Papers by Howard H Pattee
Nature, Cognition and System II, 1992
Page 1. THE MEASUREMENT PROBLEM IN PHYSICS, COMPUTATION, AND BRAIN THEORIES HHPAITEE Department o... more Page 1. THE MEASUREMENT PROBLEM IN PHYSICS, COMPUTATION, AND BRAIN THEORIES HHPAITEE Department of Systems Science TI Watson School of Engineering State University of New York Binghamton, New York 13901 ABSTRACf. ...
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Biosystems, 2001
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Biophysical Journal, 1961
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Biosemiotics, 2012
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Biosystems, 1989
The only epistemic relations between the world and organisms are established through evolution by... more The only epistemic relations between the world and organisms are established through evolution by natural selection, and learning by observation and measurement. In physics, measurements map an open domain of physical structure to a closed set of symbols. A basic problem in simulating evolution and measurement is that neither activity can be adequately formalized. Artificial world models based on programmable computers require a formalized domain of symbols in which the concepts of evolution and measurement are limited. The measurement problem also bears on the questions of the relation of computation to physics and to formal symbol systems and on what sense dissipationless computation is a useful concept.
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Biosemiotics, 2012
It is not obvious that the concept of causation, in any of its many forms, has ever played a nece... more It is not obvious that the concept of causation, in any of its many forms, has ever played a necessary role in the discovery of the laws of nature. Causation has a tortuous philosophical literature with no consensus in sight (e.g., Hart and Honore 1958; Bunge 1959; Taylor 1972), and modern physics has little interest in the concept. Nevertheless, causation is so ingrained in both the syntax and semantics of our natural language that we usually feel that events are somehow causally explained by almost any grammatically correct declarative statement that relates a noun and a verb phrase to the event: Why did the ball roll? Because John kicked the ball. Why did the ball bounce? Because the ball hit the post. In Aristotelian terms, the verb is a form of efficient cause, and either the subject or object can act as a material cause. If the subject happens to have a large brain we may also attribute a formal, teleological, or intentional cause to the event: Why did John kick the ball? Because John wanted a goal. As a child we figure out that these linguistic forms are transitive and always lead to a vicious circle or an infinite regress, but we are usually told that it is rude to continue to ask, “Why?” when presented with one proximal cause. The major weakness of the concept of causation is this Whorfian dependence on natural language. Thus, the richness and ambiguity of causal forms arises more from the richness and ambiguities of language than from any empirical necessity or from natural laws.
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Open Semiotics, 2023
Interpretation of human language is an obscure process that constructs meaning from symbol vehicl... more Interpretation of human language is an obscure process that constructs meaning from symbol vehicles. Less obscure is the symbol grounding of genetic language by copolymer folding. Folding is an energy-dependent dynamics that removes sequence degeneracy. There is no interpreter. The converse process of sensory input is initiated by folded macromolecules that convert external stimuli to molecular or electrical symbols. These symbol-matter events bridge the epistemic cut at all evolutionary levels.
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Biosemiotics, 2008
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Biosemiotics, 2021
Deacon speculates on the origin of interpretation of signs using autocatalytic origin of life mod... more Deacon speculates on the origin of interpretation of signs using autocatalytic origin of life models and Peircean terminology. I explain why interpretation evolved only later as a triadic intervention between symbols and actions. In all organisms the passive one-dimensional genetic informational symbol sequences are converted to active functional proteins or nucleic acids by three-dimensional folding. This symbol grounding is a direct symbol-to-action conversion. It is universal throughout all evolution. Folding is entirely a lawful physical process, leaving neither freedom nor necessity for interpretation. Similarly, the initial converse action-to-symbol conversion of sensory inputs also leaves no freedom for interpretation until after the action-tosymbol conversion. Keywords protein folding, origin of life, symbol grounding, self-replication, interpretation, declare no conflicts of interest Background history
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Always lurking behind our extensive scientific knowledge of laws, language, and life are the clas... more Always lurking behind our extensive scientific knowledge of laws, language, and life are the classical philosophers’ epistemological questions: By what criteria and actions do the concepts in our individual subjective brains conform to the external objective natural forms in the universe? How much is our knowledge of these forms limited by how our senses and brains have evolved? How much do these forms depend on conceptual and linguistic constraints? How effectively do the brain’s cognitive binary oppositions, like discrete and continuous, finite and infinite, time dependent and space (sequence) dependent, determinism and chance, describe the objective forms in the universe? And finally, if life and mind arose only from natural law-abiding earth, air, water, and fire, why are life and mind so peculiarly different? These are the types of questions that motivated these papers
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Artificial Life, 2019
Open-endedness is often considered a prerequisite property of the whole evolutionary system and i... more Open-endedness is often considered a prerequisite property of the whole evolutionary system and its dynamical behaviors. In the actual history of evolution on Earth, however, there are many examples showing that open-endedness is rather a consequence of evolution. We suggest that this view, which we call evolved open-endedness (EOE), be incorporated more into research on open-ended evolution. This view should allow for systematic investigation of more nuanced, more concrete research questions about open-endedness and its relationship with adaptation and sustainability.
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Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 2015
As a broad academic discipline phenomenology may be summarized as the study from a first person p... more As a broad academic discipline phenomenology may be summarized as the study from a first person point of view of what appears to subjective human conscious experience. As a historical philosophical movement phenomenology was often motivated by the belief that subjective human experience is the proper foundation of all philosophy. I explore phenomena from a broader evolutionary and physical point of view. I consider a phenomenon as the subjective consequence of a physical interaction with an individual organism. In physical terms, a phenomenon requires some form of detection or measurement. What is detected is determined by the organism, and is potentially functional for the organism as a self or subject. The concept of function has meaning only for living organisms. The classical human mind-body problem is an ill-defined complicated case of the more general epistemic subject-object problem, which at the origin of life I reduce to the primitive symbol-matter problem. I argue that the first memory-based self-replicating unit, like a cell, is the most primitive case of a necessary symbol-matter distinction. The first phenomena, which include all forms or sensing, detection, and measurement, require a subject-object distinction, called the epistemic cut. It is only because of such a subject-object distinction that populations of individual subjects can selectively adapt to their environment by heritable variations. This basic evolutionary process requires distinguishing the individual's subjective phenomena from the objective events of inexorable physical laws.
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Biosemiotics, 2009
ABSTRACT − Biosemiotics recognizes that life is distinguished from inanimate matter by its depend... more ABSTRACT − Biosemiotics recognizes that life is distinguished from inanimate matter by its dependence on material construction under the control of coded symbolic description. This distinction between matter and symbol extends from the origin of life throughout all of evolution to the ...
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Applied General Systems Research, 1978
General Systems Theory was first conceived and developed in the context of biological organisms, ... more General Systems Theory was first conceived and developed in the context of biological organisms, but at a time when a living system was only vaguely understood as a kind of chemical Cartesian robot. This view was intended as a synthetic extension of the engineering disciplines, for which the languages used for systems description came directly from the mathematics and epistemology of classical physics. These machine-like systems were later augmented with “informational” constraints by the infusion of concepts from cybernetics, and communication and control theory which were themselves outgrowths of the engineering view of artificial hardware systems.
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Biosemiotics, 2012
The necessary but not sufficient conditions for biological informational concepts like signs, sym... more The necessary but not sufficient conditions for biological informational concepts like signs, symbols, memories, instructions, and messages are (1) an object or referent that the information is about, (2) a physical embodiment or vehicle that stands for what the information is about (the object), and (3) an interpreter or agent that separates the referent information from the vehicle’s material structure, and that establishes the stands-for relation. This separation is named the epistemic cut, and explaining clearly how the stands-for relation is realized is named the symbol-matter problem. (4) A necessary physical condition is that all informational vehicles are material boundary conditions or constraints acting on the lawful dynamics of local systems. It is useful to define a dependency hierarchy of information types: (1) syntactic information (i.e., communication theory), (2) heritable information acquired by variation and natural selection, (3) non-heritable learned or creative information, and (4) measured physical information in the context of natural laws. High information storage capacity is most reliably implemented by discrete linear sequences of non-dynamic vehicles, while the execution of information for control and construction is a non-holonomic dynamic process. The first epistemic cut occurs in self-replication. The first interpretation of base sequence information is by protein folding; the last interpretation of base sequence information is by natural selection. Evolution has evolved senses and nervous systems that acquire non-heritable information, and only very recently after billions of years, the competence for human language. Genetic and human languages are the only known complete general purpose languages. They have fundamental properties in common, but are entirely different in their acquisition, storage and interpretation.
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Biosemiotics, 2012
The question is posed as to whether the behavior of living matter gives us any reason to reconsid... more The question is posed as to whether the behavior of living matter gives us any reason to reconsider fundamental physical principles. How is the problem of language likely to influence our concepts of physics? The problems of neuronal activity are felt to be too complex to confront directly with physical principles. We need to understand the physical basis of all symbolic activity on a more fundamental level.
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Introduction to Biosemiotics
Abstract: Biosemiotics distinguishes life from inanimate matter by its dependence on material con... more Abstract: Biosemiotics distinguishes life from inanimate matter by its dependence on material construction controlled by coded symbolic information. This irreducible primitive distinction between matter and symbol is necessary for open-ended evolvability and the origin of life as we ...
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Biosemiotics, 2012
Natural selection operates on living systems through their function and behavior. The biological ... more Natural selection operates on living systems through their function and behavior. The biological structures constraining this behavior always involve fortuitous elements, or frozen accidents, as well as essential principles. In order to distinguish the accidents from the principles we must refer to some theory of living systems. Similarly, in order to distinguish which biological constraints on linguistic form are fortuitous and which are fundamental, we must refer to some theory of symbolic systems. A theory of symbols must address the process that relates the symbol vehicle to its referent or meaning. At the level of natural language we have many facts, but still have great difficulty incorporating them in a theory of language. However, at the level of the gene the relation of symbol structures to their referent function is better understood. A careful look at this elementary symbol system may provide some clues to basic principles of language at higher levels. In particular, we consider the articulation of the discrete, rate-independent, linear symbol strings, which generate continuous, rate-dependent, three-dimensional functions through the folding transformation. We suggest that this complementary interaction of constraints and laws involves general principles that are elaborated in higher linguistic forms.
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Social Epistemology, 1990
Dietrich (1990) deals with a number of topics related to the currently dominant approach towards ... more Dietrich (1990) deals with a number of topics related to the currently dominant approach towards explaining cognitive phenomena. He presents a sketch of the basic theoretical structure of computationalism, and outlines some of its consequences for a number of venerable problems familiar from metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. Given the wide variety of issues discussed, it will come as no surprise that I cannot properly address all the claims he advances. In what follows, I concern myself exclusively with computationalism ...
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Papers by Howard H Pattee