Teleodynamics

I work in a field called emergence which is trying to solve such ginormous mysteries as how information emerges from energy, how life emerges from chemistry, how selves emerge from atoms, how soulishness emerges from life, how purpose emerges from non-purpose.

We’re not asking whether they do. Evidence suggests strongly that they do, and not the other way around with God, the great purposeful and informed soul in the sky making atoms and chemistry.

We’re not asking why they emerged either. Or where or when, because it’s safe to assume they didn’t just emerge here in our neighborhood of the universe.

No, we’re asking precisely how they emerge. We seek a scientific account as solid as science’s explanation for lightning, clouds or tides. No smoke and mirrors, no woo woo or fancy technical sounding forces we claim exist but can’t explain, no thumbs on the scale, no sneaking a God in to give it a nudge, no appeals to one mystery like quantum mechanics to explain another mystery like purpose.

The question boils down to how matter becomes mattering.

The philosopher John Stuart Mill got the ball rolling on emergence research when he noted that two toxic substances, chlorine gas and sodium metal, when combined produced common table salt. He thought there must be some special combinatorial logic that makes it so the attributes of parts don’t simply add up to the attributes of wholes. He speculated that the same combinatorial logic might explain how life emerges from chemistry.  In this he raised questions about where properties really reside. If sodium metal is toxic here but not there, does it have the property of toxicity?  Do any things have properties and if not where do their properties reside?

To leap out a few levels, personality researchers originally thought that people had personalities that stayed pretty much fixed. Lately they’ve noticed that, as with the chemicals that make salt, what we’re with makes a difference to what we are. A shy person in some contexts becomes bold. A grumpy person in some contexts becomes sweet. If you hang out with overweight people you tend to gain weight. Your deepest held values are largely inherited from the company you keep.* As political scientists say “Where you stand depends on where you sit.”

I called soul “soulishness” to hint at this mutability.  In the enlightenment the solidity of souls was questioned.  Descartes and others thought of souls as the unchangable parts of our natures that even outlast our bodies.  The French philosopher La Metre scoffed, noting that if you get a guy drunk his soul is radically altered. Some said that’s not the soul but an overlay on it, as though the soul is your original face over which you can put a drunkard’s mask. Another French philosopher Diderot wondered whether there was really an original face under the masks.  Maybe we were nothing but masks.  Or to put it another way, maybe a soul wasn’t a specific thing with specific characteristics but rather a range of behaviors on various dimensions. Your personality is like a mixing board–you dial up your charm here, you mute your sexuality there–you change the mix depending on the company you’re keeping.  You might have noticed this at a party that brought together friends from your various circles. It can be hard to know what personality to wear.  Over there are your professional colleagues, and sitting right next to them are your old party animal friends from high school. You don’t know quite how to be. Who are you anyway?

Mill’s salt example gives us a hint at how relationship changes properties.  The toxic parts of chlorine gas bind with the toxic parts of sodium metal. Locking to each other their toxicity is constrained or bound up. We’re protected from their toxic natures but you could also say that their toxic natures are protected from the outside.  Nobel laureate Physicist Robert Laughlin notes the relevant obvious: Molecules by themselves don’t roll but if you bind enough of them together they become “protected” in the form of a wheel. The rolling property emerges. Protection like this is one reason why you can’t simply add the part’s qualities to get the whole’s qualities.  Some are locked off or protected in their effects on the whole.

And in fact, though the rest of us haven’t quite caught on–nor do we have to for everyday thought–physicists have now demonstrated that there are no solid stable indivisible things. Atom means indivisible thing, and atomism is now officially dead. Even at the atomic and subatomic levels everything is sub-divideable and moving all the time. When researching emergence we have to factor in this otherwise ignorable feature of causality. A thing is really a dynamic process whose features result from their ever changing interactions. What we perceive as a thing is really a habitually stable dynamical relationship in which the parts happen to cycle through similar states consistently enough that they become reliable. Even a salt crystal could become unstable breaking into its separate toxic components. It just doesn’t tend to nearly often or long enough to pose a problem. A wheel, then isn’t a solid thing made of solid things, it’s a dance routine in which each dancer is  a dance routine in which each dancer is a dance routine, etc.

It’s a very hard concept to wrap one’s mind around.  And of course unlike a dance routine, these aren’t choreographed by outsiders or intended by their parts. A wheel’s molecule doesn’t have a leader inside or out who says “C’mon people let’s work together on this.”

So how do the dance routines emerge, especially in the composition of living beings? That’s what emergentists are working on.  And we’re making great progress. I predict that within five to ten years we’ll have a solid and well accepted scientific answer.  Can you imagine that?  Science really explaining how mattering bootstraps it’s way out of matter with no Godly assist?  Whether it would change a lot of minds, it certainly would change the dimensions of the debate.  It would no longer be a forced choice between life serving God’s purposes and life being completely meaningless.  It would no longer be, you are the soul that God gave you vs. you are a chembot zombie meat puppet with no soul.

Another take-away therefore from this research is an overlooked factor in causality. We think of things as caused by outside things pushing them. The bowling pin fell when it was hit by the bowling ball. There’s another kind of causality that is getting a lot of attention in science these days. It’s the way the internal dynamics–the dance routine between the parts–constrain each other, limiting their ability to move in certain ways. Think salt again. It’s two component chemicals are mutual constraints on each other, restricting what they can do. Anthropomorphizing, you could say the two chemicals are like two buddies in the buddy system at some drug-rehab program: I’ll keep you in line if you’ll keep me in line.  We tend to think of constraint as the enemy of free-will, but it’s not. Think of how the drug-rehab buddies, if successful, restore free-will. Self-discipline is just such internal self-constraint a dance routine in which the sub-routines keep each other in line. The successfully self-disciplined are those who negotiate with themselves and win. They win more autonomy and self-directedness. People with self-discipline generally have more free will to work with. Paradoxically freedom is a matter of forming the right constraints.

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Witches, goblins, and gremlins with magical powers, kings hand-picked by God, glass spheres with star-holes encapsulating the earth, rocks falling to earth because they want to be where they belong…

Yup, the cluelessness of past generation’s assumptions is laughable. It makes us proud we’ve overcome it. It also makes us wonder what we assume today that will look clueless to future generations.

To overcome cluelessness, we try to doubt all of our assumptions. But you can’t doubt assumptions you don’t know you make.

If I had to bet where we’re most clueless today, it would be about causality. We think science has licked it, but some persistent mysteries suggest that we’re missing something. I know, I know. Whenever someone says there’s more to causality than meets the eye, responsible thinkers say, “Uh-oh, blast from the past, I’m about to be pitched on some magical woo-woo gremlin power.”

I’m not pitching gremlins. In fact, the opposite, I’m arguing that while scientists claim victory in purging the gremlins, they’re still harboring stow-aways they don’t notice or won’t acknowledge. They try to explain life by dissecting it into its parts, but then ambiguously treat the parts as both lifeless as rocks and as purposeful as gremlins. For example, we treat genes as nothing more than chemical strands, and at the same time the builders and organizers of bodies. Likewise, we treat brains as meat-webs of trigger cells, but also as the seat of the soul. Exposing this problem, Biologist Paul Weiss, winner of the prestigious National Medal of Science said:  “In trying to restore the loss of information suffered by thus lifting isolated fragments out of context, we have assigned the job of reintegration to a corps of anthropomorphic gremlins. As a result, we are now plagued-or blessed, depending on one’s party view-with countless demigods, like those in antiquity, doing the jobs we do not understand: the organizers, operators, inductors, repressors, promoters, regulators, etc.,—all prosthetic devices to make up for the amputations which we have allowed to be perpetrated on the organic wholeness, or to put it more innocuously, the “systems” character, of nature and of our thinking about nature.”

I promised constraint propagation for this column. It’s a key to what I think future generations will say we were missing about causality. That will be next column. But first, to reveal the blind-spot, a very short history of thought about causality:

We hear the first careful wondering about the nature of causality in Aristotle. He distinguished four kinds, and to illustrate them, describes how all four contribute to a house being built:

Material cause:  The lumber, nails, windows.
Formal cause:  The plans for configuring the materials
Efficient cause:  The carpenter’s work, hammering nails; sawing wood.
Final cause: The goal or final end–that for which the house is built–providing future shelter to someone.

For centuries people assumed everything had its four causes, with their final causes built right into them. You are born with your purpose built right into you. A rock falls to the ground because being on the ground is the rock’s final cause–its goal.

The church came to see things Aristotle’s way too. God was the carpenter (efficient cause) of the universe, he had the plans (formal cause) and the goal or purpose (final cause) for all matter (material cause).  He had endowed everything with its purpose.

Kings and popes claimed that their plans were God’s plans and that people should simply get with God’s program. By the end of the middle ages though, people started to wonder about it, spurred by frustration with the oppression perpetrated in God’s name, the conflict between supposedly God-elected leaders, and exposure to successful cultures with different Gods.

And then Newton demonstrated there was no glass ceiling on either the earth or causality–we weren’t encased in God’s glass spheres as had been thought since Aristotle. All motion on earth and in the infinite heavens could be explained by efficient cause alone. No purpose–just action and reaction.  When asked what final cause or purpose gravity served, Newton said “I wouldn’t feign a hypothesis.”

Philosophers started to notice that final cause was actually a pretty sketchy concept. How can needing a future house cause the existence of one today? That’s backwards causality. Ultimately, the sciences rejected final cause as a kind of blind faith.

Everywhere that efficient cause was successful and began to dominate in explanations, it tended to crowd out final cause. After all if it’s all just things bumping into each other, what do you need with purposes. But people weren’t going to drop purpose just like that. So there have been clashes and ultimately a rip in the treatment of causality.

An early and significant move like this was made by the Muslims in the late 11th century. Muslims had allowed for both efficient and final cause for centuries. Their science had far outpaced the West’s. Suddenly they doubted that you could have it both ways. Either things moved the way they did because a purposeful God moved them, or because of efficient cause. The Muslims at long last decided to surrender more fully to God’s purposes and in the process they ended up surrendering their scientific edge to the West.

And in the West too, there have been repeated backlashes against efficient cause’s dominance.  The “Fideists” who said we’ll never be able to explain all behavior with efficient cause alone and therefore that we should trust in God or the Bible. Luther, who demanded faith in God’s purposes over reason. The romantics–who thought science was killing spirit, and then today’s fundamentalists of every stripe who despite their fierce battles against each other share a commitment to some higher purpose as the ultimate and final cause.

Still, with commitment to efficient cause alone, science took off like gangbusters.  It’s as though being able to talk about something’s purposes had killed curiosity.  You could explain anything by saying “it’s meant to do that.” Now that purpose was barred from science, people really had to figure out how to explain what causes things by means alone, not by ends. Why was there lightning?  Not so God could purposefully threaten and punish sinners, but because of the discharge of electro-magnetic energy.  The question “Why?” in science stopped meaning “to what end?” and became instead “by what means?”

And science claimed victory.  No more gremlins.

Except they keep showing up, for example in what’s called the functionalist approach to biology where evolution itself is treated as a master gremlin. Evolution is both a passive statistical process whereby things simply last different lengths of time, and it’s also the blind watchmaker, the innovator, creator and designer of functional parts.  Where the ambiguity is most exposed is in evolutionary psychology, a source of great insights but also often a weakly disciplined inquiry in which so long as you can come up with a trait’s function or purpose, you don’t have to wonder much by what means it arose.

Science based exclusively on efficient cause isn’t going to cut it.  There is final cause, or else we simply can’t explain the radical shift in that appears with life and mind. Next piece will get at constraint propagation as promised.  And if we researchers interested in it are onto something, you’ll be among this generation’s first to know about and apply it.

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The bittersweet sad intense pain of missing a place, a person, a crew, a time.

What’s with that? How does that happen? Here’s a take on it you probably haven’t heard before.

I’ll start way back with the big bang.  If everything was all concentrated and homogeneous at the origin, how did our universe ever get so lumpy, with separate things like stars and planets, you and me? The 2008 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to scientists who identified the source as broken symmetry. A first pass explanation of their idea is simple.

You know how you can easily balance a broomstick on the palm of your hand? If it’s centered, symmetrically upright, it tends to stay there. But if it tips asymmetrically toward one direction, then it becomes increasingly difficult to balance. The symmetry was broken. The tipped get tippier.

The butterfly effect is the most familiar version of this.  Remember it? Conceivably a butterfly’s wings flapping could lead to major shifts in weather patterns.  People latched onto that idea as evidence of uncertainty and the potential for miracles. We like ideas that suggest that life has chutes-and-ladder-like qualities, so it’s not just stepwise plodding. It gives us hope of rag-to-riches leverage but also allows that if we don’t end up fulfilling our ambitions we have an explanation that makes it not our fault: “I tried, but life has surprising shoots and I fell down one.”

Shoots and ladders aside, the butterfly effect is really about broken symmetry, how a little thing can start a big thing.  How just as a slight tip can cause the broomstick to fall or how a shout can cause an avalanche. Think of it also as the way a meteorite passing the earth could fall under our gravitational influence, being taken off course. The closer it gets to the earth, the stronger the earth’s gravitational pull.  That’s broken symmetry too.

With the big bang everything flew apart. It would have flown apart evenly but the tiniest little micro-variation got things tipping. Not falling over as like the broomstick but comparable. The universe got lumpy by the same basic process that made our moon. The moon formed when a meteor hit the earth kicking up an enormous dust cloud. Imagine that the dust started out almost evenly distributed, but little variations caused the gravitational pull in some regions to be greater than in others.  The dense grew denser. And now most of that dust is concentrated in that great lump of green cheese. A little difference in distribution causes a big difference in concentrations. Broken symmetry explains seperateness and difference.

There’s broken symmetry in thought and culture too. You meet someone, fall under their gravitational influence, start hanging out, fall further.  For good or ill–it could be the love of your life or a heroin dealer.  Either way a little tipping becomes a lot. And these days we’re rarely tipped in just one direction. In ancient tribal days, you could be born into a tribe that tipped you strongly into its ways there, in the tribe you would stay for all your days. Now, we’re under diverse influences.  You move a thousand miles to be with your new partner, but miss your old town and people. You design your whole life around a job you love and then they lay you off and you have to find a new place to orbit.

Broken symmetry implies something really fundamental about the universe but also about your life.  If the universe is lumpy, then this notion that we are all one and that everything is connected needs to be refined.  We are all one but some of us are more one than others of us.  Everything is connected but not equally.  There are plenty of people who have negligible influence on you.  They are off in their own lumpy region under their own influences.  They’re not part of your tribe and therefore are different from you.  But then you happen to meet. You’ve been on independent pages a long time so you start out on different pages. But vive la difference, you like each other.  Being with each other you start to influence each other.  But lumpy life that it is, you’re not just under their influence.  You’ve got other influences operating on you from before and they still tug.  So you miss what you had even while your drawn into what you’re having.  We are all planets under changing influences falling in with some and tearing away from others.  Something like that.

There’s more to this story of course.  In particular I’ll want to say more about influence. How does influence happen?  For that we get into another one of these new scientific concepts:  Constraint propagation.

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It’s not true about the 21 grams. That was an error in measurement back in 1907 when Duncan McDougall claimed to have weighed a soul. There’s no weight loss with death, which is fine with most people because we’ve long assumed the soul was a weightless, sizeless, timeless substance anyway.

Still, weightless, size-less, timeless substances are scientific dead ends. If there’s no way to detect a thing, then there’s no way for science to get a grip on it.  That’s fine with most fans of the soul. Science should keep its hands off souls. But it’s not OK with scientists.  The dead end forces them to look for another explanation for why living bodies act so differently from dead ones.

They have a new explanation, but it’s not a thing.  It is, in fact weightless and sizeless, but not timeless or a substance. I don’t mean to be mysterious. I’m talking science so let me be concrete.

Picture a small pile of metal. A machinist shapes it up and voila you’ve got, let’s say, a lock and key.  It’s great.  It’s got function. It serves your purposes. Much more so than a small pile of metal.  So what did you add that made it functional?

Oxford professor Michael Polanyi says nothing was added. What makes it functional is not an addition but a subtraction. A pile of metal can take all sorts of forms. You can pile it this way; you can pile it that way. Locks and keys are highly constrained. Machinists make the parts with what they call “low tolerances” meaning a lot of constraint and specificity on their shapes and sizes so that the parts interact with each other just so.

As a result, the lock and key do fewer things, not more than the pile did. When the lock and key get old and worn out, they lose function, but, Polanyi points out, they do so by gaining more possibilities, more configurations of the parts or technically, more “degrees of freedom.” In other words the parts get looser than they were. Now the old clunker can jam or the key flops around.

A broken machine does more things, not less. We prefer our machines highly constrained.  An unreliable computer has more behaviors, more states it can be in. A reliable one has less, only the behaviors we want. The weightless, sizeless non-substance that makes things functional is constraint.  You can’t talk about the weight of the states the lock and key can’t be in. You can’t talk about the size of the states they can’t be in. The states they can’t be in aren’t some added substance. But you can talk about time because constraint is a difference that occurs over time: Before, a loose pile of metal; after, a constrained lock and key, after, again a loose lock and key.

I used to have an unreliable computer. I’m not saying whose operating system it ran, but I’ll tell you it was way too versatile for me.  I was amazed by the sheer variety of ways it would act. It seemed to invent new creative ways of bombing every day.  For example, at the drop of a hat it would do blue screens which I’ll grant was clever but not what I wanted when writing under a deadline.  I wanted it to behave itself, to show some self-constraint.  One day I got out of my blue-lighted chair and dropped down to the competitor’s store. I had heard that their computers were less versatile. They did fewer things like blue screening.  That was fine with me.  I didn’t need versatility; I needed functional constraint.  I bought one and it’s been a good three years for me and my much more limited computer.

As a result, I’ve become more constrained too.  I love my replacement computer by which I mean to say I’m constrained by it. I’d even say loyal, addicted and domesticated to it. Before, if you asked me what kind of computer I wanted, I’d have been more flexible.  Now, I’m less flexible.  I want only the kind I have. It is, what in business we call a proprietary good, one you shop for by brand.  You accept no substitutes.  In other words, you’re constrained by it.

My computer’s makers likes it that way. They wants me to be as loyal, addicted and domesticated as I am. And now that the likes of me are buying their products, their employees go to work and rather than working on just anything all day, they’re highly constrained too.  They’re constrained to working on how to make things that are constrained the way people like me want them to be. That way we customers will become that much more loyal, addicted and domesticated to their products. In other words more constrained.

And then also if a friend asks me what kind of computer to buy, I won’t say “Oh, I don’t know,” or name any of a dozen other brands. I’ll be constrained to saying this brand.  And in that way the constraint spreads or propagates.

And what has this got to do with souls?  Constraint and constraint propagation apply all the way up and down, with differences along the way that mark the shift from physics to chemistry, to biology to psychology sociology.

At the bottom, if you read my article about Broken Symmetry, you’ll find constraint even there.  Remember, as the balanced broomstick tips over, the more it tips the more it tips?  Before it tips, it is balanced symmetrically. It could tip in any direction. After it tips, its tip-able direction is highly and increasingly constrained.

Your body is not a machine made by a man or, I’ll argue, a creator. At least for scientists to fulfill their (constrained) obligation, they can’t settle for saying the soul is a weightless, size-less, time-less substance that is made by a bigger fancier weightless, size-less, time-less substance.  We can’t therefore treat a living soulful being as the equivalent of lock and key made by the machinist.  Still, in its functionality,  your body and even your mind are like the lock and key if only in that they do consist of parts that are highly constrained to and by each other, and to their context.  As the great philosopher Emannuel Kant said, “The definition of an organic body is that it is a body, every part of which is there for the sake of the other (reciprocally as end, and at the same time, means)”

In later articles I’ll talk more about how Kant’s “means and ends” business relates to constraint, constraint propagation, causality, the origin of life, and souls, and also to missing the sweet souls that come and go in our lives.

In the mean time, if this article constrains your thinking even a little, let it be by encouraging you to tip less toward explaining all behaviors as caused by new things and more toward explanations based on constraint. The leading researcher in this area, Terrence Deacon says, the whole is not more than the sum of its parts, its less. In other words, when parts start interacting with each other as wholes, they constrain each other. The whole lock does less things than the pile of metal pieces can do.

And I know I know, this material is likely to give a reader a headache. That’s the way it is with novel constraints sometimes, like the ones imposed by new counter-intuitive ideas.  I’ll do my best to keep these reflections grounded. And after all, it might be worth the effort. Researchers like Deacon are coming at old mysteries from new angles that might finally split them open, explaining lots.

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Abstract: A scientifically adequate theory of semiotic processes must ultimately be founded on a theory of information that can unify the physical, biological, cognitive, and computational uses of the concept. Unfortunately, no such unification exists, and more importantly, the causal status of informational content remains ambiguous as a result. Lacking this grounding, semiotic theories have tended to be predominantly phenomenological taxonomies rather than dynamical explanations of the representational processes of natural systems.  This paper argues that the problem of information that prevents the development of a scientific semiotic theory is the necessity of analyzing it as a negative relationship: defined with respect to absence.  This is cryptically implicit in concepts of design and function in biology, acknowledged in psychological and philosophical accounts of intentionality and content, and is explicitly formulated in the mathematical theory of communication (aka “information theory”). Beginning from the base established by Claude Shannon, which otherwise ignores issues of content, reference, and evaluation, this two part essay explores its relationship to two other higher-order theories that are also explicitly based on an analysis of absence: Boltzmann’s theory of thermodynamic entropy (in Part 1) and Darwin’s theory of natural selection (in Part 2). This comparison demonstrates that these theories are both formally homologous and hierarchically interdependent. Their synthesis into a general theory of entropy and information provides the necessary grounding for theories of function and semiosis.

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Abstract: A scientifically adequate theory of semiotic processes must ultimately be founded on a theory of information that can unify the physical, biological, cognitive, and computational uses of the concept. Unfortunately, no such unification exists, and more importantly, the causal status of informational content remains ambiguous as a result. Lacking this grounding, semiotic theories have tended to be predominantly phenomenological taxonomies rather than dynamical explanations of the representational processes of natural systems.  This paper argues that the problem of information that prevents the development of a scientific semiotic theory is the necessity of analyzing it as a negative relationship: defined with respect to absence.  This is cryptically implicit in concepts of design and function in biology, acknowledged in psychological and philosophical accounts of intentionality and content, and is explicitly formulated in the mathematical theory of communication (aka “information theory”). Beginning from the base established by Claude Shannon, which otherwise ignores issues of content, reference, and evaluation, this two part essay explores its relationship to two other higher-order theories that are also explicitly based on an analysis of absence: Boltzmann’s theory of thermodynamic entropy (in Part 1) and Darwin’s theory of natural selection (in Part 2). This comparison demonstrates that these theories are both formally homologous and hierarchically interdependent. Their synthesis into a general theory of entropy and information provides the necessary grounding for theories of function and semiosis.

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INTRODUCTION

Neuropsychological theories make implicit assumptions about brain organization and the relationships between structure and function. These include assumptions about the movement and representation of information within brain structures and neural circuits and about the phylogenesis and development of these substrates. Unfortunately, our knowledge of human neuroanatomy remains incomplete and is particularly lacking in detailed information about the patterns of axonal connections-the basic circuits of the brain. As a result, the anatomical assumptions of neuropsychological theories are often represented by no more than diagrams of logical relationships between operationally defined functions, where the relationships are attributed to connections and the functions are assigned to areas.

The last decades have seen remarkable advances in experimental neuroanatomy using nonhuman species. Since the discovery of autoradiographic and peroxidase axonal tracer techniques in the 1970s, the development of information concerning the connectional patterns of monkey, cat, and rat brains has proceeded at an explosive rate. It is probably not too ambitious to expect that the details of the connectional anatomy for the brains of these model laboratory species will be thoroughly catalogued well before the turn of the next century. Although we still lack the means to directly analyze human brain circuitry at a comparable level of detail, the remarkable similarity in cellular and connectional anatomy in mammalian brains makes it possible to apply many of these general findings to the problem of understanding human brain anatomy.

If the 19th century “diagram makers” were guilty of inventing, singling out, or oversimplifying neural connections to fit their psychological models of brain processes; neuropsychological theories at present are guilty of ignoring the growing body of “diagrams” of empirically identified neural connections. Maps of the direct and indirect pathways through which information can be transmitted within the brain, and of the general patterns these pathways exhibit, can provide rigorous constraints within which to guide development of models of brain function. Perhaps for the first time in the study of the human brain it is possible to ask what sort of neuropsychological theories are suggested by the anatomy rather than the other way around.
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Abstract: Bateson left an unresolved ambiguity in his explanation of the relationship of the mind to the world, the map to the territory. This ambiguity is related to his failure to develop a theory of intentionality, reference, “aboutness.” However, he left us all the tools necessary to resolve this ambiguity and to lay the groundwork for a theory of intentionality. In using these tools, a different emphasis is placed on the relationship between change and difference. A proposal is made for an understanding of the rudiments of abstraction. Finally, the ambiguity is addressed and the groundwork of a theory of intentionality proposed, through an understanding of the distinction between (a) the indirect access of creatural mental process to the pleromic world and (b) the direct access of our pleromic hands to the pleromic world. It is through the interplay and alternation of indirect perception/cognition of the world and direct action on the world in manually-operated experiments that Bateson’s problem of “maps, of maps, of maps, ad infinitum” is solved and a theory of mediate realism can be derived from his work, linking to an understanding of the roots of intentionality.

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Abstract: Deacon has recently proposed that complexes of genes can be integrated into functional groups as a result of environmental changes that mask and unmask selection pressures. For example, many animals endogenously synthesize ascorbic acid (vitamin C), but anthropoid primates have only a nonfunctional version of the crucial gene for this pathway. It is hypothesized that the loss of functionality occurred in the evolutionary past when a diet rich in vitamin C masked the effect of the gene, and its loss effectively trapped the animals in a fruit-eating lifestyle. As a result, the complex of abilities that support this lifestyle were evolutionarily bound together, forming a multilocus complex. In this study we use evolutionary computation simulations to explore the thesis that masking and unmasking can transfer dependence from one set of genes to many sets, and thereby integrate the whole complex of genes. We used a framework based on Hinton and Nowlan’s 1987 simulation of the Baldwin effect. Additional gene complexes and an environmental parameter were added to their basic model, and the fitness function extended. The simulation clearly demonstrates that the genetic redistribution effect can occur in silico, showing an initial advantage of endogenously synthesized vitamin C, followed by transfer of the fitness contribution to the complex of genes that together allow the acquisition of vitamin C from the environment. As is well known in the modeling community, the Baldwin effect only occurs in simulations when the population of agents is ‘‘poised on the brink” of discovering the genetically specified solution. Similarly, the redistribution effect occurs in simulations under specific initial conditions: too little vitamin C in the environment, and its synthesis it is never fully masked; too much vitamin C, and the abilities required to acquire it are not tightly integrated. The Baldwin effect has been hypothesized as a potential mechanism for developing language-specific adaptations like innate universal grammar and other highly modular capacities. We conclude with a discussion of the relevance of genetic assimilation and genetic redistribution to the evolution of language and other cognitive adaptations.

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PP

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