Not to worry it was “Mind” and nervous system was a special case.   Mind means, 
well, whatever it needs to.

From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow
Sent: Friday, April 1, 2022 4:09 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Ordinary logic

Hey, I posted the arxiv papers for the mechanically coupled complex adaptive 
organism a few weeks ago, no nervous system required for a multicellular 
predator to pounce on a patch of algae, nervous systems are entirely optional.

-- rec --

On Fri, Apr 1, 2022 at 5:11 PM Steve Smith 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:


this discussion lead my free-associative, somewhat atrophied brain (or is it 
mind?) back to this paper:
Digital Information Mechanics, Edward Fredkin 1981
http://52.7.130.124/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/PhysicistModelofComputation.pdf
which I was surprised to find online (I think I have looked before).  I have a 
(very yellowed) paper copy of this in a dusty box at the bottom of a dusty 
stack of boxes somewhere.  I am about to re-read it (online) but felt I would 
just tangent wildly (as I am wont to do) if I did so before sending it to the 
group for your own thoughts.

Fredkin himself handed me the paper copy when I met him at the Cellular 
Automata conference at LANL in 1983.  I was incredibly green at the time and 
quite eager in many dimensions, but this particular workshop/conference really 
blew me away in it's combination of abstractions and concrete examples.   From 
Wolfram's 4 categories of CA to meeting Conway, to seeing Crutchfield's 
video-feedback-as-CA, to having Feynman hisself introduce the Toffoli Gate and 
Drexler's work that became "Engines of Creation" in the context of reeling out 
his circa 1957 "Plenty of Room at the Bottom" talk.  If I remember right, 
Margolis and/or Tofolli had a Toffoli-gate based CA hardware device at the 
conference that they couldn't quite keep running.  Also, Gosper's memoised 
implementation of GoL added a whole other set of entropic implications with 
allusions to digital physics implied.

I don't fully subscribe to the variations on Fredkin's "Digital 
Physics/Philosophy" or Wheeler's "It from Bit" and as hard as I try I can't 
penetrate far enough into Wolfram's variations to do more than wish I could and 
wonder if there is meaning (relevance?) in there?



 Frank -

Formal logic is not a god but exists independently of nervous systems.

A -> B   <->   -B -> -A
But is it *relevant* to anything independent of (central?) nervous systems?

I know this isn't precisely what you meant, but I would suggest that formal 
logic and gods have more in common than not, being both artifacts *of* special 
kinds of symbols and transformation systems for them.  I don't know that 
molluscs (even cephalapods) have formal logics nor gods (though they may well 
be capable of some kind of arcane modeling and prediction that is in some sense 
equally powerful/useful/interesting).

- Steve

PS.  I liked EricCs reformulation of the scenario, it fit well how *I* parsed 
and sorted things out.

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