<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">An excellent paper discussing the limitations of the use of the machine metaphor in biology can be found here:<div><br></div><div><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259159128_Organisms_Machines">https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259159128_Organisms_Machines</a><br></div><div><br></div><div>The entire issue of the journal in which this article appears includes some useful discussions of this issue.</div><div>I agree that the concept of a machine is a high level abstraction, an idealization that ignores the deeply tychistic nature of things.</div><div>Indeed, like mathematics and the concept of number, the remarkable power of these symbolic representations to help us predict the way natural phenomena change and influence one another, can make them seem even more real than what they refer to. But remember, the image in the mirror is only a reflection.</div><div><br></div><div>— Terry</div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Nov 3, 2019 at 7:02 AM Stanley N Salthe <<a href="mailto:ssalthe@binghamton.edu">ssalthe@binghamton.edu</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">Thanks, Bruno. Here is a related text: <div><br></div><div>
<p><span><a href="https://aeon.co/ideas/wired-that-way-genes-do-shape-behaviours-but-its-complicated" target="_blank">https://aeon.co/ideas/wired-that-way-genes-do-shape-behaviours-but-its-complicated</a></span></p><p>STAN</p></div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Nov 3, 2019 at 5:24 AM Bruno Marchal <<a href="mailto:marchal@ulb.ac.be" target="_blank">marchal@ulb.ac.be</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><br>
> On 25 Oct 2019, at 21:02, Stanley N Salthe <<a href="mailto:ssalthe@binghamton.edu" target="_blank">ssalthe@binghamton.edu</a>> wrote:<br>
> <br>
>> <br>
>> Bruno, Joseph -- Somewhat delayed: I can contribute my 1993 definition of 'machine' as: "the most highly specified object there can be" No natural system qualifies under this definition.<br>
<br>
That is a quite astonishing definition, which makes sense for the digital machine (which can be seen as relative natural numbers, which I agree might not make sense in Nature. This is a quasi theorem in the Digital Mechanist Theory, as nature is “only” an appearance emerging from a relative statistics on all computations. Nature, in that frame is how the numbers see the numbers, and they cannot observe them, just a not entirely computable emerging pattern. In that setting, physics is no more a science studying an ontological reality, but a relative appearance brought by a statistics on all machine’s experience (and this is confirmed by quantum mechanics without wave packet reduction, like in Everett theory. This makes physics into a branch of digital information theory/computer science.<br>
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Bruno<br>
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>> <br>
>> STAN<br>
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</blockquote></div><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature">Professor Terrence W. Deacon<br>University of California, Berkeley</div>