that can become established as scientific knowledge are the aspects of nature that, when we investigate nature, pass the scientific method test. Which means, that the results have to be redundantly confirmable. And the fact is that that's not all of nature. The current "reproduceability crisis" demonstrates this. The reproduceability crisis is not simply due to everybody being dishonest about the results, or not following proper scientific method in the race to publish papers.
The limiting factor around science is not a code that we have to crack. Which is how we now mistakenly like to think about so many things that we do not yet understand. It's there because it is in us. In the way our intelligence is working. It's in the way we currently presume nature herself to consist of nothing but what current scientific method can establish as stable and definite behaviour. In other words, as what is "objective".
When all along, what is "objective" about nature is what has survived the process of becoming "objective". In quantum mechanics we already understand that process and are coming to understand it better, as quantum decoherence and quantum Darwinism. But that's only one kind of objectivity. There are other kinds. The most salient one to mention is the objectivity of the world we sense-perceive and consciously experience. Because that's not the same thing as the objectivity derived from quantum decoherence. The latter is a structure of pointer states in quantum mechanics, a quantum-derived objectivity, or QDO. The former, the world we sense-perceive and consciously experience, is a neural-derived phenomenological objectivity, or NDPO. The NDPO is not simply just the same thing as the QPO. In evolutionary time, the NDPO comes much, much later than the QDO.
In VGF analysis we can understand evolution as an evolving attractor landscape, in which what exists in the landscape at any stage, including spacetime and quantum coherence itself, is what has survived as an attractor, in the ongoing iteration that produces the landscape.
In VGF analysis quantum coherence isn't the beginning. A density matrix in quantum mechanics is already a network of stabilisations. It is just that the density matrix shows them to be superposed, in a way that already stable, distinct things in the classical world cannot be.
In VGF analysis quantum coherence can be approached as part of the evolution of closures formed from the principle of infinite iteration - an ever ongoing process of evolution by VGF decoherence that we could call attractor Darwinism.