[Fis] What is a machine?

[Terrence W. DEACON]

An excellent paper discussing the limitations of the use of the machine
metaphor in biology can be found here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259159128_Organisms_Machines

The entire issue of the journal in which this article appears includes some
useful discussions of this issue.
I agree that the concept of a machine is a high level abstraction, an
idealization that ignores the deeply tychistic nature of things.
Indeed, like mathematics and the concept of number, the remarkable power of
these symbolic representations to help us predict the way natural phenomena
change and influence one another, can make them seem even more real than
what they refer to. But remember, the image in the mirror is only a
reflection.

— Terry

On Sun, Nov 3, 2019 at 7:02 AM Stanley N Salthe <ssalthe at binghamton.edu>
wrote:

> Thanks, Bruno.  Here is a related text:
>
>
> https://aeon.co/ideas/wired-that-way-genes-do-shape-behaviours-but-its-complicated
>
> STAN
>
> On Sun, Nov 3, 2019 at 5:24 AM Bruno Marchal <marchal at ulb.ac.be> wrote:
>
>>
>> > On 25 Oct 2019, at 21:02, Stanley N Salthe <ssalthe at binghamton.edu>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> >>
>> >> Bruno, Joseph -- Somewhat delayed: I can contribute my 1993 definition
>> of 'machine' as: "the most highly specified object there can be" No natural
>> system qualifies under this definition.
>>
>> That is a quite astonishing definition, which makes sense for the digital
>> machine (which can be seen as relative natural numbers, which I agree might
>> not make sense in Nature. This is a quasi theorem in the Digital Mechanist
>> Theory, as nature is “only” an appearance emerging from a relative
>> statistics on all computations. Nature, in that frame is how the numbers
>> see the numbers, and they cannot observe them, just a not entirely
>> computable emerging pattern. In that setting, physics is no more a science
>> studying an ontological reality, but a relative appearance brought by a
>> statistics on all machine’s experience (and this is confirmed by quantum
>> mechanics without wave packet reduction, like in Everett theory. This makes
>> physics into a branch of digital information theory/computer science.
>>
>> Bruno
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> >>
>> >> STAN
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-- 
Professor Terrence W. Deacon
University of California, Berkeley
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