Re: Correct URL

[John Kineman <***>]

Howard,

This is a really great paper. Thanks, I will cite it in my work. There
is so much history one could review in making these points, but you
cover what is necessary and sufficient. I agree with all of it (pending
a more detailed read sometime), most of which I also think it is very
much Rosen - philosophically I mean, not that you lifted it. It is only
in the conclusion where I draw a boldly different one, as you know. My
earlier comments probably triggered enough of this already, but perhaps
some direct reference to the paper will help clarify:

On the Von Neumann issues, I suppose I have to read more VN to be sure,
but it seems he is saying something very similar, and yet, as you also
defer to to some degree, there is this question of how hardcoded is the
memory (or function). You use the word "quiescent" to describe the
functional memory component; however in a Rosen modeling relation both
sides - the realization and the representation -- are equally effective.

So, quibbling on this philosophical issue; If I may insert my points in
reference to some exceprts from the paper:

>Imagining such a subject-object distinction before life existed would
be entirely gratuitous,

OK, certainly it would be a leap of faith (i.e., assumption) and
gratuity to a certain point of view; but it is not at all different from
the opposite leap of faith that we have all made, that material reality
existed before matter. That particular gratuity to a particular way of
looking at the world has run into problems now that we have investigated
it very thoroughly; so it makes sense now to try the other one and
investigate it. This sort of dismissal is the most frustrating thing to
combat, because it presumes to need no justification other than habit
and group consensus, which the paper does a great job of transcending
otherwise. Why close this door? It is logically no more or less
gratuitous than its failed opposite. One could say that vitalism failed
before mechanism did, but I don't see this as the same vitalism that
failed before. What was Shirlock Holms' advice on solving a mystery -
when you've eliminated the probable what remains, no matter how
improbable, must be the truth, or something like that?

>What is the simplest epistemic event? One necessary condition is that
a distinction is made by a subject that is not a distinction derivable
from the object. In physical language this means a subject must create
some form of distinction or classification between physical states that
is not made by the laws themselves (i.e., measuring a particular initial
condition, removing a degeneracy or breaking a symmetry).

Yes - form-function complementarity does that, but does it go too far???
I first thought it must be too radical, but have since found the
necessity. If I changed no other words in your paper, this could be an
alternative conclusion. Being the big taboo, have you given it serious
thought?

>Where does a new distinction first occur?

I would say the first distinction occurs in the most primitive physical
interaction, as we can observe at the quantum level or in conscious
decision making. Here's my fuzzy description of it - please pardon the
imprecise language: Such events do not occur in space-time but generate
space and time coordinates as a result of their interaction. Why the
event takes place at all, I cannot say - that's the remaining epistemic
cut in this view. Nevertheless, an interaction is what defines a "state"
and its surrounding context in which it is defined. I have shown
mathematically that many such interactions would share the same
space-time reality, with relativistic laws relating its distant parts.
This turned out to be very similar to Milne's "Kinematic Relativity."
Such a view is fully compatible with the idea of space-time as a
simplification of functional complexity (which I/Milne modeled as a
relationship between real and imaginary planes), providing a measurement
space in which we can thereafter have local causality and
predictability, as long as we are interacting with the states already
defined in that space. That primitive event, which occurs all the time,
I would think of as perception - the most fundamental percept imaginable
(i.e., not "quantum isolated," I suppose might be the term). This
provides at a most fundamental level, a relationship between syntax and
semantics, form and function, thus eliminating the necessity for
emergence of this source of complexity in evolved life forms. One then
has less to explain about that emergennce, and particularly a piece of
the explanation that simply can't be derived from the other view without
tortuous machinations; e.g.,  "emergence" of an actual principle (or,
same thing, behavior "...unlike the behavior of any other known forms of
matter in the universe"). All that needs to emerge are variations on a
theme and, as a result of adaptive fitness, a gradual magnification of
the form-function relation.

I know you've heard this from me before, so I apologise for repeating
it, but its precisely because the majority of scientists see oppositely
than I do (and I believe Rosen did) that I am constantly testing this to
see if I am really crazy or just have a preference for insanity. So, to
counterpoint the paper on this question, it is only the conclusion I
would challenge, all else seeming quite supportive of the alternative
conclusion, to wit:

>Is it not plausible that life was first distinguished from non-living
matter,

Why should we assume that matter was first, when even physics has shown
that it cannot be, that matter as such is not ontological as it was
originally thought to be?  Turn it around and that problem is
eliminated. Finding the threshold between living (form) and non-living
(form) becomes a matter of distinguishing between systems that
degenerated into a simple local entanglement, and those that somehow
embodied a dualistic relationship. We would look how a system could
preserve and embody a separate space-time domain that remains related to
system behavior (we know of relativistic relations at least, and hence
the concept of information and uncertainty) and then how it can become
reproductive and thus the self-defining units we observe (no small task,
I admit, but not as bad as having to figure out how functions emerge
from machines).

> 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?

If there are  irreducible new behaviors, we then need new laws. But in
the traditional view of science all laws were pre-ordained, so new ones
are taboo. I believe this came from the Greco-Christian legacy of a
Platonic realm that fit neatly into the doctrin of a temporal,
inexplicable, external origin --  a gratuitous marriage if there ever
was one! But if that's the game we're playing, a universal law of
complexity should not be a problem simply because it took biology to
confirm it. If we relax that game, it is clear that biology invents new
laws. For example, predator-prey relationships are new behaviors that
are not reducible to prior laws. Somehow those from a physical
orientation (myself formerly included) think of such laws as somehow
less "real" than physical ones - sort of epi-laws. But since complex
systems are demonstrably the only ones that can generate new irreducible
laws, why not explore the possibility that the physical ones were also
produced from complexity, and thus apply to their own simplifications (a
point I believe you made in your paper)? Also, is it not more
parsimonious to consider the kind of system that is capable of
generating laws as the more original, rather than the one that is not?
Occam should be proud of this, as it attempts to explain more with less.

J Kineman

Howard Pattee wrote:

> The URL in my last post has an extra parenthesis at the end that
> invalidates it.
> Use http://wwwc3.lanl.gov/~rocha/pattee/pattee.html
> Howard

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© 2004 John J. Kineman
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