Re: models - branch fromf GM discussion

[Dan Fiscus <***>]

John Kineman wrote:
snip
> On your second point, I agree there must be some energy cost. Many of
> our evolved models are mechanistic, of course, as can be seen in sensory
> perception and by how hard it is to get over the habit, so there must be
> a cost advantage to many mechanistic models.

snip

John,

I know many people talk about biological models or examples of
systems or organs or etc. that are mechanistic, but I am still not
clear on this, not sure I agree that it's really true. Maybe just good
old semantics, language problems, but how is a sensory perception
model mechanistic? It would seem to me that these examples and
maybe most others would not really be mechanistic in that I can't
imagine removing any of them from their context or transferring
them into new contexts without loss of function. And I don't see
them as clearly fractionable into components and often the function
of the model or sense is not easily localizable but is instead spread
over, distributed over, a variety of places in an organism. And I
don't see them as self-sufficient or closed or independent or modular
like I think of mechanisms and mechanistic models. Most of them
seem to me to have or imply causal loops, either at present time or
perhaps at some earlier time like their origin or at times along the
evolutionary way.

For example, an visual perception seems complex in this sense
(example of loops between organism and environment vision
evolved, multiple organs and interactions involved, function not
just in the eye or the brain, function entangled with others from
autonomic nervous system to physiology and muscular system, etc.
etc.) Whereas maybe only something like a lens is mechanistic in
the modular, removable, transferable, fractionable sense.

Do you have other examples or can you say more on how/why you
see sense perception or other evolved life functions/models as
mechanistic?

Dan