The starting point to the biggest refusion of his principle is unorthodox but it does the work: Debates continue that go over the line between life and nonlife.
If we can use an extremely broad, but very useful definition, like that Life is everything that's subject to Darwinian evolution, Smolin proposed that the universe is alive!
Of course, at subsystem level (system=universe) , life and Darwinian evolution is permitted and, for example, Paul Suter points to the issue of existence of non human life in that some creatures existing in very early universe (VEU) conditions would have lived and died in the blink of an eye, their entire history lasting less than a second — being structures that could have stored information. There would have been plenty of energy to go around, and those structures could have self-replicated, enabling Darwinian evolution.
This does not fall under cosmic Darwinian evolution principle, but in subsystem darwinian evolution which is valid.
Darwinian evolution is a series of life and death with a fairly short period, and the evolution of the universe is a long transition from a less stable state to a more stable one. There is still a difference.
The scientific answer to the question
“Are the arguments against Smolin's Darwinian Cosmological principle strong?”
- is simple: the principle is a typical really transcendent/uncertain/irrational, i.e. by no means having any scientific grounds,, mental construction of the author, who has only some transcendent/uncertain/irrational imagination about what the really fundamental phenomena/notions, first of all in this case “Matter”– and so everything in Matter, i.e. “particles”, “fields”, etc., “Consciousness”, “Space”, “Time”, “Energy”, “Information”, are.
As that is really in whole mainstream philosophy and sciences, including physics, though, and so that in the question by no means is something unique – such constructions are numerous, and are well published in mainstream journals, books, etc.
The phenomena/notions above can be, and are, really rigorously scientifically defined only in
the Shevchenko-Tokarevsky’s 2007 “The Information as Absolute” conception, recent version of the basic paper see
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/363645560_The_Information_as_Absolute_-_2022_ed
Including, say, really Matter is some rather simple automaton, which exists and changes/evolves in fundamentally complete rigorous accordance with Matter’s set of basic laws/links/constants,
- what has fundamentally no any relation to Darwinian life evolution theory, which fundamentally is applicable only to fundamentally non-material living beings, and which really is fundamentally incomplete, because of living beings on Earth didn’t/don’t evolve, they develop,
- from simple first bioforms up to homo sapiens sapiens species. More see the paper linked above.
Cheers
In my opinion, the cosmological principles should be purely geometrical by dynamical embedding instead of anthropic ideas. See for instance this model:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6382/aceacc
Robert Monjo,
Have you tried to consider the universe as a hypersphere in 8-dimensional space with a neutral metric that is homeomorphic to the product R^4\times S^3?
Dear Igor,
Thank you for the question. I just considered the "minimum embedding", which is given by an expanding S^3 (that is a four-Hypercone) in a five-dimensional Minkowskian space-time. With this assumption, most of astrophysical observations can be well modelled.
Dear Robert,
Let me note that the Lie algebra of the Killing fields of the 8-dimensional space with a neutral metric is isomorphic to the Dirac matrix algebra, and the hypersphere itself is homeomorphic to R^4xS^3 Details can be found in the third chapter of the book
Research Proposal MATHEMATICAL NOTES ON THE NATURE OF THINGS
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