[Fis] (Non-Fis) Re: Bill Miller's contribution: the "It" of a machine, truth and trust. Ambiguity

Sun Jun 1 16:25:44 CEST 2025

Yes, Joe. I would absolutely agree, andI believe that John would too, that the ambiguities that we discussare never fixed. As we saw it, these ambiguities exist as implicatesthat the organism settles into explicate action as biologicalexpression (and I'll ask John to correct me if he thinksdifferently). 

Implicit to our perspective, but notspecifically noted, was that the nature of those ambiguities areconstantly shifting. Those shifts relate to temporal alterations inthe environment that offers cues embedded with uncertainties andconcurrent shifts in the receptive organism, which is always underself-construction. 

Mike's fine work on self-improvisingmemories is an excellent example of the fluidity that has to existbetween the external environment, the internal representation of itby which the organism self-interprets external reality(infoautopoiesis), its receptive capabilities, and the liberties andconstraints of its range of responses. The circumstance that theuncertainty is itself mutable even during this process is why I thinkthat Pedro and Pablo's distinctions on the adjacent and a narrowingof the uncertainty gap are so useful in understanding how cells andorganisms deal with the environment. 

These requisites impact ourunderstanding of the difference between machines and the livingframe, I believe. Living organisms receive their information fromtheir outside through a replete cell or species-specific sensoryarmamentarium, and they use those senses to protect themselves andsurvive. However, and little considered, they do so by staying withinpreferential states of homeorhetic flux. Consequently, cells aremeasuring information for what can be considered infocomputationalvalue but also for valence, as qualitative differences between acurrent state (which includes a memory of a prior one) and apreferred flux status. My colleagues and I regard this difference asan experience at any scale. 

This valenced aspect is crucial to thetransformation of what can be termed syntactic environmentalinformation into meaningful internally self-generated meaningfulsemantic information, which is valenced. This biosemiotic translationonly exists in the living state. Machines have no actual internalvalences. These are directly related to the constant shift ofuncertainties as you say, Joe, which is the living state. Livingorganisms have doubts. Machines do not. As Katherine stresses, you can't denude the living process of its emotional qualities. 

Best, 

Bill 

    On Sunday, June 1, 2025 at 03:26:19 AM MST, <joe.brenner at bluewin.ch> wrote:  

   Dear Bill, John, Lou and All,       Ref.: Torday and Miller, "The resolution of ambiguity as the basis for life: A cellular bridge between Western reductionism and Eastern holism, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 131, Dec 2017, pp. 288-297       What I find has been missing in recent notes is the dialectics of "our existence as self-referential organisms". This results in many arguments "floating" outside science.       I suggest a return to the reference paper. Here, in contrast, our friends showed that "self-organization actually requires ambiguity". "Life exists within a persistent state of ambiguity". Now, ambiguity must mean two things going on at the same time, and my approach which continues to be ignored, is that the states in question must be viewed as changing, moving from more or less potentiality to less or more actuality. In fact, the reference implies, but does not say, that systems move between more and less ambiguity!       The one basic difference between the theory in the reference paper and mine is that the ambiguity "construed as an expression o apprehension and judgment by any self-aware entity" must "involve quantum-like inferences". Why quantum-like? My principle of dynamic opposition provides a sufficient basis for inference or implication. I thus can completely agree with the author's description of ambiguity and doubt (Lupasco: dubito, ergo sum) in relation to Eastern thought and some of its Western expressions.        The "Self-referential uncertainty" that extends to relationships between parts and wholes (or their environment) can should in my view be expressed as a changing relationship, and the change for any member of the pair of entities means somewhere "on the path from one to the other.  I note also something I have pleaded for, an opening-up of standard Category Theory, away from rigic exclusivity and exhaustivity.       I hope that FIS'ers will see the same relevance of John and Bill's paper to this debate as I do.       Best,   Joe          
  Le 28.05.2025 11:50 CEST, JOHN TORDAY <jtorday at ucla.edu> a écrit :            To Bill, Joe, Lou, Mark, and fis in absentia, not to be contentious, but I  must respond to Bill's comment and set the record straight ....       "Going back to "nothing is isolated from its precursors", John Torday and I have consistently stressed the importance of keeping in mind that all the basic living processes in multicellularity are exaptations of preexisting inventions in the unicellular realm. Of course, this stems from Gould and Vrba's initial insight. However, and pertinent to our discussion, I would be willing to take taht concept one step further. Although we do not know how the cognition/consciousness that defines the living state was instantiated, we can make a reasonable assumption that in some manner, processes were exapted from the abiotic realm enabled cognitive competence that go beyond the obvious necessity to conform to thermodynamic laws."       With all due respect to Bill, I have published several articles invoking Lynn Margulis Sagan's Symbiogenesis as the putative mechanism by which organisms have assimilated factors in the environment to form their physiology, consciousness emerging from that process, expressed again most recently (Torday JS. The quantum cell. Prog Biophys Mol Biol. 2024 May;188:24-30). That mechanism is reflected by the stepwise loss of evolved traits in microgravity (Torday JS. Parathyroid hormone-related protein is a gravisensor in lung and bone cell biology. Adv Space Res. 2003;32(8):1569-76) and is the fundament for the mechanism of epigenetic inheritance, for which my lab has provided evidence in the form of nicotine from cigarette smoke causing transgenerational childhood asthma. Most recently, I have hypothesized that the reason that Symbiogenesis works 'constructively and cumulatively' is because it provides the memory of and for our origin in a holism (Torday JS. Symbiogenesis redicts the monism of the cosmos. Prog Biophys Mol Biol. 2024 Sep;191:58-62), the latter being at the core of the evolution of consciousness in my opinion.       Sincerely,               John S. Torday   Professor of Pediatrics  Obstetrics and Gynecology   Evolutionary Medicine   UCLA       Fellow, The European Academy of Science and Arts        
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