Symmetry, Symmetry Breaking, and the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Intelligence (Cognition/Mind) from Universal First Principles—Part 1

Abstract The “hard problem” of the origin and nature of intelligence (cognition/“mind”) in the cosmos and its relation to symmetry and symmetry breaking goes back to the pre-Socratic Parmenides who claimed true reality (ontology) was a state of perfect symmetry and the world of change we know an illusion. Parmenides’s problem was that his ideal symmetry was broken ab initio by the cognitive act of him asserting it. This incommensurable separation of the time-asymmetric cognitive part of the world and physics came into modern science with Cartesian dualism and the time-symmetric equations of Newton and then with the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. The aporia is also found in the belief that unifying the forces of nature under a single symmetry would provide a “theory of everything” (TOE). Cosmology shows, however, it is symmetry breaking rather than symmetry that has brought the universe into being. Irreducible to the time-reversal symmetry of classical and quantum mechanics, an expanded thermodynamics, specifically the addition of the fourth law of thermodynamics, provides a universal explanation. Coupled with a first law time-translation symmetry account of information (in the meaningful sense) the origin, nature and evolution of cognition is readily seen as a direct manifestation of universal law rather than somehow sitting impossibly outside it.