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Wandering towards a goal : how can mindless mathematical laws give rise to aims and intention?
Aguirre A., Foster B., Merali Z., Springer International Publishing, New York, NY, 2018. 254 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319757-25-4)
Date Reviewed: Jan 24 2020

Since 2008, the Foundational Questions Institute has sponsored an annual essay competition. This volume offers the 17 best submissions to the contest that ran from December 2016 to March 2017.

The editors’ introductory chapter summarizes the essays. Three essays tied for first place. Albantakis (chapter 2) presents an experiment with evolving simple agents and contrasts two agents that successfully adapt to the environment: a simple feed-forward agent and an agent with internal causal constraints based on feedback. The author admits only the second category as demonstrating intention. By contrast, Rovelli (chapter 3) defines intention simply as the coupling of the agent to the environment, as measured using information theory.

Szangolies (chapter 4) appeals to von Neumann’s insight that the same data can serve both as static information to be passed from one agent to another and as instructions to be executed by an agent. This self-reference is the core of intentionality. DeDeo (chapter 5) and Magnusdottir (chapter 8) also see self-reference as the key to causality.

The rest of the essays develop one or another of a limited set of key themes. Several essays explore how intentionality can arise from coarse-graining system microstates (where the dynamics are reversible in time) to macrostates (where dynamics are irreversible). DeDeo (chapter 5) shows how coarse-graining can lead to third-order terms not present in purely physical dynamics, which can generate memory and, thus, self-reference.

Hoel (chapter 6) shows how coarse-graining can provide error-correction among system macrostates, leading to causal dynamics. Walker (chapter 7) draws on Hoel’s insights to speculate about the emergence of top-down causality, where intentionality can affect the system’s microstates. Durham (chapter 12) describes the emergence of intention in macrostates in terms of combinatorics, while Stoica (chapter 17) appeals to quantum collapse to explain the emergence of macrostates.

This last essay is one of several, including Rickles (chapter 9), Samengo (chapter 10), Seguin (chapter 11), Yanofsky (chapter 13), and Bolognesi (chapter 16), that make causality dependent on an observer. Yanofsky claims that we think the world is causal only because scientists choose to study patterns that exhibit causality, ignoring those that do not; and Bolognesi denies any objective reality to causality, which is simply our way of making sense of what we see. Most of these essays amount to defining the problem away as an illusion.

Among the subjective essays, two exceptions to the last statement are Rickles and Seguin, who appeal to J. A. Wheeler’s notion of a self-excited circuit in which an increasingly complex universe observes itself. Causality is real in such a system; the subjectivity emerges from the objective dynamics of the system over time, in a manner reminiscent of the self-referential schemes advocated by Szangolies, Magnúsdóttir, and DeDeo.

Searle (chapter 14) relies on purely thermodynamic considerations to suggest that causality exists when a system can absorb energy from a varying environment by dumping entropy into a sink. Theoretically, even a nonliving system could follow such dynamics, but Searle does not document such a system.

Most of the essays invoke some concept of evolution to explain how causal mechanisms might have evolved by favoring systems that can predict the future. Two chapters focus directly on evolutionary explanations. Kadin (chapter 15) sees the evolution of neural networks as the critical transition, while Ellis and Kopel (chapter 18) focus on protein structures, such as gated ion channels, that can implement Boolean logic as the key.

The book is generally well produced, though some figures that use color to make critical distinctions are printed only in black and white (for instance, 7.2 and 7.5). As is usual in collections of this sort, there is no index or integrated bibliography.

The essays suggest several possible lines of exploration (self-referentiality, coarse-graining, and the dismissal of causality as imposed by observers, for example), none of which are compelling. In addition, many of them assume an evolutionary dynamic, which requires a self-replicating mechanism--itself a mystery for which no satisfactory naturalistic explanation is yet available.

Reviewer:  H. Van Dyke Parunak Review #: CR146852 (2006-0121)
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