Chapter 124 20.3 Sit, gush, autocatalyze

Ten years ago the "stack" game was all the rage.This engaging outdoor game showcases the power of cooperation.The game master has 25 or more people stand close together in a circle, with each participant staring at the back of the head of the person in front of him.Imagine the people waiting in line to buy movie tickets and connect them in a neat circle. When the host gave an order, a group of people immediately bent their knees and sat on the laps of their friends behind.If everyone moves in unison, the circle forms a self-supporting chair when seated.If one person makes a mistake, the whole circle collapses. The world record of the "stacking" game is that hundreds of people sit firmly on the "chairs" behind at the same time.

The autocatalytic system and ouroboros are a lot like a game of "stacking".Compound (or function) A synthesizes compound (or function) B with the help of compound (or function) C.And C itself is generated from A and D. D is in turn produced by E and C, and so on.Without him there is no me.In other words, the only way for a compound or function to persist for a long time is to be a product of another compound or function.In this circular world, all causes are effects, just like all knees are someone else's "chair."Contrary to our common perception, the existence of all entities depends on the co-existence of other entities.

The "Stack Sit" game proves that circular causality is not impossible.Our stinky skin is also supported by tautological logic.Tautology is real, and it's actually an essential element of a stable system. Cognitive philosopher Douglas Hofstadter called these contradictory circuits "strange loops," and cited two examples: the notes that seem to keep rising in Bach's Canon Rondo, and the infinitely rising notes in Escher's brush. steps.He counts the famous Cretan liar paradox and Gödel's proofs of unprovable mathematical theorems among his "strange circles."Hofstadter wrote in his book "Gödel, Escher, and Bach": "When we move up (or down) between different levels of a hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves back To the place where I stayed, this is the 'strange circle'."

Life and evolution will inevitably fall into the vicious circle of circular causality, which has tautological logic in fundamentals.Without this fundamental logical contradiction of circular causality, there can be no life and open evolution.In complex processes such as life, evolution, and consciousness, causal agents seem to be constantly shifting, like an optical illusion described by Escher.One of the problems humans have with trying to build systems as complex as ours is that in the past we have insisted on a certain level of logical consistency, clockwork precision, that has prevented autonomous events from emerging.As the mathematician Gödel articulated, contradiction is an inherent property of any self-sustaining system—even if the parts that make up the system are consistent.

Gödel stated in the theory proposed in 1931 that it is futile to try to eliminate the circle of self-phagia. The reason for this is that Hofstadter pointed out that "you don't know the true face of Mount Lu, only because you are in this mountain."When viewed on a "partial" level, each part appears to be legitimate; contradictions arise only when the legitimate parts form a whole. In 1991, the young Italian scientist Walter Fontana demonstrated mathematically that a linear sequence such as function A generates function B, and B generates C can easily form a self-generated loop similar to a closed-loop control system, so the final function is the same as the initial The function of is also the generator of the result.When Kaufman first saw Fontana's work, he was struck by its beauty. "You will love it! Functions generate each other. They come from the space formed by all functions, holding hands in the embrace of creation!" Kaufman calls this autocatalytic system "egg"."An egg is a set of rules, and it has the property that the rules they generate are the same rules that created them. That's not absurd at all," he said.

To obtain an egg, there must first be a large "pool" of different mesons.They can range from fragments of various proteins to bits of computer code.If you allow them to interact with each other for a long enough time, you can form a small closed loop of "one object produces another object".Eventually, if time and space permit, the network formed by these local closed loops in the system will spread and become denser gradually, until each producer in the loop is the product of another producer, until each loop All circuits are integrated into other circuits to form a large-scale parallel and interconnected network.At this point, the catalytic reaction stops, and the network suddenly enters a steady-state game—the system sits on its own lap, with the beginning on the end, and the end on the beginning.

Kaufman claimed that life began in this "soup" of "aggregates acting on aggregates to form new aggregates."He demonstrated the theoretical feasibility of this logic through the experiment of "a string of symbols acting on a string of symbols to generate a new string of symbols".He postulated that fragments of proteins were logically equivalent to fragments of computer code, and saw digital networks of "code beget code" as protein models.When he ran the model, he got autocatalytic systems that were like a game of "sit-and-sit": they had no beginning, no center, and no end.

Life pops up as a whole, like a crystal suddenly revealing its final (albeit tiny) form from a supersaturated solution: not starting as a cloudy half-crystal, nor appearing as half-materialized The ghost, but suddenly, suddenly became a whole, just like the 200 people suddenly sitting in a circle in the "sit stack" game. "Life is whole and integrated, not fragmented or disorganized," writes Stuart Kaufman. "Life, in a deep sense, is crystallized." He continued, "I hope to demonstrate that self-replication and homeostasis are fundamental features of these organisms as collective expressions inherent in polymer chemistry. We can expect that any sufficiently complex set of catalytic aggregates that come together can form autocatalytic Reaction." Here, Kaufman again alludes to that notion of inevitability. "If my model is correct, the paths of life in the universe are broad avenues, not winding narrow alleys."In other words, in the existing chemical environment, "life is inevitable."