<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div>Dear All or whoever related Cantor and Einstein, </div><div><br></div>Please go deeper into the asserted relationship of the diagonal method and its relationship for consciousness and relativity. <div>I find it not credible but it is a fascinating suggestion. So perhaps worth exploring. Fits nicely with Goedel’s use of the diagonal method in his incompleteness theorem. </div><div><br><div>Eric<br id="lineBreakAtBeginningOfSignature"><div dir="ltr">Sent from my iPad</div><div dir="ltr"><br><blockquote type="cite">On Jun 1, 2025, at 4:26 PM, William Miller <wbmiller1@cox.net> wrote:<br><br></blockquote></div><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><div class="ydpc83186cdyahoo-style-wrap" style="font-family:times new roman, new york, times, serif;font-size:16px;"><div></div>
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<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Yes, Joe. I would absolutely agree, and
I believe that John would too, that the ambiguities that we discuss
are never fixed. As we saw it, these ambiguities exist as implicates
that the organism settles into explicate action as biological
expression (and I'll ask John to correct me if he thinks
differently).
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<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Implicit to our perspective, but not
specifically noted, was that the nature of those ambiguities are
constantly shifting. Those shifts relate to temporal alterations in
the environment that offers cues embedded with uncertainties and
concurrent shifts in the receptive organism, which is always under
self-construction.
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<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Mike's fine work on self-improvising
memories is an excellent example of the fluidity that has to exist
between the external environment, the internal representation of it
by which the organism self-interprets external reality
(infoautopoiesis), its receptive capabilities, and the liberties and
constraints of its range of responses. The circumstance that the
uncertainty is itself mutable even during this process is why I think
that Pedro and Pablo's distinctions on the adjacent and a narrowing
of the uncertainty gap are so useful in understanding how cells and
organisms deal with the environment.
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<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">These requisites impact our
understanding of the difference between machines and the living
frame, I believe. Living organisms receive their information from
their outside through a replete cell or species-specific sensory
armamentarium, and they use those senses to protect themselves and
survive. However, and little considered, they do so by staying within
preferential states of homeorhetic flux. Consequently, cells are
measuring information for what can be considered infocomputational
value but also for valence, as qualitative differences between a
current state (which includes a memory of a prior one) and a
preferred flux status. My colleagues and I regard this difference as
an experience at any scale.
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<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">This valenced aspect is crucial to the
transformation of what can be termed syntactic environmental
information into meaningful internally self-generated meaningful
semantic information, which is valenced. This biosemiotic translation
only exists in the living state. Machines have no actual internal
valences. These are directly related to the constant shift of
uncertainties as you say, Joe, which is the living state. Living
organisms have doubts. Machines do not. As Katherine stresses, you can't denude the living process of its emotional qualities. <br></p>
<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Best,
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<p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Bill
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On Sunday, June 1, 2025 at 03:26:19 AM MST, <joe.brenner@bluewin.ch> wrote:
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<span style="font-size:13pt;">Dear Bill, John, Lou and All,</span>
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<span style="font-size:13pt;">Ref.: Torday and Miller, "The resolution of ambiguity as the basis for life: A cellular bridge between Western reductionism and Eastern holism, <em>Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, </em>131, Dec 2017, pp. 288-297</span>
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<span style="font-size:13pt;">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.</span>
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<span style="font-size:13pt;">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!</span>
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<span style="font-size:13pt;">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: <em>dubito, ergo sum</em>) in relation to Eastern thought and some of its Western expressions. </span>
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<span style="font-size:13pt;">The "Self-referential uncertainty" that extends to relationships between parts and wholes (or their environment) can should in my view be expressed as a <em>changing</em> 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.</span>
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<span style="font-size:13pt;">I hope that FIS'ers will see the same relevance of John and Bill's paper to this debate as I do.</span>
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<span style="font-size:13pt;">Best,</span>
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<span style="font-size:13pt;">Joe</span>
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Le 28.05.2025 11:50 CEST, JOHN TORDAY <jtorday@ucla.edu> a écrit :
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<span style="font-size:large;">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 ....</span>
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<span style="font-size:large;">"<span style="font-family:'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;">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. <strong>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.</strong>"</span></span>
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<span style="font-size:large;"><span style="font-family:'times new roman', 'new york', times, serif;">With all due respect to Bill, I have published several articles invoking Lynn Margulis Sagan's <u>Symbiogenesis</u> as the putative mechanism by which organisms have assimilated factors in the e<u>nvironment to form their physiology</u>, consciousness emerging from that process, expressed again most recently (</span><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33);font-family:BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Fira Sans', 'Droid Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif;">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 (</span><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33);font-family:BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Fira Sans', 'Droid Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif;">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.</span><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33);font-family:BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Fira Sans', 'Droid Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif;"> 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 (</span></span><span style="color:rgb(33,33,33);font-family:BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Fira Sans', 'Droid Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif;"><span style="font-size:large;">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.</span></span>
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<span style="color:rgb(33,33,33);font-family:BlinkMacSystemFont, -apple-system, 'Segoe UI', Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, 'Fira Sans', 'Droid Sans', 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif;font-size:16px;">Sincerely,</span>
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John S. Torday
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Professor of Pediatrics
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Obstetrics and Gynecology
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Evolutionary Medicine
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UCLA
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<em>Fellow, The European Academy of Science and Arts</em>
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