Howard, Kalevi, Edwina, Tori, Jeff D., lists,
Thanks for your post below, Howard, it clarifies things. You wrote,
The only "self" in "self-replication" that evolves is the heritable
symbolic information.
[End quote]
It sounds like the 'self' that gets replicated is a species-self or
lineage-bearing self, a kind-self, as embodied, moreover, in an
individual. So it seems we've been taking the phrase 'individual self'
in the cross lights of different senses. Anyway I don't think we
disagree much about it.
It also reminds me of the classical argument about what is _/primary
substance/_, is it the concrete individual or is it the species. I
remember Aristotle in "The Categories" giving _/this man, this horse/_
as examples of 'primary substance'. That's not the same thing as giving
Socrates and Bucephalus, or, more austerely expressed, _/this/_ and
_/that/_, so-called 'bare particulars', as examples, nor the same thing
as giving Human and Horse, kinds seen abstractly, as examples. (For my
part I go with very 'thick' particulars - thick not only with
historical-geographical connections and with qualities but also with
alternatives, potentialities, probabilities, mathematical relations, and
so on - and see abstractions such as bare particulars and species as
'secondary' or at any rate non-'primary' substance.)
On the subject of symbols and icons, another distinction that seems
simple enough in some contexts yet confusing in others is that between
repetition and replication/reproduction. Repeated observation, by the
same inquirer with the same setup, helps uncover or corroborate an
average, a frequency, a ratio; reproduced observation, by another
inquirer (or even the same inquirer) with a reproduced setup, typically
aims to check a seemingly significant observation (the 'sanity check').
Emulation is the replication in oneself of goal-oriented characteristics
or behavior found in another. The idea of emulation or replication of
characters involves valuation and selectiveness; art as imitation of the
processes of the real is "selection, or selective composition" as
Wordsworth I think put it. The idea of practice involves that of
repetition, the rhythms of work, and so on; the idea of generally
valuing an end or valuing for an end, involves that of replication or
emulation. Simplistically put, material processes involve repetition;
organismic processes, replication. So, if symbols involve dispositions,
habits, repetition, growth, etc., as icons involve 'reproduction' of
characters, this puts your question of matter (or material process)
versus symbols in an ironic light - that of two very different kinds of
repeatability - I don't mean in a bad way, it's just striking, that's
all. I'm not sure quite what to make of it.
In common English, a _/replica/_ is a kind of semblance, likeness, copy,
icon, of something. Peirce calls a symbol-instance a 'replica' of a
symbol. Now, one certainly can and needs to copy and replicate symbols.
Still, symbols are not basically replications or reproductions of their
objects, they're not icons produced from their objects. At any rate, are
instances or Peircean 'replicas' per se of a symbol really icons of a
symbol? I'm inclined to see them as repetitions of the symbol and, more
generally, the symbol - which represents its object by a disposition or
habit of representation apart from resemblance or connection to the
object - as a repeatability or repetition of its object. That sounds
pretty incredible at first. Yet the symbol's basic object is a kind of
thought, it can symbolize other things insofar as they can be regarded
as embodying thoughts or ideas that one may have of them; and in a way a
symbol _/is/_ a thought, often clothed in language ('dog' and _/perro/_
are pretty much the same thought in two languages, thus two special
symbols instancing the same more-general symbol in Peirce's
perspective), so the symbol can be said to repeat its thought-object
rather than merely resemble or emulate it. When a symbol behaves in
logic and language as the thought of its object would behave, appear as
frequently, and so on, then it is suited to represent that object with
the aid of icons and indices that helped guide its behavior in the first
place. But sometimes we're dealing with a symbol of a thought of a
thought and such icons and indices are not so readily available; like
you point out, sometimes symbols represent invisibles, intangibles, etc.
Now, you said that spatial and temporal displacement and prepositions
have no natural icons. I partly disagree and partly agree, if I take
'natural' in what seems your sense. I'd say that displacement has
natural icons - two objects as far from each other as two other objects
are from each other can be used in order to iconically portray the
displacement between the two other objects. Stories can represent time
by mirroring a chronological order and pacing of events by the
chronological order and pacing of their telling. However, time as
considered modally, expressed with 'did', 'does', 'will', etc., does
lack natural icons as far as I can tell; it's hard to think of an index
or an icon of futurity as such; one can point westward but how does one
point futureward? If one points westward in order to indicate the
direction itself rather than some object in that direction, isn't the
act more diagrammatic than indexical? Well, I'm unsure of that. Still,
if one uses a pregnant animal as a sign of futurity, isn't the act more
symbolic than iconic? Likewise it's hard to think of a natural icon for
probabilities, 'if-then', and so on, alternatives among cases or worlds.
Instead we apply diagrams whose transformabilities mirror those of logic
etc. Mathematical diagrams seem to represent relations or prepositions
so directly that they are their own 'generic' objects, anyway
observations of their individual instances in experimental
transformations count (with some due mathematician-fallibilism) as
observations of their objects insofar as their objects are universal
hypothetical possibilities, while application to concrete cases leads
one formally into non-deductive inferences and increased fallibility.
I'd better trail off here. I'd have returned to the thread sooner but I
was immersed for the past four weeks in a plumbing project at the co-op
building where I live, and maybe that's why this post seems to have an
aspect of complex pipes.
Best, Ben
On 5/20/2015 7:16 PM, Howard Pattee wrote:
At 02:07 AM 5/20/2015, Kalevi Kull wrote:
let us try whether we can find more agreement here.
HP: I think the apparent disagreements are mostly misunderstandings
about different problems. Everyone needs to defines his/her own
problem. So I will try to be clearer about my problem. My problem is
the origin of life. This is a long way (by 4 billion years) from human
language and human "selves" that I think is on Ben's, Kalevi's,
Tori's, and others' minds. Like all scientific origin theorists, I can
begin only with /physical laws/ and /initial conditions/, like a
plausible sterile earth chemistry. Originally I performed and followed
many abiogenic synthesis experiments and concluded (mainly because of
their proliferation) that the basic chemistry necessary for life was
not the hard problem. The matter is there. My problem is how matter
became symbolic.
There are two other hard origin problems. First, even assuming all the
chemistry and conditions are ideal, /how did they first assemble
themselves into a live cell?/ (We can probably never know the
details.) Second, /how would you detect such a cell and ascertain it
was alive? /This second problem was under very active discussion
(/ca./ 1960-1970) because of NASA's plan for a Mars lander to try to
detect life. This began NASA support of Origin of Life research and
conferences, which is where I learned fundamental biology from experts.
The most fundamental and universal fact of life is that it always
begins with a single cell. Humans are no exception. Of course, Ben is
correct that humans will say that "individual self is founded at a
'higher' level," that is, in the individual's experienced brain. But
from the "origin of life" and evolutionary point of view, the brain
level is another aspect of the problem. But the /symbol-matter
problem/ is the same. It is /not the matter/ of the brain that we call
the self, but the /symbolic information/ that we recognize as the self.
The detection of a single living cell runs into the same problem of
defining /the self /in the following way. Suppose you detect an
individual "cell-like" object on Mars. (Of course, you can detect an
individual object by its bounded shape. In my lab I have created
thousands of individual proteinoid microspheres that look like
bacteria. If you shake them they may divide, like droplets divide in a
colloidal solution.) We don't call this self-replication because
"self" is redundant or meaningless.
For this reason, von Neumann (and biologists) do not want to call the
division of an individual /material/ object into two objects of the
same**/matter/ a 'self-replication" because /as matter/ it only
follows laws and has no evolutionary potential. The only "self" in
"self-replication" that evolves is the heritable symbolic information.
By the way, von Neumann discussed the possibility of replication
without symbolic description. He considered what Peirce might call
"iconic replication" where the material structure of each part is
copied and then assembled. This has been proposed as a precursor to
symbolic description. Why would this be inadequate for evolution?
The same proposal and the same question arises with human language
where the answer is clearer. Human language probably began with iconic
and mimetic signs. Written language certainly began with natural icons
and hieroglyphs. This presents the well-known linguistics limitation
that there are no natural icons for relations (e.g, prepositions) and
/displacement/ in space and time (e.g., tenses). For full expressive
power genetic language, like human language, also requires symbols.
Howard
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