Howard, Gary F.,
Howard, I don't see why a rock's hitting the ground on a lifeless planet
shouldn't be taken as occasioning a measurement. That's the sense that I
got for example from Gell-Mann's _The Quark and the Jaguar_. I can see
how people can disagree about which interactions constitute
measurements, but the key thing that seems to distinguish the biological
situation is not a measurement per se but a kind of evaluation or
appraisal or act of classification, reflecting the living thing's
interests as a member of a species or lineage, and those interests have
to do with reproduction of fertile offspring. To keep in the spirit of
applying philosophical semiotic to biosemiotics (at least through
analogy), let me add that reproduction (as opposed to mere repetition)
of observations has been called the 'sanity check' in science, and
biological self-replication could be called a health check, or fitness
check, except that capacity to reproduce fertile offspring is not just a
check but is of the essence of biological fitness (likewise
reproduciblity of results, at least in principle, is of the essence of
scientific fitness). Within the organism, there must be the
replicability, reproducibility, of information that you discuss.
If there is something like evaluation or appraisal in nonliving things,
things that lack vital interests that the appraisals would reflect, then
such appraisals would seem of a rather lower grade than in living
things, - I guess something to do with the common end of entropy
increase in an isolated system as a whole, or the conservation of
certain quantities when physics symmetries hold. (Things get murky to me
here.)
I'd agree that living things' capacities for measuring, sensing,
detecting, are evolved to lend themselves to evaluational semiosis; they
have a 'bias' or selectiveness for sensing the things that evolutionary
quasi-experience has shown to matter, to be worth the attention of the
evaluative faculties.
I think that a focus on the measurement's function for species- or
lineage-purposeful appraisal would keep one from having to take sides in
physical theory on whether measurements require living brains, living
systems, or simply bodies. To me that seems an advantage, but you may
see advantages that my lack of background keeps me from seeing in a
particular physical definition of measurement in those respects.
Best, Ben
On 5/1/2015 7:50 AM, Howard Pattee wrote:
At 10:06 AM 4/30/2015, Gary Fuhrman wrote:
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
<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/>]. 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
<http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/johnarchib201713.html>]. 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.
*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.
*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:/* 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
cellthe 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
<http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/bell/Against_Measurement.pdf>)
A partial answer to your question is that (1) the result of a
measurementis 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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