Bill Everett
Jul 20, 2017 · 3 min read

“… all cognitive abstraction is ultimately of the mind.

We normally ignore this for practical purposes — our physical world appearing usefully understood as a set of essentially discrete entities. However, is this such a valid approach for understanding the biosphere?”

I could tell a shaggy dog story featuring a dispute between adherents of an old paradigm and a proponent of the new paradigm to illustrate the importance of “classification” (or “categorization”) in constructive explanatory theories. But I will merely briefly describe the two paradigms, and you can imagine the fuller picture. This is not my example but comes from discussions with Anatol Rapoport about the time when I proposed recruiting R. B. Fuller and M. Meade to run for president and vice-president of the USA with the slogan “Back Bucky for a Fuller life.”

Old paradigm: We sample an area of our forest, capturing, weighing, and releasing all medium-size four-footed furries (FFF) in that area, and we estimate the total FFF biomass in the forest. Doing this for several decades, we conclude that the total FFF biomass is a constant characteristic of a given forest up to measurement error.

New paradigm: Using a similar procedure but distinguishing short-ear long-tail FFF (SeLtFFF) from long-ear short-tail FFF (LeStFFF) based on the ratio of ear length to tail length, we separately estimate the SeLtFFF and LeStFFF biomasses over several decades. We conclude that these biomasses oscillate with time with a roughly constant sum. Why this should be requires explanation, of course. Further observation in search of an explanation finds that LeStFFF eat plants and SeLtFFF eat LeStFFF and consequently leads to a theory of predator-prey relations.

The main point is that changes to a system of classification are useful if they result in new questions whose answers generate a deepening understanding.

“an ultimately unfathomable level of what our mind can only envisage as ‘complexity’”

You might be interested in the MOOC “Introduction to Complexity” from the Santa Fe Institute if you have not taken it already. Unfortunately, this years session of the course ended in June. The archived course materials (videos, etc.) are still available. If you are not familiar with their MOOCs, you can watch a ten-minute introduction at https://www.complexityexplorer.org/about/how-to-use-complexity-explorer. If you think you might be interested, you can read the course description at https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/74-introduction-to-complexity-spring-2017 or go directly to the archived materials at https://www.complexityexplorer.org/courses/74-introduction-to-complexity-spring-2017/segments/5687?summary.

“… DNA/RNA. It is obviously encoding information but, regardless of the words we use here, I would put it in a different bag for (seemingly) not including any form of abstraction. As best as we know, genetic action works directly, whereas a written instruction is actually utterly ineffectual in the absence of a mind to interpret the instruction.”

For a language, I regard symbolization (not abstraction), in which symbols are more or less arbitrarily associated with the items or concepts they represent, as an essential feature. In a written language, the tokens for the symbols are relatively permanent, not transient like sounds or gestures (movements). The fact that the DNA language of a gene (representing a protein, i.e., a polymer of amino acid units) involves a somewhat arbitrary association between codons (a three-letter word composed from a four-letter alphabet) and amino acids is indicated by the existence of different dialects of the language: some organisms associate a given codon with a different amino acid than the amino acid in the most common dialect. There are many videos on YouTube with animations of interpreting the gene language for protein construction (for example, search in YouTube for DNA mRNA tRNA ribosome protein). Clearly, the gene is “actually utterly ineffectual in the absence of” cellular machinery “to interpret the instruction.”

We do not yet understand the DNA language, only small parts of it. If you had discovered the ASCII code and could decipher the text strings embedded in a computer program, you would be foolish to claim that you understood the language of the computer program (because there is much more to the program that determines when to output a particular text string). We are just beginning to understand the rest of the DNA language that determines when a particular gene should be expressed to produce a given protein. I also note that just like a computer program is ineffectual without the proper, functioning computer system to interpret and act according to it, a DNA molecule (or set of DNA molecules) representing the complete genome of an organism is ineffectual without a proper, functioning cell to interpret and act according to it.

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    Bill Everett

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