[Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 118, Issue 35

[Katherine Peil]

Thanks Pedro – great to hear from you. A quick comment on:
…. I see a problem going from "percepts to concepts" as Lou claims
below. Neuroscience has nowadays a rare consensus on not dissociating
PERCEPTION and ACTION. The "Action Perception Cycle"…
>From the view of emotion science, this reflects a neurocentric problem wherein “cognition” (perceptual processing) confounds sensations that lead to actions – embodied emotional sensations that came on the evolutionary stage well before nerve nets or brains. It is emotion that is central to action, behavior and motivation.

Neuroscientist Jospeh LeDoux made this key distinction:
Cognitive computations: Reflective, conscious, goal-directed thought, often linked to areas of the brain involved in higher cognitive functions.
Affective computations: Automatic, unconscious, emotional processing, often linked to areas of the brain involved in emotional regulation and survival mechanisms. They always concern “the self” and the lead to actions.

I can paraphrase his example…” there is a huge experiential difference between the thought that a snake is a reptile, that its skin can be made into belts and shoes, and the thought that a snake is likely to be dangerous.”

Recall my claim that emotion in its simplest binary form – akin to pleasure or pain - carries the foundational semantic information bit that undergirds all learning systems, but emerges from the dynamics and logic of genetic, epigenetic and immune regulation. The Perception-Action-Cycle relies on the emotional component, so IMHO Lou is still on safe and important new ground.

Kate Kauffman



On 1/12/25, 2:59 PM, "Fis" <fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es> wrote: Katherine Peil Kauffman

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: LOF Friday (Pedro C. Mariju?n)


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Message: 1
Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2025 22:58:21 +0100
From: Pedro C. Mariju?n <pedroc.marijuan at gmail.com>
To: fis at listas.unizar.es
Subject: Re: [Fis] LOF Friday
Message-ID: <d93cbae2-038d-4733-8071-4f7b93a4f6d6 at gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; Format="flowed"

Dear List,

Please, take care to post properly (as the server automatically
demands), as otherwise I become rather overwhelmed wit all the different
warning messages. Thanks Lou for the tip about that.

Well, I see a problem going from "percepts to concepts" as Lou claims
below. Neuroscience has nowadays a rare consensus on not dissociating
PERCEPTION and ACTION. The "Action Perception Cycle" is the most common
acceptation. The "concept" gets? not too far from either side, and
usually it is incorporating elements of each kind, with different
predominance. Joaqu?n Fuster (2008 and 2014 I think) coined the term
"cognit" to refer to the intermediate stage, having both percept ears
and action legs (so to speak). The union of cognits legs and ears (or
legs and legs, ears and ears, etc.) would give birth to different kinds
of concepts, and the union of concepts via shared cognits would give
rise to conceptualizations, sentences, etc. Having entered action in the
world scheme is not trivial at all. Our litmus test for reality is not
that the percept agrees with the concept, but with the action. It is, as
we consider in the world of science, the whole experimental part... the
"fact". As Goethe's Faust aptly says: "In the beginning was the deed"!

My other brief pill refers again to autopoiesis. A few cellular
arguments not well tolerated (or only partially some of them) by
autopoiesis:

--The enormous cellular importance of protein degradation. The world of
proteasomes (the cell "industry of destruction") is fascinating, even in
the simplest cells.
--The different classes of programmed cell death, essentially apoptosis,
is also of enormous multicell--and even bacterial-- importance.
--The absorption of external DNA is quite frequent, and even customary
in some bacteria.
--The horizontal gene transmission is of great evolutionary importance
too (the world of phages, plasmids, transposons...)
--A number of genes in E. coli are never expressed in a regular life
cycle (close to 30 or 40%, depending on the happenstances)
--The revolutionary role of 'external' viruses in the greatest evo
transitions (Villarroel, Witzany).

So, even if you consider these caveats fulfilled in larger and larger
definitions of autopoiesis, there is another point that may be quite
troubling: information flow and signaling disappear, and are substituted
by the structural coupling with the environment and the observer
conceptualization involvement. The big concern is that advancement of
the life cycle, as the central hub to which signaling or external flows
cohere, and to which biological meaning relates, does not occupy its
explanatory essential role... while adaptively advancing the life cycle
is the silver thread that connects all biological world, including our
own societies.

I understand that for a mathematician the AP idea is quite handy, and
fruitful, but for those interested in the evolution of signals,
sensibility, action, emotions, social emotions, etc. is perhaps a
stumbling block to overcome. By the way, your previous post to Krassimir
on information was quite valuable, a firm standpoint which I share. I
was trying to comment on it, but my daily schedule is bizarre.

Best--Pedro


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