There is no relevant information nature cannot access, nature unfolds according to its own sense of relevance, but its sub-processes learn to contextualise. Perhaps it could even be phrased like the origin of sub-process is a context of development. Like the canopy trees never become immune to lava. Causal histories get absorbed into intermediaries until they become relevant again. — fdrake
The relevant thing to look for in here is how expanding the 'state space' (available information which is incorporated to process dynamics) can reduce the dependence on the unobserved past (unavailable information that is implicitly unincorporated). — fdrake
I have a feeling this whole story is a parable or a metaphor, but I can’t see what of. However seems far more germane to a biology forum than a philosophy forum. — Wayfarer
Any relationship to the ‘arche-fossil’? Am I getting warm? — Wayfarer
Here's what I think is at stake here (let me know if it's different): are you trying to account for the autonomy of systems without at the same time trying to entirely disengage that system from it's wider environment? That is, trying to account for a relative autonomy of systems within (variable) threshold values that when crossed (under equally variable conditions), make it so that the environment now bears upon the system in question? — StreetlightX
Though they may have functional sortals embedded in their germination patterns; temperature ranges which are amenable to growth, light levels amenable to growth, moisture levels amenable to growth; switches that say germinate or do not germinate, with fuzzy boundaries depending on the seed and the plant and all sorts of other things. The variation on the individual level manifests in a distribution of germination times on the originator plant level; of probabilities of germinating given (environmental condition) and on the plant community level. — fdrake
We project the idea on events. Didn't Rovelli say something along the same lines? — frank
A different question: what's the enemy here? Are they accounts which can't provide such an account? And what do they look like? Trying to triangulate the motives here. — StreetlightX
Relevance and irrelevance to reproductive success induces a sortal on the environment; a partition of its behaviour into that which counts-as relevant for the seed's reproductive success and that which does not. We can imagine an environment as a series of cycles; seasons, diurnal patterns of animals, weather in those seasons, rain crystallising in spider webs; some are sensitive to others, some are not. — fdrake
When one follows a cladistic tree back in time, one sees not what is unchanging and essential, but what perturbations become reproduced; what contingencies are embedded in a flow of biomass reproduction that can become its moving (really becoming) parts. Essence is stability reified as given in a being; essence as a property forgets the becoming of its subtended sortal; it unasks the questions of what and how flows become partitioned into relevance and irrelevance for that being.
If we consider amylase itself as a self maintaining process; of folded proteins with their movements constrained to a geometry induced by their intermolecular forces; the amylase part of the amylase-starch system, going down from the amylase starch interaction catalysis renders the amylase just a bearer of an active site. The proximity of amylase and starch is what initiates their interaction, but they both are sensitive to the presence of the other. — fdrake
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