Born To Do Math 204: Da Vinci’s “Necessity”
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Born To Do Math
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/12/02
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Ok, so, you have this idea about necessity, a lot of people do.
Rick Rosner: I just have thought that just came to me that freedom from necessity is an emergent quality.
Jacobsen: As in an increase in degrees of freedom?
Rosner: Well, you don’t have choice until you can make choice and choice is generally associated with awareness. It doesn’t have to be like an amoeba, which can still reach some inflection point where it has to move one way or another.
And, of course, in an amoeba, it’s all chemistry, but you could argue that a choice has been made. You’d get people who would argue back that, no, it’s not a choice, it’s chemistry. But you don’t get a choice of where alternatives are weighed and decisions made until you get some level of awareness.
Jacobsen: So, the way I’m interpreting necessity is in its most general sense of unaffordability.
Rosner: Yes!
Jacobsen: Something is necessary.
Rosner: Da Vinci didn’t know the fundamental particles of physics, but I’d say it’s a minority of scientists, who spend much time thinking about how the fundamental particles could be any other way than the way they are.
Even most scientists do not specialize in questioning the particles we have and what they do, I would think that the underlying assumption in scientists and everybody else is that the universe had no choice in particles. You have to take a physics class or read some article on physics for the layman, for somebody to tell you that it’s an active question whether there was any where you could among possible universes, whether there is a choice of particles.
People, I think, assume that physics is the way it is by way of necessity, that I think you can find all sorts of examples of that, like the inverse square law for forces. How could it be otherwise? Because space itself spreads out by the square of the distance from the particle that’s exerting the force.
Jacobsen: Yes, I think you just take the common domains of knowledge, chemistry, particle physics, biology and fundamental questions about creation and annihilation in cosmology. Each of those layers, you can apply this principle of necessity.
Rosner: It brings up an area that where there is the wild boys, where: Can you imagine alternative worlds? And that is the history of evolution, where the species that survive and then the species that evolved from those species, there is a lot of luck arbitrariness.
We’ve had six waves of mass extinction where we had to rebuild after every wave. All that depends on a random meteor. So, earlier, I was arguing that the choice can’t exist without awareness, but their choice is just one thing and then random chance. What I’m saying is there is nothing necessary about the history of evolution, what’s necessary is that things would evolve.
Jacobsen: So, that’s a fundamental statement on necessity in biology. The fact that things evolve, the ways that things fundamentally evolve. Is this something like talking about primary and secondary necessities as you get the higher order complications?
Rosner: Is he talking about that or are we talking about that?
Jacobsen: He’s so cool, “Necessity is the mistress and guide of nature,” or, “Necessity is the theme and inventress of nature, her curb and her eternal law.” So, we’re talking about choice. It’s not that there has to be choice. That’s a secondary deal.
I think it’s fundamental. I think there is a similar process when you just have differentiation happening in a universe and choice between options of a conscious agent, of an operator.
But it’s the same process going on, but they’re fundamentally different and one simply differentiates and one has a certain recursive element to it. It’s reflective back onto itself and then making a choice, a differentiation relevant to its own nature.
But fundamentally, this is a bifurcation in either case. Self-consistency and principles of existence, but he’s using it. The way he says necessity sounds like the way we use principles of existence, that which cannot be; those which are necessary. In other words, that which can’t be the other.
Yes, and so, there is a certain unavoidability to existence in the same way there is a necessity for existence. In the same way, there are principles of existence and those principles of existence and that necessity is reflective of self-consistency.
So, the fact that things are unavoidably existent means that they are necessary, means that they are grounded in principles of existence. What those principles are, that’s another question, but essentially necessity is fundamental and is another way of framing in another century, in another philosophical paradigm of principles of existence, of self consistency, I think.
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