Abstract
The necessary but not sufficient conditions for biological informational concepts like signs, symbols, memories, instructions, and messages are (1) an object or referent that the information is about, (2) a physical embodiment or vehicle that stands for what the information is about (the object), and (3) an interpreter or agent that separates the referent information from the vehicle’s material structure, and that establishes the stands-for relation. This separation is named the epistemic cut, and explaining clearly how the stands-for relation is realized is named the symbol-matter problem. (4) A necessary physical condition is that all informational vehicles are material boundary conditions or constraints acting on the lawful dynamics of local systems. It is useful to define a dependency hierarchy of information types: (1) syntactic information (i.e., communication theory), (2) heritable information acquired by variation and natural selection, (3) non-heritable learned or creative information, and (4) measured physical information in the context of natural laws. High information storage capacity is most reliably implemented by discrete linear sequences of non-dynamic vehicles, while the execution of information for control and construction is a non-holonomic dynamic process. The first epistemic cut occurs in self-replication. The first interpretation of base sequence information is by protein folding; the last interpretation of base sequence information is by natural selection. Evolution has evolved senses and nervous systems that acquire non-heritable information, and only very recently after billions of years, the competence for human language. Genetic and human languages are the only known complete general purpose languages. They have fundamental properties in common, but are entirely different in their acquisition, storage and interpretation.
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Notes
Hoffmeyer (2008, p. 93) speaks of my subscribing to “the ontology of natural law.” Physics says nothing about the ontology of natural law besides the belief that some unknowable kind of reality exists outside our mental images and symbols. There are only epistemological and objectivity conditions. Objectivity requires natural laws to appear common to all conceivable observers. Hertz’s briefly stated epistemology is accepted by most physicists: “We form for ourselves images or symbols of external objects; and the form which we give them is such that the logically necessary consequents of the images in thought are always the images of the necessary natural consequents of the thing pictured. . . For our purpose it is not necessary that they [the images] should be in conformity with the things in any other respect whatever. As a matter of fact, we do not know, nor have we any means of knowing, whether our conception of things are in conformity with them in any other than this one fundamental respect” (Hertz 1984).
Hoffmeyer refers to one paper (Pattee 1997) in which I used the linguist’s narrow definition of semiosis, as I have done in other papers. That was before I was aware of its wider use in biosemiotics. I have never thought of information as limited to discrete symbols. For example I said (Pattee 1989), “The structure of the folded string has both a shape and an activity, neither of which could be called arbitrary. In fact, the folded enzyme can be called both iconic in its binding site and mimetic in its catalytic activity. The folding process as well as the substrate binding and catalysis are no longer local, sequential, or context-free, but highly parallel and global. Yet physically the folded enzyme contains the same molecules and obeys the same laws as the string of symbol vehicles. What has happened is that those aspects of structure that are essential for the activities as symbol vehicles have been suppressed, while other aspects of the symbol vehicle structure that are excluded from explicit symbolic activity, have been brought into play. Furthermore, these two aspects appear as complementary in the sense that one aspect cannot function in both roles simultaneously. A structure cannot be both arbitrary and iconic, or rate-independent and rate-dependent, or discrete and continuous at the same time. However, the same structure can possess any of these aspects depending on its context, i.e., the level of organization where the particular aspect is brought into play” (p. 271). I give a detailed discussion of the context-dependence of discrete and continuous descriptions in Pattee (1974).
Here is my conclusion of The Physical Basis of Coding and Reliability in Biological Evolution presented at the 1966 Bellagio meeting (Pattee 1968, p. 89). “At the evolutionary level this concept of a symbolic genetic description and its code structures must be broadened to a larger system that includes not only the description of the system itself but also a description or a 'theory' of the environment. In the evolutionary context the phenotype itself now plays the role of a composite measuring device that tests the descriptive theory through its interactions with the real environment. In this language we must also expand the concept of reliability to include the overall predictive value of this description-code or theory-measurement system. I believe it is then reasonable to associate this overall predictive value with what is called the 'measure of fitness' in evolutionary theory. Finally, at the level of nervous activity in the processes of memory and intellectual theory making, we are again searching for more elegant code structures which allow the maximum predictive reliability over the widest domain, but which can be generated from relatively short symbolic descriptions. Perhaps we could even say that the characteristic sign of biological activity at all levels is the existence of efficient and reliable codes”
Wigner replied to my argument: “I believe I understand your arguments in this regard and concur with you. The reason for my arguing on the basis of consciousness was indeed that in this case I could adduce evidence for the incompleteness, whereas I could not do this at a lower level” (Pattee 1972, Note 1). I am not sure that Léon Rosenfeld was complelely convinced. After a year of correspondence he cautiously concluded, “I did not meet any statement with which I would disagree.” However, he emphasized that my discussion, “was irrelevant to the problem of the actual measuring process” with which I agree because I have not addressed the measurement problem itself.
Classically, a non-holonomic constraint is a relation between the variables which limits more degrees of freedom of the dynamic motion than the static degrees of freedom that are necessary to specify the initial conditions (e.g. Sommerfeld 1952) In other words, the number of constrained dimensions, f–r, of the actual trajectory space of a system with non-holonomic constraints is smaller than the number of dimensions, f, necessary for a complete state description, by the number of non-holonomic relations, r. The constrained trajectory space, Rf–r is a subspace of the state space, Sf, but an external perturbation or mutation in the constraint can produce a different trajectory subspace, R′f–r. It is only by coupling such non-holonomic systems together that we can build machines. Computers are an extreme case of a maximally constrained machine with only enough dynamics to drive one state to the next. As I discussed, living systems are minimally constrained by genetic information, because they rely heavily on law-based dynamics. For a discussion of non-holonomic constraints in quantum theory see Eden (1951).
Watch a folding simulation video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFcp2Xpd29I More information on folding at http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Science
Peirce’s discussion of his logical graphs illustrates one of his common lapses from clear logic to vague metaphysics. Volumes III and IV of the Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce (1931–36) gives a number of logical diagrams or logical graphs which he says supports his Synechism. At the end of his logical discussion of Gamma Graphs (4.573 ff) Peirce says, “We here reach a point at which novel considerations about the constitution of knowledge and therefore of the constitution of nature burst in upon the mind with cataclysmical multitude and resistlessness. It is that synthesis of tychism and pragmatism for which I long ago proposed the name, Synechism, to which one thus returns; but this time with stronger reasons than ever before” (4.584). See also Existential Graphs, MS 514, by Charles Sanders Peirce with commentary by John F. Sowa at http://www.jfsowa.com/peirce/ms514
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Pattee, H.H. Epistemic, Evolutionary, and Physical Conditions for Biological Information. Biosemiotics 6, 9–31 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-012-9150-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-012-9150-8