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“Among the roots of your classicism you must include your passions for the stars.”
—Cesare Pavese, This Business of Living
What is reality? And is there just one reality or many, perhaps infinitely many? And how should we describe these realities, with mathematics, natural language, music, or visual art? The answer might be all of the above, but if so, can we justify these decisions based on a larger conception of reality?
Scientists tend to think about reality in one of two ways. The first perspective involves physically emergent hierarchies (ontologies)—ranging from the most “fundamental” elementary particles, through nuclear and atomic physics, collective chemistry, adaptive organisms and ecosystems, brains, minds, and, ultimately, human societies.
The second describes conceptually emergent hierarchies (epistemologies)—spanning logic, mathematics, natural language, natural science, and the arts. This perspective focuses on the cognitive and conceptual structures that humans create to describe the physical hierarchies in which they are embedded.
Increasingly these two ideas of reality—architectures of physical matter and conceptual information—are intersecting. Several contemporary areas of research are blurring the boundary between theories of reality and reality itself. The clearest example of this would be in the social sciences, where “social reality” and a model or theory of society are often difficult to disentangle. For example, does a formalism like John Nash’s non-cooperative game theory describe strategic interactions, or does game theory control strategic interactions? How might we ever disentangle these two possibilities?
This blurring of the distinction between physical and conceptual reality extends far below the social sciences to encompass deep, and by now widely held disciplinary positions, including the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, cosmic inflation, the “It-from-Bit” school of physics, and the idea of generalized observers in adaptive systems (from natural selection to cultural evolution). And these have been extended up the hierarchies, generating controversial (yet influential) frameworks, including the simulation hypothesis, constructor theory, the free energy principle, the principle of computational equivalence, and many theories of reflexivity and agency that bring us back toward the recursions of the social sciences.
Most of us were trained as materialists placing matter before mind.
These recent insights raise a rather troubling, and of course ancient, question. Should we conceive of physical and complex reality as the constructs of observers and minds working with natural language, mathematics, and computation? Or should we instead conceive of our conceptual constructs as the products of math, physics, neurobiology, and the mind? Most of us were trained as materialists placing matter before mind. But this easy assumption has been repeatedly questioned, and these assaults have become more frequent in recent years.
We suggest that many of these dilemmas can be resolved (or at least clarified) by thinking of reality as a circular structure resembling an Ouroboros (the symbol of a serpent eating its own tail). We position the ontological hierarchy of reality along this Ouroboros, including physical processes, life, intelligent systems and mind, culture, mathematics, and so forth. We suggest that any point on this circle can act as a “foundation” for subsequent theorizing, as the point where the mouth and the tail of the serpent intersect.
Consider the following choice of foundational points along the Ouroboros and the names that we give to each:
Platonists, A-lifers, and simulation theorists start with ideas. This assumes that math is foundational, and that physics, life, and mind are derived from it. The ultimate production of math by minds closes the circle making math fundamental.
Math → Physics → Neurobiology → Mind → Math
Biological materialists start at the foundational insertion point of neurobiology, from which new emergent theories ensue, including theories of mind that are the source of epistemologies, that close the circle when they generate theories of neurobiology.
Neurobiology → Mind → Math → Physics → Neurobiology
Origin-of-life researchers seek to identify crucial broken symmetries that propagate up through living matter and ultimately support the evolution of brains and minds whose models of physics and chemistry then dictate how we think about life.
Chemistry → Life → Neurobiology → Mind → Math → Physics → Neurobiology → Chemistry → Life
Research fields and disciplines are defined by the point at which they start in the cycle: the level that they declare to be “fundamental” to their investigations.
Physics likes to start with particles and fields and see how far simple symmetries might be explored to explain matter. Biologists like to start with organic chemistry, broken symmetries, and determine how far this might explain functional organization. And psychologists like to start with the mind and ask about the origins of mathematics upon which any physical theory will ultimately be constructed. And of course the influence of each discipline need not be restricted to its contiguous neighbors along the cycle but can reach into more distant points along its development; in this way, mathematics can jump straight into psychology or chemistry into ecology.
Two ideas of reality—architectures of physical matter and conceptual information—are intersecting.
Following the pioneering ideas of Philip Anderson in his 1972 paper “More Is Different,” and its sequels, we allow that there is an arbitrary choice of starting point: No one science is more fundamental than any other. But having rooted, or pinned the Ouroboros at one segment in its cycle, researchers are rigorously constrained in their exploration of the implications of this decision as they traverse the emergent hierarchy of the Ouroboros. Depending on whether they are catabolic (particularist) or anabolic (synthetic) thinkers, most researchers are either chewing on their field’s segment of the Ouroboros or patching up some small holes in their field’s segment.
Importantly though, every segment of the Ouroboros has at least some of this catabolic character, severing itself from the segments that came before and neglecting those that come after. An example is how Gödel’s incompleteness theorems in mathematics is a small hole chewed into the basic building blocks of mathematics itself. Similarly, much of philosophy casts strong doubt on the basic legitimacy of philosophical reasoning. And in many respects, the more we learn about neurobiology and cognitive science, the less trust we place in the mental processes involved in the research of neurobiologists. Each segment of the Ouroboros contains its own Shiva—destroyer of worlds.
In terms of Vedic metaphor, can we get beyond this self-destruction, to focus on the Trimurti or the personification of the whole? This is, in one telling, the subject of complexity science—surveying the many distinct approaches to reality that follow from our assumptions about what constitutes a fundamental level of explanation—or what effective theory we use to root our analyses. Complexity science seeks to explain emergent phenomena or mechanisms that “screen-off” their constituent parts and thereby allow new levels of description and understanding. These levels are not only natural manifestations of reality but all of them are required if a species as limited as Homo sapiens hopes to grasp the totality of reality. 
Lead image: Oksana Tkachova / Shutterstock
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