He (Socrates) it is who perceived a unique, a tempered, and a pervasive nature in things, bearing the closest likeness to the human spirit, and he discovered this nature to be distinct from the substance of things in their refined form. [1] It (Nature) is endowed with a power whose reality men of learning fail to grasp. Indeed a man of insight can perceive naught therein save the effulgent splendor of Our Name, the Creator [1] Baha’u’llah

One of the most fascinating areas of research, concerns the phenomena of emergence. The term emergence applies when a system displays properties beyond the simple sum of its parts. These additional properties are attributed to the interaction between the parts. So for example the complicated dynamics of ‘flocking’ phenomena in birds or fish can be reproduced in a computer by ensuring certain rules of interaction are followed by the simulation. Similarly in an artificial neural network, the rules of interaction between nodes give rise to it’s ability to store and manipulate information.

At some point the collective entity becomes imbued with agency. It operates as a causal agent, where the macroscopic description becomes more informative and predictive than the microscopic activity. A simple example of this is a propagating wave. Here the trajectory of the microscopic objects which make up the wave, when viewed alone do not contain the information necessary to explain and predict the motion of the system. Indeed the microscopic components of the wave can be replaced during the lifetime of the wave’s propagation. What does describe and predict trajectory of the system is an abstract mathematical object whose behavior might be said to be ‘platform’ independent. That is, the properties which define it can exist across very different types of medium.

Biological systems exhibit this type of agency in an even more obvious manner. So throughout the lifetime of any given living system the individual cells and components are endlessly swapped out, yet still preserving the behavior and identity of the whole system.

The study of this type of phenomena underlies research into answering the question: “When does physics become biology?”. This is because life and evolution manifest the most obvious sort of emergence. This question is a profound and deep one. There really isn’t yet a good scientific consensus on this topic. However I think it is safe to say that the old biological view which confined life solely to organic systems is being understood as fundamentally wrong. This is especially so since physicists have begun to consider this question in ernest: to understand when does physics become biology? In his book “What is Life?” Schrödinger, one of the co-developers of quantum mechanics identified the process of exporting entropy as a possible hallmark of a living system. This is because the process of self-organization, or in the terminology of thermodynamics, exporting entropy, seems to be the one thing which all living things do. Thus researchers have looked to study systems which manifest symmetry breaking, since symmetry is related to the entropy of the system. One of the more famous studies of this was carried out by the noble prize winning Chemist Ilya Prigogine, who studied various chemical and convection systems which exhibited structure formation.

A proper view of life would extend our understanding beyond the familiar organic forms. This new view is surprisingly consistent with what Abdu’l-Baha put forward over 100 years ago. Abdu’l-Baha was the son of the prophet founder of the Baha’i Faith, Baha’u’llah. Rather than de-marking living from non-living, he saw life as a continuum of emergent order from the mineral, to vegetable, animal, and human. What runs through all life however is attraction or grades of love. Thus minerals are considered partaking of the lowest grade of life since it expresses the attribute of cohesion. Physicists are coming to understand that there is actually something fundamentally anti-thermodynamic inherent in self-attractive forces. Studies of simple many-body models of the universe governed by Newtonian laws of gravitational attraction show that there is something unique about systems under the operation of an attractive force. Barbour and his colleagues, in their 2014 paper [2] on this subject, claim that, “self-gravitating systems exhibit “anti-thermodynamic” behavior that is not fully understood.” Thermodynamics as it was originally conceived didn’t take into account gravitation. Indeed the operation of self-attractive forces leads to symmetry breaking and clustering which is very different from how ideal gases behave.

Abdu’l-Baha in his talk recorded in the book, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, explained his view on life further:

“When we observe the phenomena of the universe, we realize that the axis around which life revolves is love, while the axis around which death and destruction revolve is animosity and hatred…. For instance, the stone is an existent phenomenon, a composition of elements. A bond of attraction has brought them together, and through this cohesion of ingredients this petrous object has been formed. This stone is the lowest degree of phenomena, but nevertheless within it a power of attraction is manifest without which the stone could not exist. This power of attraction in the mineral world is love, the only expression of love the stone can manifest..” [2]

Recent theoretical work [4] by Erik Hoel, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University in the Neuro-Technology Lab, has shown that the progression of emergence from the micro-scale to the macro can be given new understanding using the framework of information theory. Hoel has used the analysis of information transmission initially developed by Claud Shannon, the father of information theory. In this context the idea of “Effective Information” has been developed, it essentially is the average of how much each state reduces the uncertainty about the future of the system.

By casting causal structure as a type of communication channel, Hoel has shown that the macro scale is more than just a lossy or even lossless ‘compression’ of the micro-scale. He proves that the macro scale can posses more ‘Effective Information’ than the micro-scale and thus more casual power. Here casual power is gained via a process identical to how reliable information can be transmitted over a noisy channel, using error correcting codes.

Causal models as information channels. (A) A Markov chain at the microscale with four

states can be encoded into a macroscale chain with two states. (B) Causal structure transforms

interventions into effects. A macro causal model is a form of encoding for the interventions (inputs)

and effects (outputs) that can use a greater amount of the capacity of the channel. TPM probabilities[4]

To my thinking the implications of this work are profound since it solves the age old problem of the emergence of agency in biological systems. Further it implies that a higher order non-physical abstraction from the microscopic physical reality is imbued with more predictive information (i.e. the Map or model). This very fact could provide valid justification for inverting what one commonly considers as more ‘real’ or primary. One traditionally expects that the detailed microscopic dynamics would contain the ‘best’ and most predictive information for any system and thus represents a more basic form of reality. However for emergent systems this is not the case. The macroscopic reduced model (which is a non-physical abstraction) contains more predictive information and thus should be considered more ‘real’ or primary. The microscopic might be thought of as a ‘shadow’ of the macro (if we invoke Plato’s cave analogy). It explains what is understood intuitively about biological agents, that there exists a non-physical higher order object which transmits information controlling the behavior of the system down to the microscopic level. Even the term which is used “Emergence” actually embeds this view of information and action emerging up from the particulars to the general, when in reality the flow of information and action might be from the higher to the lower.

Another example might be in considering the central limit theorem. The central limit theorem establishes that the collective behavior of a group of independent random actors regardless of the individual statistics each actor is following, will tend towards a normal distribution or bell shaped distribution. The Bell shaped distribution is eminent in nature, independent of the microscopic dynamics. One observes its existence only after averaging.

Results of a double-slit-experiment performed by Dr. Tonomura showing the build-up of an interference pattern of single electrons. Numbers of electrons are 11 (a), 200 (b), 6000 ©, 40000 (d), 140000 (e).

This is somewhat similar to the situation which exists in quantum mechanical systems. In this case the best description of the macroscopic motion is given by wave function which is a purely mathematical abstraction and explicitly non-physical. The nature of the wave function is only deduced after averaging the behavior of many particles. That is, one cannot predict the behavior of each individual particle. In both the emergent and the quantum mechanical system, the state of the system are given by a non-physical abstraction which exists exclusively in the realm of relational-information.

In the case of the quantum wave function its existence permeates all space and time, in the case of emergent phenomena it is assumed that it remains confined to the space given by the microscopic elements of the system. However one might conjecture that its existence in some instances could, like the quantum wave function transcend the confines of a defined space or similar to the central limit theorem be somehow eminent in nature yet dynamical. Within the confines of the interior space elements can be swapped out and its existence can be understood to permeate the interior. Beyond the confines of the physical and temporal boundaries of the system can such types of objects have persistence? At this point a religiously minded individual might claim that such persistence is possible, the example of which would be the human soul, although its direct effects may not be observable in the physical universe.

Returning to the idea of ‘Effective Information’ used by Hoel, interestingly it is actually very similar to another idea developed by Christoph Adami a professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, as well as professor of Physics and Astronomy, at Michigan State University. Adami actually attempts to redefine ‘information’ [5] as the ability to make a prediction better than chance. This distinguish’s it from Shannon’s definition of information which equated it with entropy. In this case the entropy of a system represents the number of distinguishable states a given system can assume. So for example a six sided die can assume more states than a coin and thus has a higher entropy. Adami argues that defining information in this way arises from confusing the ability to store information with information. So a system with higher entropy (i.e. a six sided die versus a coin) can store more information. Yet the word ‘information’ as used commonly, denotes a value which “the ability to predict better than chance” or “the reduction of uncertainty” might better represent.

Adami has argued that this ability to predict better than chance is what is optimized for in evolution and the information carried in genes. I would argue in going further than Adami and claim that in fact predictive information is necessary for the formation of order and that this predictive information is generated by the process of measurement. This is because the act of measurement results in the generation of predictive information, since the best predictor of a future state is the current measured state. Also in the case of modeling an evolving system, measurement is necessary to initialize the model.

hot (white) and cold (black) particle in equilibrium (top). Maxwell’s Demon opens door to sort particles of different speed (bottom).

The reason measurement is important for the formation of order, follows from the famous Maxwell Demon paradox. Maxwell imagined a box containing this distribution with a wall dividing it into two sides. In the wall there was a door, which was controlled by some demon that would open the door only for fast moving particles and keep it shut for the slow particles. In this way, over time, all the fast particles would come to reside on one side of the box, leaving the slow particles on the other. In this situation, a heat engine could be run from the differential in temperature, and thus extracting work in violation of the second law of thermodynamics. The Maxwell Demon paradox was resolved using Landauer’s erasure principle [6]. Landauer accounted for the necessity of the Demon to perform a measurement and thus record this data on some physical medium whose initial entropic state had to be considered. So, for example, a magnetic tape, which stores information as zeros and ones, needed to be first initialized to be all zeros. This initialization placed the tape into a lower entropic state, which was then given up as information was recorded. In the end, the work required to reset this memory would consume more energy than was extracted, thus preserving the second law.

The act of measurement is indistinguishable from the formation of memories only the assume time scale distinguish the two. Measurement also requires the operation of a thermodynamically irreversible process (like the shattering of a glass). This is implied in the Landauer erasure principle which rescues the 2nd Law of thermodynamics in the Maxwell Demon paradox. Here the storage of information necessary for the Demon to function raises the net entropy of the storage device thus preserving the 2nd Law. In both Hoel’s and Adami’s analysis predictive information is intimately related to process of emergence and the evolution of biological systems. I would go further and claim that measurement is a necessary part of the creative act.

This idea might be reflected in the following esoteric passage of Baha’u’llah’s,

“Praised be to God Who made the Point to be outstretched within the Book of Origination, an Ornament through which is the Genesis of Creativity. From it He differentiated the knowledge of what hath been and what will come to pass. He made it to be a manifestation of the mysteries of what distinguished the [Arabic letter] “K” and the [Arabic letter] “N”! He ennobled it [the Point] …..”-Baha’u’llah (provisional translation Stephen Lambden) [7]

Arabic “K” and “N” Be!

Here the Arabic letter “K” and “N” together make the word “Be” in Arabic. This is in reference to God’s creative command “Be!”. One of the physical attributes which distinguishes the past from the future are thermodynamically irreversible processes like the shattering of glass or in our case the formation of memories or measurements. Interestingly the act of measurement is necessary for the formation of order. Thus it is linked to the creative act as seems to be implied by this verse. This also has echo’s of the central role which observation or measurement plays in creating reality by collapsing the wave function in quantum mechanics.