[Fis] Thank you Lou!

[Louis Kauffman]

Dear Kate,
Thank you. That clarifies the matter.
I suspect that whenever we have a sharp distinction there is a context that supports it.
This is more general than a boundary. Often there is no discernible boundary.
Best,
Lou


> On Jan 20, 2025, at 5:46 PM, Katherine Peil <ktpeil at outlook.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear Lou (et al),
> Sorry for the delay. (I was in dutch with Pedro for too many posts). Apologies all around for that. I had only a narrow window of time to participate, and my enthusiasm can get the better of me – particularly for math models that might address autopoiesis! But to wrap up:
> What do I mean by binary? My concept of binary begins with the dualities we experience through our embodiment, which I see as a feature (of time and space) rather than a bug. Instead of some flaw in our perceptual systems, it has to do with course graining of information required for the here and now relationship between a distinct system and its immediate environment. (Your distinctions as boundaries?)  This leads into your post-Leibniz concept that encompasses formal logic and computers, the coding language or 0s and 1s. Given the incremental nature of time, at each iterative tick in any process, there areeither~or choices to be made, which I associate with digital information. Binaries – complementary opposites - are everywhere in nature, represented by Yin~Yang in my Tao Story. Ultimately, they relate to the distinctive self-referential dance between parts and wholes.  (What Dr. Thomas says about infinite sets is most intriguing here.)
>  
> In terms of my emotion science, while we can experience “mixed emotions” in terms of our complex human feelings and cognitive imaginings, raw pleasure and pain are binary categories. Any personally self-relevant event emerges in our experience as either painful or pleasurable, they enter our consciousness as either~or valanced surprises. As Martha Nussbaum put it, they are “eruptions in consciousness”, course-grained from the unconscious regulatory processes of the body (opponent processes, chemical signaling etc.) But in terms of their physical substrates and biological function, pleasure and pain operate together as a Both~And complementary pair. One cannot be understood outside the holistic context of its binary counterpart, like conjugate variables. They both subserve the ancient function of self-regulation, mediating the paradoxical balance between stability and change over time, or from the perspective ofthe self – the sentient subject – self-preservation (mediated by pain) and self-development(mediated by pleasure).
>  
> In terms of the word perception (as opposed to sensation), I would agree that the distinguishing feature isprediction – a feedforward cybernetic process that concerns the future (while sensation is more a feedback process about the immediate present). As sensory signals that serve as the Pavlovian “unconditioned stimulus-response pair” and the mode for conditioned learning categories, hedonic emotional qualia do both jobs. They provide the fundamental semantic information bit required for autopoiesis, all learning systems, and they undergird human values. I remain hungry for math models that can root them in quantum information. Both Federico Faggin and our own Dr. Thomas resonate here.
>  
> Thank you so much sharing your deep wisdom.
> Over and out,
> Kate Kauffman
>  
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