Dear Professor Turil Sweden Cronburg,
I thank you a lot for your encouraging words and, as I see in the paper you wrote, the discovering of how we deeply coincide in many points. I greatly enjoyed reading you, particularly expressed in the diagrams you beautifully presented. However, if you allow me to make a few comments about your ideas, I would like to know how can we pretend to use experience, consciousness, space, time, etc., as we don't even know the real meaning of all that. I understand quite well that, by centuries we have been forced to accept all those concepts as provisory hypotheses, otherwise we would never progressed a bit in science... Nevertheless, I think, we should keep in mind that all the basic conceptual structure of science, including evolution as a model o time developing systems, has to be questioned again and again. In fact, I consider that what we actually call "experience" inevitably is a past reality, an already done structure, good or bad, beautiful or ugly, constructing or disastrous, whatever, but always known in a posteriori manner. Present, instead, cannot be seen or even experienced as such, since in the case of conscious experience, this always happens in a sort of estrangement of oneself, whilst the rest of atoms, not Adams, seem to me as simply being there without a notion of experience. I keep thinking that, even though I ignore what consciousness is.
Another heavy term you employ in your exposure is purpose; I would have rather utilized the term intention, but it doesn't matter. Indeed what I suppose is really important to tell you is that I don't think we get things clearer by assuming the equation purpose = function. You probably know that one of the main disjunctive topics is the question for what was first, structure or function: does structure make function or is it the other way around? I am sure that as far as we stay on that twofold situation we will never be able to get off the hook. I propose to add a third element, namely, fluctuations triggering and modulating reality. Now yes, we break through the undecidable binomial; instead of the old dialectic one-dimensional relationship structure 竊" function, we get a threefold relationship, not strictly dialectic, an equilateral triangle with structure, function and fluctuations, each one of three on each corner.
This relationship cannot be purely dialectic because there wouldn't be any possible evolution of such a closed system. Not only does each one of the three moments depend on the other two, but also each one of them has to be opened to new possible conditions. That is why fluctuations play a crucial role in evolutionary perspectives. Don't you think so? I know all that is present between the lines of your text but, perhaps, it would have been very useful to do it explicitly. No doubt, all the factors you mention for a fully functioning Earth are relevant and, in a certain sense, they all are urgent to meet.
I didn't fully developed the idea of epistemic polyglotism because of the lack of space we counted on for the contest; however, and I am very glad to confirm that you did understand the point, in order to answer a foundational question like how should humanity steer the future, only illustrious ideas like yours and mine can effectively contribute to get a glimpse of an answer. I widely develop the subject of polyglotism in a book I just registered in Mexico, it is written in Spanish, titled "La conciencia de la ciencia: un juego complejo" [The consciousness of science: a complex play (game)]. May be I will think of a translation into English and French.
Finally, I would like to tell that, yes, I would like a hot cup of tea!
Yours,
Alexandre de Pomposo