I just meant that an analysis of a cube doesn't imply anything about how the universe works. — frank
If the angles of triangles didn’t add up to 180 degrees, we would know the universe wasn’t flat. — apokrisis
Yea, it just doesn't tell you the mechanics of an event involving cubes. Block universe, holographic universe, many worlds, etc. — frank
In my personal philosophical worldview, Enformationism, Logical Necessity is Causation. But that meta-physical notion does not compute for physicalists. They think that all causes are physical, in the sense of billiard balls smacking into each other, and imparting momentum. So, I think it's the reductive physicalists who are confused. But, Information science, has concluded that energy, force, momentum are ultimately various forms of generic Enformation (the power to cause changes in form).So, I have a deep confusion about why philosophy sees this disconnection between logical necessity and physical causation. — Wayfarer
The number of degrees in a circle is arbitrary. It could have been a hundred, four hundred, a thousand, or any number. 360 was a convenient number because it's pretty close to the number of days in a year, and the astrological calendar used a circle, so a day was a degree. — Metaphysician Undercover
are you familiar with Jesper Hoffmeyer's book Signs of Meaning in the Universe? Would you consider it a suitable primer for biosemiosis? — Wayfarer
You will probably like it because it indeed wants to regain a numinous notion of meaning, when Pattee has already rigorously done away with precisely that. — apokrisis
Pattee is correct. The sign is really a switch. It has its feet straddling the two sides of the divide. — apokrisis
I have made the case over many years (e.g., Pattee, 1969,1982, 2001, 2015) that self-replication provides the threshold level of complication where the clear existence of a self or a subject gives functional concepts such as symbol, interpreter, autonomous agent, memory, control, teleology, and intentionality empirically decidable meanings. The conceptual problem for physics is that none of these concepts enter into physical theories of inanimate nature
Self-replication requires an epistemic cut between self and non-self, and between subject and object.
Self-replication requires a distinction between the self that is replicated and the non-self that is not replicated. The self is an individual subject that lives in an environment that is often called objective, but which is more accurately viewed biosemiotically as the subject’s Umwelt or world image. This epistemic cut is also required by the semiotic distinction between the interpreter and what is interpreted, like a sign or a symbol. In physics this is the distinction between the result of a measurement – a symbol – and what is being measured – a material object.
I call this the symbol-matter problem, but this is just a narrower case of the classic 2500-year-old epistemic problem of what our world image actually tells us about what we call thereal world.
I can't see that in what I've been reading of him. — Wayfarer
Pattee, H.H.. [2001]. "The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut". Biosystems. Vol. 60
In more common terminology, this type of constraint is a structure that we say controls a dynamics. To control a dynamical systems implies that there are control variables that are separate from the dynamical system variables, yet they must be described in conjunction with the dynamical variables. These control variables must provide additional degrees of freedom or flexibility for the system dynamics. At the same time, typical control systems do not remove degrees of freedom from the dynamical system, although they alter the rates or ranges of system variables. Many artificial machines depend on such control constraints in the form of linkages, escapements, switches and governors. In living systems the enzymes and other allosteric macromolecules perform such control functions. The characteristic property of all these non-holonomic structures is that they cannot be usefully separated from the dynamical system they control. They are essentially nonlinear in the sense that neither the dynamics nor the control constraints can be treated separately.
This type of constraint, that I prefer to call non-integrable, solves two problems. First, it answers Lucretius' question. These flexible constraints literally cause "atoms to swerve and originate new movement" within the descriptive framework of an otherwise deterministic dynamics (this is still a long way from free will). They also account for the reading of a quiescent, rate-independent memory so as to control a rate-dependent dynamics, thereby bridging the epistemic cut between the controller and the controlled. Since law-based dynamics are based on energy, in addition to non-integrable memory reading, memory storage requires alternative states of the same energy (energy degeneracy). These flexible, allosteric, or configuration-changing structures are not integrable because their motions are not fully determined until they couple an explicit memory structure with rate-dependent laws (removal of degeneracy).
The crucial condition here is that the constraint acts on the dynamic trajectories without removing alternative configurations. Thus, the number of coordinates necessary to specify the configuration of the constrained system is always greater than the number of dynamic degrees of freedom, leaving some configurational alternatives available to "read" memory structures. This in turn requires that the forces of constraint are not all rigid, i.e., there must be some degeneracy to allow flexibility. Thus, the internal forces and shapes of non-integrable structures must change in time partly because of the memory structures and partly as a result of the dynamics they control. In other words, the equations of the constraint cannot be solved separately because they are on the same formal footing as the laws themselves, and the orbits of the system depend irreducibly on both (Whittaker, 1944; Sommerfeld, 1956; Goldstein, 1953; Neimark and Fufaev, 1972).
What is historically amazing is that this common type of constraint was not formally recognized by physicists until the end of the last century (Hertz, 1894). Such structures occur at many levels. They bridge all epistemic cuts between the controller and the controlled, the classifier and the classified, the observer and the observed. There are innumerable types of non-integrable constraints found in all mechanical devices in the forms of latches, and escapements, in electrical devices in the form of gates and switches, and in many biological allosteric macromolecules like enzymes, membrane channel proteins, and ciliary and muscle proteins. They function as the coding and decoding structures in all symbol manipulating systems.
https://homes.luddy.indiana.edu/rocha/publications/pattee/pattee.html
:chin: — Wayfarer
There is a real conceptual roadblock here. In our normal everyday use of languages the very concept of a "physics of symbols" is completely foreign. We have come to think of symbol systems as having no relation to physical laws. This apparent independence of symbols and physical laws is a characteristic of all highly evolved languages, whether natural or formal. They have evolved so far from the origin of life and the genetic symbol systems that the practice and study of semiotics does not appear to have any necessary relation whatsoever to physical laws.
As Hoffmeyer and Emmeche (1991) emphasize, it is generally accepted that, "No natural law restricts the possibility-space of a written (or spoken) text.," or in Kull's (1998) words: "Semiotic interactions do not take place of physical necessity." Adding to this illusion of strict autonomy of symbolic expression is the modern acceptance of abstract symbols in science as the "hard core of objectivity" mentioned by Weyl. This isolation of symbols is what Rosen (1987) has called a "syntacticalization" of our models of the world, and also an example of what Emmeche (1994) has described as a cultural trend of "postmodern science" in which material forms have undergone a "derealization".
Another excellent example is our most popular artificial assembly of non-integrable constraints, the programmable computer. A memory-stored programmable computer is an extreme case of total symbolic control by explicit non-integrable hardware (reading, writing, and switching constraints) such that its computational trajectory determined by the program is unambiguous, and at the same time independent of physical laws (except laws maintaining the forces of normal structural constraints that do not enter the dynamics, a non-specific energy potential to drive the computer from one constrained state to another, and a thermal sink).
For the user, the computer function can be operationally described as a physics-free machine, or alternatively as a symbolically controlled, rule-based (syntactic) machine. Its behavior is usually interpreted as manipulating meaningful symbols, but that is another issue. The computer is a prime example of how the apparently physics-free function or manipulation of memory-based discrete symbol systems can easily give the illusion of strict isolation from physical dynamics.
This illusion of isolation of symbols from matter can also arise from the apparent arbitrariness of the epistemic cut. It is the essential function of a symbol to "stand for" something - its referent - that is, by definition, on the other side of the cut. This necessary distinction that appears to isolate symbol systems from the physical laws governing matter and energy allows us to imagine geometric and mathematical structures, as well as physical structures and even life itself, as abstract relations and Platonic forms. I believe, this is the conceptual basis of Cartesian mind-matter dualism.
This apparent isolation of symbolic expression from physics is born of an epistemic necessity, but ontologically it is still an illusion. In other words, making a clear distinction is not the same as isolation from all relations. We clearly separate the genotype from the phenotype, but we certainly do not think of them as isolated or independent of each other. These necessary non-integrable equations of constraint that bridge the epistemic cut and thereby allow for memory, measurement, and control are on the same formal footing as the physical equations of motion. They are called non-integrable precisely because they cannot be solved or integrated independently of the law-based dynamics.
Consequently, the idea that we could usefully study life without regard to the natural physical requirements that allow effective symbolic control is to miss the essential problem of life: how symbolic structures control dynamics.
Is it not plausible that life was first distinguished from non-living matter, not by some modification of physics, some intricate nonlinear dynamics, or some universal laws of complexity, but by local and unique heteropolymer constraints that exhibit detailed behavior unlike the behavior of any other known forms of matter in the universe?
What is historically amazing is that this common type of constraint was not formally recognized by physicists until the end of the last century (Hertz, 1894).
Pattee's clarity on these gritty matters always makes my soul sing. — apokrisis
biology invented the molecular switch — apokrisis
Not sure I understand. Why shouldn't determinism be meaningless in such a universe? I understand that from the outside of such a universe all the events in that universe can be known. If you are part of it, your being in it prohibits knowing all happenings, that's clear. But while in it you can still say there is determinism. Without actually knowing what's determined. — Haglund
for at any time t, the sequence of lights generated so far is always describable by some computable function, — sime
I'm not sure what you are looking for. The nature of cause and effect? The physical meaning? The logic we use to determine cause and effect? — Haglund
You complaining that I gave you the tl;dr? — apokrisis
Determinism and non-determinism are descriptive of theories and beliefs concerning the consequences of hypothetical actions, but these concepts are not descriptive of phenomena. — sime
Where all of this started, for me, was with the conviction that ideas (not information) are real in their own right, and not because they're derived from or supersede on (neuro)physical matter. — Wayfarer
The OP lays it out pretty clearly. Hume's analysis of causation and Kant's answer to Hume would comprise the basis for a semester. I did do the Hume semester as an undergraduate, but only ever discovered Kant years later. It’s a gap in my education. — Wayfarer
Where all of this started, for me, was with the conviction that ideas (not information) are real in their own right, and not because they're derived from or supersede on (neuro)physical matter.
— Wayfarer
Can you expand this a bit? ‘Ideas’ ? — I like sushi
Kant didn't know relativity yet. ...He spoke of relative and movable space which exist relative to, say, a room. — Haglund
The flatness of space is defined by the constancy of the ratio between a radius and a circumference. Only in flat space is this ratio a constant - pi. In curved space, it ranges from the 2pi of the sphere to the infinite pi of a hyperbolic geometry.
So only in flat space does some particular angle retain that value over all its scales of extension. And should you choose, instead of degrees, you can talk about angles using a more fundamental pi-based unit like radians. — apokrisis
But Pattee's biosemiotics stresses that a sign does the work. It actually switches the state of some material process. The meaning of a sign lies in the physical way it stops the world doing this, and thus counterfactually directs it towards doing that.
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Pattee is correct. The sign is really a switch. It has its feet straddling the two sides of the divide. It is both informational and physical. It connects the logical necessity to the physical causation in a way that is autopoietic or cybernetic - a working feedback loop.
Biosemiotics-lite just wants to treat the sign as a passive mark - something that is physical in being a mark, but then not physical because it doesn't change the world on which it is written in some directly meaningful way.
But a switch is a logical device that both represents the world - some enzymatic process is either on or off - and regulates that world. Flip the switch and you turn that process back on or off. — apokrisis
In other words, biology invented the molecular switch. Suddenly physics could be turned on and off "at will". Nothing like this had ever been seen before in nature. A whole new biosemiotic game had been invented. — apokrisis
The universe could have been different. — frank
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