Synthesis

On Oct 31, 2015, at 5:16 PM, Michael Epperson <epperson@csus.edu> wrote:

Hi Xin Wei,

 

That all sounds great!  I’m so glad you had a chance to engage with Stu. He’s a friend, and worked with me and Elias on our RR project. In fact, we were working on that at the same time he was working out the ‘res potentia / res extensa’ / poised realm ideas and relating these to Whitehead, so we had some great discussions. We’ve been talking about how/when to get together next to explore all this further, so this would be a great opportunity. (We have an edited volume coming out in March called  “Physics and Speculative Philosophy: Potentiality in Modern Science,” and Stu has a chapter in there.)

 

Anyway, lots of good synergy to explore here. The Synthesis Center info you sent is great—it’s exactly the kind of thing Elias and I want to explore re: representing and exemplifying QM in visual and other sensory ways that will inspire understanding (as opposed merely mystifying people, which is how QM is typically represented). 

 

I’m definitely game for a visit to ASU to discuss further, give a talk, etc., whatever you think is best to get the ball rolling. Let’s do it!

 

--Mike

 __________________________________________

Michael Epperson

Research Professor & Director

Center for Philosophy and the Natural Sciences

College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics

California State University, Sacramento

 

www.csus.edu/cpns

 

Phone:  916-278-5135

Email:  epperson@csus.edu

Web:  www.csus.edu/cpns/epperson

From: Xin Wei Sha [mailto:Xinwei.Sha@asu.edu] 
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2015 9:55 AM

Dear Mike and Elias, 

 

Actually I met and had delightful conversation with a biological scientist and complexity theorist  who may be an ally: Stu Kauffman.  

Stu’s come to appreciate Whitehead and Aristotle (perhaps analogous to Thom’s late reading of Aristotle’s Physis, after his Semiophysics )

See below my email to Synthesis re.  “Stuart Kauffman: Poised Realm, potential + actual, non-algorithmic thought”

We propose to meet in Santa Fe in the shadow of the Complexity institute …

 

Mike how about if I invite you down for a preliminary chat — we should; make a talk out of it —-

for that I propose engaging say a sister center like 

 

http://emergence.asu.edu/

 

Stu introduced me to them

 

I attach Synthesis’ mission statement + 6 linked research projects to give an idea of what it’s about…

 

Regards,

Xin Wei

 

On Oct 27, 2015, at 8:54 AM, Michael Epperson <epperson@csus.edu> wrote:

 

Hi Xin Wei—

 

So sorry for the delay in responding to this—it caught me right as things were heating up for Fall semester, and you know how that goes... Great to hear from you! Thanks for forwarding the Antoniou/Prigogine paper. Very interesting.  I discussed it with Elias, and his take on it was very helpful. Maybe we can have a Skype session to discuss?

 

I had been meaning to reach out to you again to see what you thought of the SynAPS group idea we had been talking about, so your email got me thinking about it again. I did a small test run last semester at Berkeley with Henry Stapp, a neuroscientist named Stan Klein, and Menas Kafatos, who came up from Chapman. Along the way, there were some postdocs who joined in, etc., and overall it was a good experience. Elias came over from Budapest and joined us in presenting a few papers at the 2015 Whitehead conference in Claremont in June. (Speaking of which, Elias recently published a REALLY fascinating paper on global geometric phase phenomena wrt the concept of a quantum spectral beam: http://www.hindawi.com/journals/amp/2015/124393/ )

 

Anyway, we’ve been thinking about ways that these structures might be represented and even exemplified via different visual media—something that we could collaborate with you on at the Synthesis Center. What we’re envisioning is a visualization project for quantum global geometric/topological phases—something that has never been done before. It would essentially be a visual representation of memories of quantum systems as topological structures—e.g., the quantum spectral beam. We think this kind of visualization would be both practically useful to researchers, heuristically useful in ‘showing’ the public what quantum histories ‘look like’, and (for the perfect trifecta) aesthetically inspiring as a new, and heretofore unseen example of Nature’s artistry. 

 

Attached is a short white paper that explains the idea. Elias and I would love to hear what you think!

 

Hope all’s well—

 

Mike

Begin forwarded message:

 

From: Xin Wei Sha <xinwei.sha@asu.edu>

Subject: Stuart Kauffman: Poised Realm, potential + actual, non-algorithmic thought

Date: October 23, 2015 at 9:22:00 AM MST

To: synthesis-research@googlegroups.com

Cc: post@topological.posthaven.com, post@synthesis.posthaven.com

 

Finally had a chance to have long conversations with a remarkable scientist and bon vivant Stuart Kauffman, — one of the most prominent and acute anglo scientists coming around to process philosophy.  (Interesting parallel to Rene Thom discovering Aristotle’s Physics late in his life.)

  

“Res Extensa, Res Potentia and the Poised Realm”

NPR: http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2010/08/17/129250892/res-extensa-res-potentia-and-the-poised-realm#more

 

Santa Fe Institute brief:
http://www.sfcomplex.org/2010/08/stuart-kauffman-res-extensa-res-potentia-and-the-poised-realm

 

Kauffman writes:

We have lived with scientific “monism” since Newton. Monism is the view, shared by virtually all scientists, that the world is made of one kind of “stuff,” the Actual world of matter and energy and with some question marks, space and time and information.
There are very good grounds to accept monism, and it has an ancient history. No less an ancient philosopher Empedocles said, “What is real in the universe is what is actual.”
Aristotle was less sure, he toyed with the idea that both the Actual and the Possible were “Real.” He called the Possible “potentia” and meant a variety of things by Potentia. And no less a mathematician and philosopher than Alfred North Whitehead, he of Principia Mathematica in the early 20th Century, written with Bertrand Russell, moved on to think of both Actuals and Possibles as “real”, or “ontologically real”, meaning two kinds of “stuff,” Actuals and Possibles in the universe.

I’m beginning, to my surprise to think Aristotle and Whitehead may have been right.
If so, the implications are radical.

 

 

In his article “ Free Will: There Are No Easy Answers”  Kauffman argues cogently from quantum mechanics that the human mind cannot be algorithmic:

 

http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2011/02/18/129375622/free-will#more