John, Stan, Loet, Krassimir, List: This message responses to posts of both Stan and John, which are, strangely enough, philosophically, intimately related.
First, Thank You, Stan, for your illuminating post which clarifies your personal philosophy. (The paper you comment on can be found online under the same title.) > Note that the levels are found to be orders of magnitude different in size. > No change in any single unit at any level can have an effect at the next > upper level With all due respect to you and to Terrence Sejnowski, the overwhelming weight of evidence from molecular genetics and human genetics denies your conclusion. The evidence denying your conclusion is very simple. Since the 1960s, molecular biology has been based on a quantitative premise that a single base change in a DNA molecule may cause a change in the inheritance of the organism and a change in the health state of the organism. This is the background premise supporting the sequencing of the human genome and the gradual switch to "personalized medicine." We all human beings by virtual of our common inheritance, our diversity emerges from the individual sequences we inherit from our parents. Our DNA is one source of our individual reflexivity. A single base change is certainly a "single unit". Stan, you conclusion that " No change in any single unit at any level can have an effect at the next upper level" is simply factually false since the overwhelming body of DNA sequence data supports the opposite conclusion. After nearly two decades of attempting to understand your self-constructed narratives, I think I understand the philosophical reasons why you are engaged in this line of discourse but I will leave that for you to clarify however you wish. John, your response to the semiotic issues rather surprised me as you are regular contributor to the Peirce list serve. The symbol systems used by physics to communicate are derived from mathematics. Physics lacks a symbol system of its own making. As such, the concept of reflexivity, X = X, is one of the triad of terms used to create the notion of an equivalence relation. Now, Shannon information depends on this concept of reflexivity to provide the exact mechanisms of encoding and decoding codes by the sender and receiver. These must be 'platonic' mathematical relations without any physical meaning or content. Otherwise, Shannon information would not a faithful method of communication between different systems. The notion of probability enters into Shannon information not in the message itself, but rather in the capacity to detect errors in the transmission. Strangely, it appears that Stan and John have stumbled on the same philosophical concept of reflexivity, a concept which lies at the heart of human individuality and human communication. The scientific facts support the conclusion that the reflexivity of a human being is an emergent property of life, not mathe-magic or philo-magic. Cheers Jerry, forever the realist. On Nov 20, 2010, at 12:00 PM, fis-requ...@listas.unizar.es wrote: > Send fis mailing list submissions to > fis@listas.unizar.es > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > fis-requ...@listas.unizar.es > > You can reach the person managing the list at > fis-ow...@listas.unizar.es > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of fis digest..." > Today's Topics: > > 1. footnote to fluctuon discussion (Stanley N Salthe) > > From: Stanley N Salthe <ssal...@binghamton.edu> > Date: November 20, 2010 9:18:18 AM EST > To: fis@listas.unizar.es > Subject: [Fis] footnote to fluctuon discussion > > > Folks -- This cut is Figure 1 from > > Sejnowsky, T., 2006. The computational self. Annals of the New York Academy > of Sciences 1001: 262-271. > > > > > Note that the levels are found to be orders of magnitude different in size. > No change in any single unit at any level can have an effect at the next > upper level > > > STAN > > > _______________________________________________ > fis mailing list > fis@listas.unizar.es > https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
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