The Metaphysics of ESSHOC & SOAR. Are characters in Amia an instance?

Some thoughts on ESSHOC (Emergent Systems of Self Hierarchically Organized Complexity):

Contemplation on the sixth basic question of ontology (being)  in reverse plus Erwin Schrödinger's conclusion in CHAPTER 6 Order, Disorder and Entropy of WHAT IS LIFE? that "the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness ( = fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment" has led me to believe that if Schrödinger had known in 1944 our current science of cosmology, which has progressed from the hypothetical speculation of his time to the falsifiable hypotheses of the expanding Big Bang, he might well have extended his "exploration of the question which lies at the heart of biology" to include consideration of how Emergent Systems of Self Hierarchically Organized Complexity or ESSHOC (pron. es-shock) that are produced by thermodynamic pumps like Earth, living cells, and human brains, which reverse entropy locally while creating Gaia, species, and human culture respectively, might apply to a universal thermodynamic pump created by the combination of accelerating expansion and the limiting speed of light such that as time proceeds from the one of maximum density/temperature at minimum size towards the zero of minimum density/temperature at infinite expansion that mass/energy/information "lost" beyond the point of no return creates the ESSHOC as our universe cools into separation of forces, emergence of elementary particles organized into elements, galaxies, organic chemistry, life, brains, memetic evolution & leading perhaps to an upcoming technological singularity and beyond?  Meanwhile, isn't it logical to consider Amia and such internet game worlds as a higher level "reality" emergent from the mental, memetic world of human culture? Anyway, There’s nothing particularly new about the idea of our universe creating itself by a bootstrapping process or emergent self-organizing hierarchies of complexity.  I find confirmations everywhere among scientific models of our macrocosm. Not to even mention Schrödinger's epilogue to WHAT IS LIFE? "So let us see whether we cannot draw the correct, non-contradictory conclusion from the following two premises: (i) My body functions as a pure mechanism according to the Laws of Nature. (ii) Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for them. The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that I –I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every conscious mind that has ever said or felt 'I' -am the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of the atoms' according to the Laws of Nature.".

Some musings on SOAR (Self Observational Active Replication):

I’m trying to characterize these mechanisms simply, so, after considering anthropomorphism, I would like to include the necessity of a subjective time dimension for human consciousness:

For a being to observe and interact with the universe, it must exist across one dimension as well as sensing the others -- anything which sensed all dimensions could not be said to think or act, because it would not have any dimension for thoughts to take place in (thoughts being sequences of brain states, and sequences automatically requiring a dimension to exist in just as multiple points makes a line). Here we can see that despite a lack of objective distinction between the four dimensions, any subjectively existing being (a thinker) must encounter one of those dimensions subjectively in the form of time. Time is that dimension in which thoughts are sequenced.

One point it seems important to be crystal clear on is that SOAR at the level of mind creates a much richer consciousness, in a non-mystical sense of self-awareness, than at the Gaia level of genetic replication or the universal level of the “laws” of physics. In terms of:

Semiotics concerns the study of signs/symbols in three basic dimensions: syntactics (rule-based operations between signs within the sign system), semantics (relationship between signs and the world external to the sign system), and pragmatics (evaluation of the sign system regarding the goals of their users).

I’d say that universal SOAR is purely the creation of syntax, in DNA-based SOAR semantics emerges with pragmatics enforced by the environment (This seems to be the level determinists limit themselves to considering.) whereas at the level of mind pragmatics becomes internalized so that choice, as far as humans know anyway, only emerges in mental SOAR, although exercising creative free will of course entails all those “laws” of organic chemistry and particle physics being simultaneously enacted in turtles-all-the-way-down recursion. Surely, when our personal "muse" inspires us to create characters and stories all the lower levels are simultaneously invoked, so when we do this co-operatively, what else is it but universal representation?

I'm afraid that I’ve expressed myself poorly regarding this subtlety of levels:

I'm not sure I'd agree with calling simple patterns like crystals non-representational. Crystals clearly don't have the extensive symbol set and syntax DNA has, but they still represent information in their replication process.

The difference is between information which is locally represented or universally represented as Von Neumann, et. al, explain the evolutionary advantages of local memory over distributed memory:

Why then is there an advantage of local memory over distributed memory self-replication? Von Neumann's argument maintains that if we do not have symbolic descriptions directing self-replication, then an organism must replicate through material self-inspection of its parts. In other words, the dynamics must be able to produce copies of itself by template identification of parts existing in its environment. The simplest way would be to have every part of the structure individually heritable. Clearly, as systems grow in complexity, self-inspection becomes more and more difficult [Pattee, 1995]. The existence of a language, a symbol system, allows a much more sophisticated form of communication. Functional, dynamic structures do not need to replicate themselves, they are simply constructed from physically non- functional (dynamically inert) descriptions. For instance, for an enzyme to replicate itself, it would need to have this intrinsic property of self-replication "by default", or it would have to be able to assemble itself from a pool of existing parts, but for this, it would have to "unfold" so that its internal parts could be reconstituted for the copy to be produced [Pattee, 1995]. With the genetic code, however, none of these complicated "gimmicks" are necessary: functional molecules can be simply folded from inert messages. This method is by far more general since any functional molecule (with limitations to be discussed ahead) can be produced from a description, not merely those that either happen to be able to self-reproduce, or those that can unfold and fold at will to be reproduced from available parts. The evolution of distributed memory based self-organizing systems is restricted to this type of trivial (in Von Neumann's sense) or through self-inspection (self-description [Kampis, 1991]) reproduction..

I have an inkling how universal SOAR transforms distributed memory of the “laws” of physics to local memory, but I don’t want to babble foolishly about quantum mechanical decoherence for which I can’t give any mathematical formula, so I’ll content my self with a quasi-empirical meta-logical formulation of : E + ~E -> 0 where the symbol “->” denotes the process of becoming “=”.
The best physical model I can find for this is in Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind Of Science | On Line Chapter 9: Fundamental Physics (See: Sections 7 – 16.) that the Universe is fundamentally the evolution of a network of relationships between nodes, which entails that there is no ultimate substance as a node is simply where three relationships cross – continually updated in SOAR as at each center of ESSHOC, with the center of the universe being everywhere, new information is constantly arriving from earlier higher-entropy eras and coordinating the creative emergence of the “laws” of physics as non-local universal information becomes local information, or as Wolfram explains it:

…the basic reason for this is that if the universe is a network then it can in a sense easily contain threads that continue to connect particles even when the particles get far apart in terms of ordinary space.
The picture that emerges is then of a background containing a very large number of connections that maintain an approximation to three-dimensional space, together with a few threads that in effect go outside of that space to make direct connections between particles.
If two particles get created together it is reasonable to expect that the tangles that represent their cores will tend to have a few connections in common – and indeed this for example happens for lumps of non-planarity of the kind we discussed on page 527. (Preserving physical quantities like electric charge, and, with casual invariance, like local gauge invariance.) But until there are interactions that change the structure of the cores, these common connections will then remain – and will continue to define a thread that goes directly from one particle to the other.

Thus, crystals don’t replicate themselves via local representation, but are instances of phase transitions perhaps best characterized in this poetic way physicist John Baez explains Renormalization:

Right at the critical point, something very cool happens: the system transforms in a simple way under scaling! What does this mean? Well, if you get some water right at the critical point, it looks "opalescent" like a moonstone. If you stare at it carefully, you'll see a bunch of liquid water droplets of all different sizes floating around in steam. However, if you look closely at any of these droplets, you see they are full of bubbles of steam, and if you look closely at the steam, you see it's full of little droplets of liquid! It's like a random fractal: no matter how closely you look, you see the same thing. You can't tell if you're looking at water droplets in steam or bubbles of steam in water, and there is no distinguished length scale... at least until you get down to the scale of atoms, that is.

Well, this is all background material for a Metaphysical question I'd like to raise about worlds such as Amia, i.e., are they ESSHOC within which characters instantiate a level of SOAR beyond mind?

Sorry if that this is still a bit recondite. Maybe after a few more days meditation on the question, I can recast its background in simpler terms. This is just to get us started.

Regards, Hypatia Theon