Stuart Kauffman

I recently read Stuart Kauffman's 'Investigations' (Oxford 2000)*, a series of investigative essays examining different facets of what life is, how thermodynamics and life interact, the limits of reductionist science and so on. It aims to begin a conversation about a 'general biology.' Overall, it was like my ideal internet browsing, organised in a book - lots of fascinating references, big ideas and so on.  As an example that I remember most clearly now: there have not been enough femtoseconds since the big bang that if every particle was in a protein, all the proteins of length 200 could even have existed, much less their usefulness explored.  The sparsity of material in the universe is rather like the sparsity of explored combinations in the universe - there is only a very little yet in existence. Life on earth may be a very particular example out of a huge gamut of feasible lifes.

Kauffman's main point is that we probably lack some kind of paradigm shift and associated mathematical laws that would allow us to understand the autopoiesis of life from non-life.  He thinks there will be some entailment of the second law of thermodynamics that causes complexity to accumulate and well up, for energy to cascade through equilibrium pools which auto-catalyse toward some particular structures, into self-organised criticality, a near-chaos region that is not quite chaos, characterised by 1/F (Power Law) avalanches of disorder. He is already referring to the self-organisation of dissipative systems, so it goes beyond merely that.

I think the self-organised criticality of non-reacting systems has a constant dimensionality, whereas reacting systems can escalate their dimensionality as a means of structuring the dissipation. (I'm not sure he doesn't say this - it seems obvious.) This escalation of dimensionality in complexes reminds me of that Tononi paper on integrated information theory, giving phi, a measure of consciousness from how much information is integrated from moment to moment.  Someone good at thinking, get on that.

* Written, like Brian Arthur's book, at the Santa Fe Institute.