Neo-Cybernetics — from the physical to the biological model

The physical world view has been the dominant one since the end of the 19th century. Not only our everyday understanding, for example in the form of cause and effect, but above all science is essentially based on the physical interpretation of the world. The invention of ever new technologies and products clearly justifies this point of view.

Physics ultimately describes nature on all scales and, with its findings, provides both epistemic and, above all, operational foundations for science and philosophy.

Physics describes matter and is therefore the fundamental science, because matter is, according to everything we know, the basis of reality.

Now at some point this matter began to organize itself in a completely new way that we call life. This is characterized by the fact that properties have developed that the previous matter did not have. This new form of organization reproduces itself, evolves and establishes itself as a separate entity in relation to the remaining matter with which it is in an energy exchange.

While mere matter is dead, life is agent. And, in contrast to dead matter, it can only be understood as a structure. In inanimate nature, individual parts such as molecules or atoms can be examined to understand what matter is. In living nature this is not enough, because life does not appear in individual parts, but only as a structure or system.

Consequently, in addition to the physical description, another description must be added that captures the specificity of life. That would be biology, but unfortunately it is itself trapped in the physical model, so that it never even came up with the idea of developing its own epistemological paradigm.

The development of a biological model does not mean that physics is superfluous, quite the opposite. Ittakes care of the individual parts and their relationship to one another, which do not describe life in themselves, but are important for understanding it.

It is wrong to derive ontology from knowledge of the individual parts, because this lies in the structure. Therefore, the approach to a biological epistemology must be structural or systems theoretical.

Furthermore, he must give his object, the living object, subject character, because life is in every case an agent.

And life changes and develops.

So we are dealing with an acting structure that evolves in space and time.

I would like to illustrate the difference to the physical model using two examples.

The theory of physical dynamic systems knows deterministic and indeterministic systems. If you apply these to life, it becomes clear that none of them can describe life. In a living system, the attractor — and thus phase space and trajectories — not only changes with regard to external variables, but it changes itself. This means that the system can no longer only be described in terms of its initial conditions, but it also changes in terms of the attractor. So there is a correlation between initial conditions and final conditions.

The attractor therefore represents the subject status of the system. By acting, it changes its structural properties. In contrast to the physical system, the attractor in the biological system is virtually personalized. The state can be represented as a value in the form of structure (or information) density or as a value of the reaction probability [1] [2] [3]. Only a biological model can do justice to this connection.

The second example is Tononi’s integrated information theory. It physically derived the concept of information as the basis for consciousness. However, the term itself remains schematically mechanistic because it makes no reference to the subject character of life. Information is a static concept. If you introduce the subject character, it becomes clear that not only the integration of information is important, but also the causal force that generates influence on the entire system. Because the IIT makes no distinction between living and inanimate nature, consciousness theoretically also applies to inanimate systems, a proposition that cannot be proven and is therefore unscientific.

Of course, what has been said so far also applies to classical cybernetics. The physical model is also followed there. This is justified as long as one deals with the simulation of individual aspects in living systems. But in order to make statements about the entire system, a new cybernetics is required: neo-cybernetics. In it, physical theories must be transformed into a biological model.

So it is no wonder that the European Human Brain Project has not produced any results regarding the explanation of consciousness has resulted. Like most neuroscientific theories, as well as medicine, it is based on the physical model.

The essential point for living systems must therefore be the attribution of a subject status. This means that every living system is the subject of its actions and this status must be operationalized. In this way, terms such as self-organization, which are merely descriptions for the living area, can be explained. If you attribute causal power to structural densities, this results in metastructures [4], which are the core of self-organization. Within this framework, all expressions of life can be classified epistemologically, in that the epistemology and the associated methodology correspond to the object — not the other way around.

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[1] Stegemann, W., Metabiology of the mind, https://medium.com/@drwolfgangstegemann/metabiology-of-the-mind-d2779efa27a5

[2] Stegemann, W., Self-controlling living systems are hierarchical, https://medium.com/@drwolfgangstegemann/self-controlling-living-systems-are-hierarchical-life-can-in-principle-be-described -as-an-695b1a83dcf2

[3] Stegemann,W., Neural swarm intelligence?, https://medium.com/@drwolfgangstegemann/neural-swarm-intelligence-cf30ad78ba99

[4] Stegemann,W., Consciousness as metastructures, https://medium.com/@drwolfgangstegemann/consciousness-as-metastructures-36ae906c36fa