As my first posting of the week,
Jerry -- Your questions are good in allowing me to further sharpen what I
meant (all too briefly) to say. Then ...
On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 8:33 PM, Jerry LR Chandler <jerry_lr_chand...@me.com
> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
I'm surprise that you would suppose that a biologist would be
unprepared to confront this question! The compositional hierarchy -- the
one under consideration here -- is a model of ongoing dynamical activities
(separated by rates of order of magnitude difference into different levels)
within a complex system. It's a 'mass action' kind of model. In such a
model, a fluctuation at a lower level (the burden of Conrad's "fluctuons')
is simply swamped out by the average reading of that level's activities at
the next higher level. Your point about genetic differences has no
relevance here, since these genetic differences don't function as
fluctuations (even if they originate as one). Instead they 're-design' some
of the elements in the lower level activities, which in some cases might
make a difference to the results of the ensemble activities down there,
which would *then* register at the next higher level to be used in its usual
activities.
>
>
> 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.
>
>From Wikipedia: In mathematics <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics>,
a *reflexive relation* is a binary
relation<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_relation> on
a set for which every element is related to itself, i.e., a relation R on S
where xRx holds true for every x in S.
So, every cell in our body has the same information, some of which might
have descended from a fluctuation during DNA copying. But that error did
not function* **as a fluctuation* at higher levels, either in the organism
or propagule in which it occurred, or in the organism(s) which inherited it.
Human individuality is a gradually accumulating effect of historically
acquired (experienced) information as registered in the body (e.g., wounds),
including the brain (alterations of expectations as imprinted upon
continually cycling neuron 'circuits'). Here too, there is no question of
any fluctuations arising at low compositional levels being involved. If
such would occur during neuron cycling in one cell, it would again be
swamped out at the levels of networks, or maps or higher systems. If one got
promoted to the level of consciousness, it might be experienced fleetingly
for the moment, then forgotten.
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.
"Reflexivity of a human being" seems like something more than the above
definition. Experience may have a cumulative effect, of course, especially
if repeated, but none of it would, I think, be acquired by fluctuation in a
neuron (which would be non-repeatable).
STAN
Cheers
>
> Jerry, forever the realist.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Nov 20, 2010, at 12:00 PM, fis-requ...@listas.unizar.es wrote:
>
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> Today's Topics:
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> 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: *...@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
>
>
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