Friday, April 26, 2013

Network Cosmology

A Nov. 2012 paper in Nature, Network Cosmology argues that the cosmos is a complex, scale-free network, similar to the brain, the internet, and social spontaneous orders. The authors seem surprised at this, and they wonder if there is a hidden law of physics. They should perhaps consider constructal law and perhaps even bios theory to explain their findings. I personally am not in the least surprised at their findings. This is completely consistent with how I understand the cosmos to be structured. Over the course of cosmological evolution, new levels of complexity emerge, and the same scale-free network processes are discovered. The exciting thing is that network science -- developed to explain complex interactions of high-level complex entities -- is being brought down to the simplest levels of reality, demonstrating the same structures repeat at each level of complexity. Just as reductionist science is starting to experience decreasing returns in physics, emergentist science is being discovered to be highly relevant at even the simplest levels of reality, like physics.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Causal Entropic Forces

Is intelligence a fundamentally thermodynamic process? That is, do we get the emergence of complex behaviors through causal entropic forces? The authors have developed a model that seems to demonstrate tool evolution and social cooperation emerging from entropic forces.