Presentation of the work

It is common for an author to introduce the main lines of his work by placing it in the context of a specific disciplinary field. If the author suspects that his work will challenge established conventions, it is sometimes preferable for him to announce his intentions beforehand, and to develop a series of hypotheses and conjectures. Such is the case of this book entitled “Time, Emergences and Communications”, which does not fit into any of the two conventional categories, neither that of works which develop analytical studies nor that of synthesis essays. This book anticipates knowledge by outlining a scientific philosophy destined to interpret things and entities that have come into being or which are in a development process, while formulating general and bold hypotheses about those things which have emerged, those which have submerged, as well as those concerning the root of that which still escapes us: time.

We will endeavor to understand emergence in various situations where material components interact by coordinating their actions in order to “constitute systems” with emerging properties (or functions) accessible to experimental investigation or social analysis where man is involved. I will strive to show that communications play a key role in these processes and for that, a strategy will be implemented. If communications are so important, then it must be shown that they are an essential property of matter, which justifies the detailed analyses of the quantum world developed in the first five chapters. If we want to understand the functioning of complex systems such as living cells or animals, we cannot circumvent the study of the strange property of entanglement as well as the interpretation of chemical bonds. The strategy is thus clear. It consists of explaining what quantum matter really is, and then moving on to realities made up of very large numbers of elementary components.

After five chapters devoted to the interpretation of quantum physics, Chapters 6 and 7 will attempt to explain how emergences occur in large sets of elements by focusing on the phases of matter. Contemporary physics is rich in detail, making it possible to reveal the causes of emergence and to bring out this little-known aspect of contemporary science: quantum and material communications whose role appears via the theories of condensed matter as well as quantum field theories. Emergences and communications, these two notions harmonize with each other and work with a third term that still remains enigmatic: time (with its arrow, its polarities and its orientations). Chapters 9 and 10 will explore the question of time, after a brief discussion about computing in Chapter 8. Chapter 11 will offer a general view of the different emergence categories by describing two orders of reality constituted from quantum microphysics (the infra-physical): the mesoscopic level (living cell, viruses, etc.) and the macroscopic level, which corresponds to our daily universe, populated by living species and in which human societies flourish.

Summing up, Chapters 1 to 5 offer an expanded study on communication in quantum matter. Then, Chapters 6 to 8 focus on emergence and Chapters 9 and 10 deal with the question of time. A complete study on the topic of emergence is presented in Chapter 11. Chapter 12 concludes this study devoted to the triplet: communications, emergence and time.

The aim of this book is to explain how natural information is exchanged through the fields of communication and is involved in every emergence found in matter, life, societies and the cosmos. If information is a means of producing emergences, it is also at the root of time. This book will introduce unprecedented research. It resumes the quest begun in my previous essay on information, while taking up and completing the fundamental thesis that was delineated therein, namely the duality of physical processes, involving arrangements and communications. In particular, this study will introduce an interpretation of quantum mechanics which, to my knowledge, is unprecedented and which starkly contrasts with most of the classical writings about this enigmatic science. Thermodynamics will also be approached in an unconventional way, in terms of noise and information, which will lead us to examine the roots of time.

A scientific philosophy

Therefore, the essay that you have in your hands is a scientific philosophy, quite a different discipline from the philosophy of science and the history of science. These two fields, sometimes included under the notion of epistemology, envision science and the results it yields, as an object of study. They share a common interest with the history of philosophy, which, like an archeology of meaning and concept, studies transcendental thought as it spread over the centuries. What is more, the philosophy of science studies its object by observing it, analyzing it, but without modifying its object or its formalisms and theories. Contrary to this, the scientific philosophy that I propose is based on scientific results that will be interpreted and selected to serve the purpose of understanding nature and its emergences. Scientific philosophy does not hesitate to upset scientific theories in order to deliver the secrets of nature, and particularly, this strange material that quantum physics studies.

The elaboration of knowledge outlined in this essay concerns each of the central notions mentioned so far: Time, Emergence and Communication. This naturally suggests the idea of three anticipated upheavals: (1) the quantum revolution of communication, (2) the semantic revolution of emergence and (3) the biographical and cosmological revolution of time. All this together with the hypothesis of a Trinitarian conception of time that might lead to a new enigma, even a mystery whose understanding must be sought.

We must understand this book as an attempt to bring together distant disciplines by developing a philosophy capable of building bridges between some central notions, particularly that of communication. In this sense, our approach assumes the legacy of the 20th Century systemic currents gathered around the concept of self-organization and whose ambition was to find the common ground that would help harmonize statistical physics with the socio-political spheres, passing by biology. In the end, I hope to have convinced the reader of the preponderance of communications in the genesis of the emerging worlds, from quantum to the cosmos and the logos, without forgetting about consciousness and the emergence of mental processes.

One last precision, though. Scientific philosophy as I perceive it justifies a particular use of bibliographic references that are sometimes distant from more academic works. This essay has been written in a “Bergsonian” spirit, not only guided by a certain vision of nature, but also using some remarkable results of contemporary science, especially those related to the fields of physics and biology. Finally, the transversal intention of the work may give the impression of a dispersion of arguments; however, a careful reading of the text will show that the ideas developed in it are not arbitrary, but follow a consistent conceptual coherence.

Time, emergences and communications is not a concluding book, but an essay that opens new paths and avenues, both in scientific research and in philosophical thought. In a certain way, it is a manner of restarting the construction of the real. This possibility was proposed by Popper in his preface to The Logic of Scientific Discovery, published in German in 1934: “Indeed, it has now become a recurrent question in philosophical circles whether philosophy will ever go far as to pose a genuine problem. Nevertheless, there are still some who do believe that philosophy can pose genuine problems about things, and who therefore still hope to get these problems discussed, and to have done with those depressing monologues which now pass for philosophical discussions. And if by any chance they find themselves unable to accept any of the existing creeds, all they can do is to begin afresh from the beginning” [POP 73].

I hope to have configured three authentic problems, that of quantum matter, then the question of emergences and, finally, the enigma of time which is here conceived as Trinitarian. I propose a new way of understanding things refusing the ontological limits of modern atomism and envisioning information as a basic element of the universe, in that it circulates and is ordered according to different modalities, rules and forms. Then, it is a return to Heraclitus that is put forward, together with the famous formula commented by Hadot about a “nature who loves to veil itself” [HAD 04], except that the aforementioned return is not understood as a regression. Unveiling and veiling correspond to two orders of reality that have been succinctly outlined: emerging phenomena and the submerged structures which are responsible for organization and for emerging forms.

Acknowledgments

I would like to kindly thank Lazaros Mavromatidis for his suggestion to study emergence processes and for having offered me the chance to publish this book. I would also like to thank Anne Pavan for the careful proofreading of the text as well as the corrections suggested. Finally, I wish to thank Julieta Schroeder for her help in the production of this book.