At 10:59 AM 4/28/2015,Gary F.wrote:
Howard, interesting definition!
[A phenomenon is information resulting from an individual subject's detection of a physical interaction.]
HP: This definition is just an extension of the classic definition to subhuman organisms.
GF: "Classic":? I think "modern" might fit better, given your Kantian usage of the term "subjective" and your vaguely Husserlian take on "phenomenology"
HP: Call it whatever you like. If you will allow me to define my terms, I am starting with this standard definition: "Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view . . ." [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]. Notice, the SEP definition includes experience recalled from the subject's memory. I am then extending this concept of phenomenology below the human conscious level, as a good biosemiotician should, incorporating the physicists' condition that No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon [ J . A. Wheeler]. I define "observed" as sensed, detected, measured, remembered, or any information processed by a subject (agent, self, cell, organism, human, robot, etc.) acquired from an object (anything in the agent's environment including its internal memory).
GF: But even in modern philosophy, I think very few use the term "phenomenon" as referring only to a subject's experience and not to the object experienced (or semiotically, referring to the sign and not its object).
HP: I have no objection to the many other uses enjoyed by philosophers. My definition is one philosophers' definition also used by many physicists who can be realists only so far! Modern physics theories resist realistic interpretation.
I consider a phenomenon as the subjective result of a physical interaction with an individual organism. That is what human senses do. Physically a phenomenon is equivalent to a detection or measurement. What is detected is determined by the organism as a self or subject.
GF: And is [it] not at all determined by the other, the object with which the self is physically interacting? Or by the interaction?
HP: Humans, like all organisms, detect only the information their senses, nervous systems, and brains allow them to detect. Organism detect only a tiny fraction of the innumerable physical interactions -- only enough to survive. Only by instruments are we able to indirectly detect more of the vast amount of information in which we are inexorably immersed.
HP: The cell [is the individual subject or self] that is self-replicated. It must detect the information that defines the self that is self-replicated. Most of this information is in the gene.
- GF: Applying this to your proposition, then, I have to ask: Who or what was the individual subject who detected the first self-replication, so that the information resulting from that detection thus qualifies as the first phenomenon.
GF: This scenario raises more questions than it answers.
HP: You are the one raising more questions. I am not raising the origin question which is still a mystery. I have only stated a fact that in self-replication the information that defines the self must be detected, replicated,and communicated. Biologists call this heritability.
GF: First of all, you have a cell prior to the first-ever replication. Is that original cell not alive?
Next, after the replication, you have two individuals, the original cell and the replica. Which of them is the individual subject of this first-ever subjective experience? Originally you said that information resulted from the detection. Now you say that the information is what is detected. Is this consistent, in your view?
HP: As I said, origins are a mystery. The theory of Darwinian evolution begins with self-replication. I am talking about one individual cell which is a self or a subject. For this individual cell the child copy is an object. A parent subjectively experiences the child as an object. A child subjectively experiences the parent as an object. This process of self-replication is complex, and there are several levels of information detection and interpretation, all described in detail by molecular biologists. I am describing the same process in terms that are consistent with physics, biosemiotics, and an ur-phenomenology (not Goethe's) to avoid the phenomenologist's anthropomorphic consciousness bias. From the evolutionary perspective, human consciousness is highly overrated.
GF: You say the information is in the gene. But the gene is in the cell. So the detection is an event (or more likely a process) internal to the cell 's [?] [It is] not plausible for any cell that gene-reading is its only internal process. Why then is it the only one that has a "subjective" (experiential) aspect or result?
HP: This is the hard question.In physics. this is the "measurement problem." But it isn't a question just for cells. One should ask: Among the myriad physical interactions going on in the universe, why are only some specific interactions called measurements? This is one of the fundamental unresolved issues of physics. One well-known physicist, John Bell, wants to get rid of this subject-object distinction (the epistemic cut) by deriving measurement from laws, but most physicists think this is impossible. (See Against Measurement)
A partial answer to your question is that (1) the result of a measurement is not the event itself, but a record of the event as interpreted by a subject, (2) the record is not described by the lawful dynamics but as a constraint (special boundary condition) on the dynamics, and (3) it is the individual subject or organism that decides what is measured, depending on its genetic or cognitive memory. The most elementary examples are the cell's enzymes (gene products) that detect their substrate, and control (constrain) the chemical dynamics. Note: Physical measurement is irreducibly triadic -- the event itself, the record of the event (usually a symbol), and the agent-subject. (This is not based on Peirce, and I make no claim that it is, or is not, consistent with Peirce. It is implicit in Hertz's epistemology.)
GF: But most physical occurrences internal to my body are not phenomena for me. When I am aware of a physical occurrence, it's mostly my brain that does the interpreting, and the "interpreting" is itself a physical occurrence in my brain -- which occurrence is never a phenomenon for me. It's only a phenomenon for a third-person observer who happens to be measuring my brain activity somehow.
HP: Of course.Your conscious brain, by definition, is the only level you are conscious of. There are many types of phenomena that occur at different levels of organization and function. Your senses, nerves, and brain cells have their own levels of detecting phenomenal (for them) events, which can also be studied as higher level phenomena..
HP: I agree it takes a little imagination to see the correspondence if you believe that only humans experience phenomena.
GF: I doubt that anyone on either of these lists believes that. No, the problem is that you are projecting human subjectivity down to a microscopic scale. This is highly implausible if the neuroscientists such as Damasio are correct that animal experiencing requires a nervous system far more complex than a single cell could ever be.
HP: Apparently, that is your problem. You have still not explained why you think a cell is not a subject. Damasio's conclusion is obvious. There are many levels of experience created over 4 billion years of evolution. Concepts like sensing, detection, and measurement, which are necessary for human experience, are also a primary necessity for life and evolution at all levels beginning with self-replication. For physicists and biologists there is no disagreement here. Why do you disagree, and why do you think Peirce would disagree?
GF: On the other hand, there's no conceptual problem with imagining semiosis at the cellular level. That's why I think Peirce was right to identify semiosis as far more essential to life (and thought) than "subjectivity."
HP: What does subjective mean to you? I define a subject in the common sense as an individual that exhibits agency by detecting, acting or constraining another entity called an object -- as do cells and humans. Choice is a property of subjects. How does semiosis in itself explain any level of the subject-object problem?
Howard
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