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

Tue May 27 22:19:07 CEST 2025

 Joe and all, 
First, my sincere apology for my brain cramp and misattribution. 

I did want to let you know that we're much on the same wavelength. A couple of comments. I am in agreement with your unease about the term 'spontaneous" because I absolutely agree that "nothing is isolated from its precursors". This fluidity is clearly characteristic of the living state. For that matter, I'm always squirming with 'emergence' ..... same reasons. 

I would note, however, that 'spontaneous' gets applied to 'autopoiesis', it is not a feature of 'infoautopoiesis'. I agree that is confusing. That term was determined by Jamie Cardenas-Garcia, the originator of the concept and refers specifically to the internal self-generation of information by cells. There is nothing actually spontaneous about that or its consequences. They are two different processes, despite that confusing nomenclature.
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. 

To that end, I had published an article hypothesizing that the cellular measurement of information was an exaptation of abiotic 'sensing' of 'differences that make a difference' via separated quantum reference frames. 
Miller Jr, W. B. (2023). A scale-freeuniversal relational information matrix (N-space) reconciles theinformation problem: N-space as the fabric of reality. Communicative& Integrative Biology, 16(1), 2193006. https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://doi.org/10.1080/19420889.2023.2193006__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!RXlJ7EYzVqznwN359p9SJpT-pD2oOS7lCLRNDLzzVLaqXdJofHr2sm6AbCaGJ-nn-3ib30N6jU6KXnAYcSw$ 

To do this required a suitable definition of information and postulating a universal information matrix. I'm interested in learning how how your Effective Field Theory fits into your Login in Reality schema. Could I ask you to send me a reference or two about that? I'm anxious to see it. 

Just to note, I'm planning on responding next to Mark's comment about information fields. In that response, I will make some remarks about information fields and how they might influence our debate on machines vs. the living frame. I'll not include your field concept for now until I'm more familiar with it.  But, I'm happy to admit that's a missing piece of our discussion. 

Best regards, 
Bill 

    On Tuesday, May 27, 2025 at 03:52:40 AM MST, <joe.brenner at bluewin.ch> wrote:  

    Dear Lou, Mark, Mike, Bill and All,       Recent postings on- and off-line support in different ways the principle and logic for living systems that I have proposed:       As succinctly as possible:       -      Autopoiesis, meaning "self-making," describes a system that sustains and produces (and reproduces) itself by creating its own components form its environment (to which it contributes).       -      Formation of structure and boundary can happen from the evolution under recursion and recursion itself can happen under some circumstances spontaneously from the properties of an environment.       -      Accordingly, cellular bioelectric fields receive their patterning cues from an overarching and yet to be explored information field, which is integral to the process of translating environmental syntactic information to semantic actionable information and is naturally, then, fundamental to understanding the multiscale competency architecture that Mike elegantly describes.       -      The process of development from that zygote through elaborating cell divisions further installs this information-space architecture in all the cells, which accounts for the unusual properties of parts and wholes and their seamless integration, as we have discussed together in this forum.       -      Yes, Lou (should be Joe), I naturally agree with that. What I sought to convey is that the issue of parts and wholes in living, cognitive systems has a fundamental difference from machines. The parts individually sense the whole and the whole knows that it has individual, constituent parts. Each part contains some element of the whole within it, and these parts summate to be a whole comprised of those parts which are somewhat wholes. One of the reasons why it is difficult for us to adequately grasp the living frame is that we don't really have a mental model of this relationship in our daily lives. This is why I offered holograms as a short-cut to understanding this critical difference, and of course, directly refers back to Bohm's holomovement.       In my view, in order for the pairs evoked in the above snippets to function, they must be present as potential in state -1 to be actualized in state1and so on. This applies to part/whole, “self-“organization, syntactic/semantic. The terms “auto-poesis” and “spontaneous” in this interpretation and somewhat misleading, since nothing is isolated from its precursors – the information field, probably as vectors or tensors.  Bohm’s holomovement is one option. Bohm envisages the ground of the universe as the set of known, knowable and unknowable fields, whose essential qualities exist in their movement, and calls this ground the holomovement, the source of everything in the explicate order of common experience. I claim the Effective Field Theory, which contains a basis for “my” principle of opposition, has a better foundation in physics. With the above in mind, I look forward very much to the continuation of the debate.       Best,       Joe    
  Le 24.05.2025 20:16 CEST, Louis Kauffman <loukau at gmail.com> a écrit :          I think we are agreeing. I just say that it is too simple to say that machines are sums of their parts because the word “sum” is very complex here.  The point about the “sum” is that for us a machine is a something that we in principle know how to make by performing the “sum”. 
  When we go to ourselves it is different.    We do not know how to “make” ourselves or other living organisms from “parts”. So we are not knowing how to “sum” some parts to form a whole that is us.       Actually, we experience all the time the situation that we may know how to build something, but that does not at all tell us what is disclosed in its behaviour or in its properties. So there is a great subtlety in machines and that led Burks and other computer scientists to state that “a finite deterministic automaton can simulate to any degree of accuracy any articulated human behaviour”. That does not bring the machine to life.   

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