[Fis] Bill Miller's contribution: the "It" of a machine, truth and trust

Sun May 18 15:26:26 CEST 2025

Dear John, and All,

Thank you for sharing your thought-provoking remarks and the fascinating perspective you've developed regarding gravity as a fundamental driver in the origin and evolution of life. Your work on PTHrP as a gravisensor, and the broader implications you draw from it, raise important questions about how we conceptualize life's emergence from a physical and developmental standpoint.

I wanted to offer a collegial and constructive view from my perspective that complements your argument by considering the foundational role of information in biological systems—especially in the context of cognition, learning, and adaptation at the cellular level.

While I fully agree that gravity, as well as other forms of energy— electrical, chemical, thermal and mechanical are crucial in shaping the physical environment that made life possible, I would suggest that these energy forms are enabling conditions for a more fundamental transition: the emergence of systems capable of processing, storing, and responding to information.

Cells, even the simplest ones, are not passive reactors to external forces; they sense, interpret, and adapt to their environment.

This requires:

  *   Internal representations of their state (e.g., energy levels, osmotic pressure, etc.),
  *   Interpretation of signals (via receptors and transduction pathways),
  *   Decision-making logic (e.g., feedback control, signal integration),
  *   Forms of memory and adaptive behavior.

These capacities reflect informational architectures—structured, rule-governed processes that allow organisms to maintain homeostasis, respond to novelty, and evolve complexity.
These processes are not reducible to energy flows alone, even though they are energetically instantiated.

To take your Newtonian analogy a step further: just as force requires mass to produce acceleration, energy requires an informational structure, a network or system capable of interpreting and responding to that energy, for it to lead to life-like behavior.
Without that, physical processes remain inanimate.

Both Mike and Bill have written extensively on cellular information processing and cognition, and you in your book Consciousness-Based Evolution are emphasizing the role of communication that is information exchange.

I find great resonance in your broader point that life must be understood as a holistic, dynamical phenomenon, not merely a sum of parts. My aim is not to oppose that view, but to emphasize that information, context-sensitive, functional information, is one of those essential parts, and arguably what makes life different from non-life.

Looking forward to continuing the conversation and exchanging ideas on this deep and fascinating topic.

Best regards,
Gordana

From: Fis <fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es> on behalf of "joe.brenner at bluewin.ch" <joe.brenner at bluewin.ch>
Date: Sunday, 18 May 2025 at 14:18
To: JOHN TORDAY <jtorday at ucla.edu>, Mark Johnson <johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com>, "Levin, Michael" <michael.levin at tufts.edu>, Bill <wbmiller1 at cox.net>, "Pedro C. Marijuán" <pedroc.marijuan at gmail.com>, fis <fis at listas.unizar.es>, "goernitz at em.uni-frankfurt.de" <goernitz at em.uni-frankfurt.de>
Subject: Re: [Fis] Bill Miller's contribution: the "It" of a machine, truth and trust

Dear John,

I wish to apologize for not having recognized previously my failure to see and express the fundamental role played by gravity in science and philosophy as you have now expressed it. Please let me expand a little (like the universe, at this point) by calling attention to the fact that the force of gravity, or gravitational field, is inhomogeneous. We also exist by capitalizing (storing) the potential energy available from the differences in the strength of the field between two space-time points. We drink by catching part of a waterfall, converting gravitational energy from actual to potential in our cupped hands.

However, to explain the further development of phenomena to the point at which one can start to talk about information requiires an additional fundamental principle, the Lupasco principle of Dynamic Opposition: all systems move from states constituted by more potential and less actual energy - gravitational, electromagnetic, electrostatic - to the reverse, reciprocally and sinusoidally, without ever returning to exactly the point of origin. (Machines are also subject to this principle, but at short time scales it can be ignored to all intents and purposes - just a little wear at a microscopic level).

I thus am forced to a position that information is not more (but also not less) than the epistemic descriptions of those states. However our knowledge of these states as information is also not static. It is an ontic process of knowing which is itself subject to movement between actual and potential, becoming causally effective when transduced to muscle cells, etc. Other cognitive examples of the operation of this principle are our changing views of part and whole, or figure and ground.

Please let me know if you see any merit in this proposed synthesis of our ideas.

Thank you and best wishes,
Joe
Le 18.05.2025 11:48 CEST, JOHN TORDAY <jtorday at ucla.edu> a écrit :

To Mark, Mike, Bill, Joe, Tom, fis,
I wanted to remark on the heels of the comments by Mark, Joe, Tom regarding machines vs organisms, that simply put, organisms are 'holisms' that are greater than the sums of their parts, machines are just the sums of their parts, without something 'greater than' themselves. In my opinion, the 'greater than' is the consequence of the force of gravity that caused the transition from non-life to life in the first place (Torday JS. Parathyroid hormone-related protein is a gravisensor in lung and bone cell biology. Adv Space Res. 2003;32(8):1569-76). I would like to point out that that experiment and that of others showed that it is the energy of gravity that is necessary for evolution, not information, with all due respect. There is no singular piece of information that one could deprive the cell by doing a so-called 'knockout' experiment that would have the same fundamental effect. And as for ontology and epistemology, I am of the opinion that to identify the fundamental nature of life, both of them must be accounted for by the same mechanism, as in the case of the effect of gravity, causing the protocell to react as an 'equal and opposite reaction' (Newton's Third Law of Motion). Subsequently, life is constituted by serial homeostatic control of energy by the organism, facilitated by Symbiogenesis, Lynn Sagan's explanation that, for example, bacteria were assimilated by archaea to form eukaryotes in order to maintain homeostatic balance in an ever-changing environment due to an expanding Cosmos.

Best, John

John S. Torday
Professor of Pediatrics
Obstetrics and Gynecology
Evolutionary Medicine
UCLA

Fellow, The European Academy of Science and Arts

On Sat, May 17, 2025 at 5:25 PM Mark Johnson <johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com<mailto:johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com>> wrote:
Dear Bill, Mike and John

First of all thank you to Bill and Mike for continuing the very stimulating discussion that began in the video call a few weeks ago.

There are, as is often the case on FIS, a number of ontological assertions flying around which make navigating this space rather difficult. Mike does his best to address this head-on in his identification of two fundamental problems: "First, the belief that we can objectively and uniquely nail down what something is. And second, that our formal models of life, computers or materials tell the entire story of their capabilities and limitations."

Channelling Warren McCulloch, and perhaps in response to those who ask "what is a machine?", I would like to ask "What is a machine that we might know it, and what are we that we might know a machine?"

What follows from the formulation such a question (whether you ask about number, distinction, etc), is that any determination of "what a machine is" - the "it" of a machine - is both contingent and necessary. It is contingent because it must depend on the determination by the observer (Maturana). It is necessary because without any determination of what a machine is, we would have no machines, no science, no institutions, no coordination - the world would not be like the world we experience.

Our arguments about ontology are an expression of the contingency of definition. The fact that we keep on going at it is indicative of the necessity of definition. We perhaps should be mindful that alongside contingency, is paraconsistency in definition: it is not x OR y, information OR energy. It is probably x AND y.

This gives rise to something that doesn't often come up on this list, which I have been reflecting on, which is dialectic. If you take necessity and contingency together, you get a dialectical process. This is political. I know (I'm sure he won't mind me saying this) that behind John's passionate emphasis on energy is a personal story about the pathology of humankind, and a fear that misapprehending the underlying mechanism of evolutionary development will lead to the kind of terrible consequences we saw in the middle of the last century. Personally, I very swayed by his arguments - they run very deep.

Indeed, behind much of the anxiety of AI are political feelings, which are not properly inspected. As scientists, we are often rather too buttoned-up, pretending this is all completely rational. Well, we know it isn't. There are feasible dystopias and infeasible dystopias, and equally infeasible utopias.

The politics comes from the dialectics which comes from the contingency and necessity of definition of what a machine is. This is not to say that there cannot be coordinated stability through science. But it fundamentally requires trust and humility, and acceptance of contingency and paraconsistency. As Von Foerster pointed out many years ago, the word "truth" has the same root as the word "trust" (see https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://youtu.be/Mc6YFUoPWSI?feature=shared__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!T1wFAi83YDDqdDZGlvOYlPi3mRDRhjzbHTgLibwzNNmdGEvNq46IZdJ0EWvKqPaHOhpGlk1MfzdraSaGZZWTbdSW1a3TWA$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/youtu.be/Mc6YFUoPWSI?feature=shared__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!Wsl84qM48TWmEsBlAC9YhD2IHxjMVlFr6erxin6en2yFgbYBGQlM8a5NGAk5ong88K_SAvMIBduo89SVofc$>)

Trust appears to be some kind of physiological process. Do machines help us to trust each other? Well, what do you think? You're in a machine right now. Do you trust me? If this wasn't email, what might we do to engender trust between us better? Could a machine help? How?

Best wishes,

Mark

On Wed, 14 May 2025 at 22:02, JOHN TORDAY <jtorday at ucla.edu<mailto:jtorday at ucla.edu>> wrote:
Dear Pedro, Bill and fis,with all due respect,  I have attached my replies to Bill's Information in a cellular framework – abstract for discussion
William B. Miller, Jr.

John S. Torday
Professor of Pediatrics
Obstetrics and Gynecology
Evolutionary Medicine
UCLA

Fellow, The European Academy of Science and Arts

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: JOHN TORDAY <jtorday at ucla.edu<mailto:jtorday at ucla.edu>>
Date: Wed, May 14, 2025 at 4:56 PM
Subject: Re: [Fis] Bill Miller's contribution
To: Pedro C. Marijuán <pedroc.marijuan at gmail.com<mailto:pedroc.marijuan at gmail.com>>

Dear Pedro and Bill and fis, I have attached my responses to Bill's "Information in a Cellular Framework".....

John S. Torday
Professor of Pediatrics
Obstetrics and Gynecology
Evolutionary Medicine
UCLA

Fellow, The European Academy of Science and Arts

On Wed, May 14, 2025 at 3:45 PM Pedro C. Marijuán <pedroc.marijuan at gmail.com<mailto:pedroc.marijuan at gmail.com>> wrote:
Given the archive difficulties with attached files, systematically scrubbed by the server, I am posting Bill's text as a regular message (today I finally could do that!).
It is an angle pretty different from the mechanism/non mechanism one...      Regards --Pedro
-------------------------------------------------

Information in a cellular framework – abstract for discussion
William B. Miller, Jr.

A long-standing presumption among many physicists and mathematicians is
that biology is a descriptive endeavor and any deep understanding of the
living frame must issue from their more rigorous disciplines. Nonetheless,
neither physics nor mathematics has explained the non-equilibrium living
state in which intelligent self-referential cells deploy problem-solving
competencies to sustain themselves across living scales. Consequently, some
scientists argue that the reverse may be correct: biology might productively
inform physics and mathematics, offering insights into how natural laws
might extend beyond known physical and mathematical principles.
In the same spirit, examining the specific attributes of biological
information processing and living information management as specifically
exemplified by cells might provide a productive further thrust to the
fundamental action-logic of those theoretical information systems formulated
by visionary information theorists.

To stimulate that initiative, it is proposed that information theorists might
direct their attention to the specific informational characteristics of intelligent,
measuring cells, which represent the basal strata of our living planetary
system.

Several specific attributes of biological information have been
empirically verified at the cellular level, thereby defining the informational
conditions of our living system:

--All cells are cognitive, problem-solving agents.

--Their living context is the ambiguity of information.

--The uncertain validity of environmental stimuli governs the cellular
reception, analysis, and deployment of all cellular resources.

--Imperfect information requires cells to internally measure their
received information.

--Accordingly, all cellular information is a product of infoautopoiesis,
entailing that all the information that any cell has about its external
environment is exclusive, self-referential, and self-produced.

--Cellular infoautopiesis drives an obligatory and little appreciated
derivative: each cell, and then we as cellular beings, create our
exclusive self-referential representations of reality and act upon that
self-generated purview.

--Obliged informational uncertainties stimulate the collective cellular
analysis of self-generated cellular information, driving ubiquitous
planetary multicellularity as a cellular expression of the familiar
'wisdom of crowds'.

--Cellular information processing directs toward narrowing distinctions
on the adjacents to diminish their obligatory uncertainty gap, yielding
the effective minimization of surprisal in conformity with the Free
Energy Principle.

--Every cell does work to sustain its self-directed state of homeorhetic
preferential flux.

--Narrowing the distinctions on the adjacents as the effective
minimization of surprisal enables cellular predictions and
anticipations.

--Self-referential cellular states of homeorhetic preference drive
multicellular eukaryotic macroorganic behaviors and emotions.

SOME BASIC QUESTIONS (for the discussion)

Information in the living frame has been commonly defined according to
Bateson’s familiar definition as a 'difference that makes a difference over
time.' How might that definition explain internal self reference that governs
our lives, enabling living information management? Might other definitions
serve better?

How can previously formulated information theories illuminate the cellular
living process within its obligatory context of informational ambiguity?
How do current information theories explain the presence of inference,
prediction, and anticipation.

Why do these informational cues, which must first manifest at the level of
cells as exclusive states of self-referential homeorhetic preference, exert in
multicellularity as nuanced multicellular behaviors and emotions?
Recent research confirms the remarkable competencies of diverse
intelligences across living scales. How might applying information systems
theory contribute to our debate about any categorical distinctions between the
living frame and the abiotic realm? If a fluid continuum is asserted, how
might that be rationalized?

Is our understanding of biological systems improved by asserting an
immaterial Platonic informational platform permitting cells to interrogate a
constrained portion of universal informational space-time (? phase space
partition) as part of a universal informational fabric?

Given the extraordinary competencies of current AI systems and projected
future abilities, how might information theory inform constructive responses
to inevitable social, economic, and cultural pressures?
What should govern our ethical responses to the still-developing organic constructs
 which will include synthetic combinations of digital competencies and living cells?
If 'consciousness' is determined to be a litmus of our ethical stance toward
other living entities, what practical informational threshold exists, if any?

------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Fis mailing list
Fis at listas.unizar.es<mailto:Fis at listas.unizar.es>
http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis 
----------
INFORMACIÓN SOBRE PROTECCIÓN DE DATOS DE CARÁCTER PERSONAL

Ud. recibe este correo por pertenecer a una lista de correo gestionada por la Universidad de Zaragoza.
Puede encontrar toda la información sobre como tratamos sus datos en el siguiente enlace: https://sicuz.unizar.es/informacion-sobre-proteccion-de-datos-de-caracter-personal-en-listas 
Recuerde que si está suscrito a una lista voluntaria Ud. puede darse de baja desde la propia aplicación en el momento en que lo desee.
http://listas.unizar.es 
----------
_______________________________________________
Fis mailing list
Fis at listas.unizar.es<mailto:Fis at listas.unizar.es>
http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis 
----------
INFORMACIÓN SOBRE PROTECCIÓN DE DATOS DE CARÁCTER PERSONAL

Ud. recibe este correo por pertenecer a una lista de correo gestionada por la Universidad de Zaragoza.
Puede encontrar toda la información sobre como tratamos sus datos en el siguiente enlace: https://sicuz.unizar.es/informacion-sobre-proteccion-de-datos-de-caracter-personal-en-listas 
Recuerde que si está suscrito a una lista voluntaria Ud. puede darse de baja desde la propia aplicación en el momento en que lo desee.
http://listas.unizar.es 
----------

--
Dr. Mark William Johnson
Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health
University of Manchester

Department of Science Education
University of Copenhagen

Department of Eye and Vision Science (honorary)
University of Liverpool
Phone: 07786 064505
Email: johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com<mailto:johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com>
Blog: https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!T1wFAi83YDDqdDZGlvOYlPi3mRDRhjzbHTgLibwzNNmdGEvNq46IZdJ0EWvKqPaHOhpGlk1MfzdraSaGZZWTbdRzthZKFw$ <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http:/dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!Wsl84qM48TWmEsBlAC9YhD2IHxjMVlFr6erxin6en2yFgbYBGQlM8a5NGAk5ong88K_SAvMIBduo1JSG9f0$>
_______________________________________________
Fis mailing list
Fis at listas.unizar.es
http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis 
----------
INFORMACIÓN SOBRE PROTECCIÓN DE DATOS DE CARÁCTER PERSONAL

Ud. recibe este correo por pertenecer a una lista de correo gestionada por la Universidad de Zaragoza.
Puede encontrar toda la información sobre como tratamos sus datos en el siguiente enlace: https://sicuz.unizar.es/informacion-sobre-proteccion-de-datos-de-caracter-personal-en-listas 
Recuerde que si está suscrito a una lista voluntaria Ud. puede darse de baja desde la propia aplicación en el momento en que lo desee.
http://listas.unizar.es 
----------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listas.unizar.es/pipermail/fis/attachments/20250518/fa73ff60/attachment-0001.html>