4. Structural Learning

Meaning for Matter

To consider the complexification of meaning, we start at the lowest level, Matter, begun nearly 14 billion years ago, where “learning” seems (at best) a semantically loose description for the sorts of processes underway. That is what we should expect, though, if we mean to trace the continuum from the crudest, most provisional forms of adaptive information processing to the most complex. At this basal level, we are dealing with the very rudiments of the objective world and how they come into being. Here we ask: Could this process also be subject to the sort of viability-filtering mechanisms that characterize genuine learning at higher levels of complexity?

John Campbell thinks so. In his books Universal Darwinism: The Path of Knowledge and The Knowing Universe, Campbell draws on the 2009 work of theoretical physicist Wojciech Zurek of the Los Alamos National Laboratory^[i] to show how quantum decoherence (the process by which quantum states become determined as classical reality) operates in terms of inferential information processing.

Since the early 20^th century, quantum mechanics has puzzled physicists by its fundamentally probabilistic nature, which is so unlike the deterministic certainty of classical physics. Do all possible states of quantum phenomena exist then somewhere—somehow—perhaps in some sort of “multiverse”? The seeming gulf between a quantum world of probability and a classical objective world of definite objects has left theoretically unresolved the transition from one realm to the other. Zurek, Campbell, and other proponents of “quantum Darwinism” resolve this question by seeing the transition to the classical objective world as one of information transfer subject to environmental selection. “[O]nly the effects of quantum systems that can pass through the filter of decoherence compose our reality,” Campbell writes.

Quantum systems participate in reality only through those interactions. When analysed in detail these interactions or quantum decoherences consist of a transfer of information between the quantum system and the web of objective reality. Not all information concerning the quantum system is transferable. In fact the vast majority is not transferable. The relatively tiny amount of information that can be transferred is selected from the huge range of quantum possibilities and numerous copies of this information are deposited in the environment by a Darwinian process…^[ii]

In this way, when interactions occur, only the environmentally viable information is selected from the vast variability of possible states. The resulting conditions then form the informational basis for determining future selection, and so on.^[iii]