Simplified genealogy of biophilosophy and cybernetics

Catastrophes: A History and Theory of an Operative Concept, 2014

Howard Pattee championed the term “epistemic cut” to describe the symbol-matter, subject-object, genotypephenotype distinction. But the precise point of contact between logical deductive formalisms and physicality still needs elucidation. Can information be physical? How does nonphysical mind arise from physicality to then establish formal control over that physicality (e.g., engineering feats, computer science)? How did inanimate nature give rise to an algorithmically organized, semiotic and cybernetic life? Both the practice of physics and life itself require traversing not only an epistemic cut, but a Cybernetic Cut. A fundamental dichotomy of reality is delineated. The dynamics of physicality (“chance and necessity”) lie on one side. On the other side lies the ability to choose with intent what aspects of ontological being will be preferred, pursued, selected, rearranged, integrated, organized, preserved, and used (cybernetic formalism).

Pragmatics &# 38; Cognition, 2007

Abstract: It is argued that robots are just quasi-autonomous beings, which must be understood, within an emergent systems view, as intrinsically linked to and presupposing human beings as societal creatures within a technologically mediated world. Biosemiotics is introduced as a perspective on living systems that is based upon contemporary biology but reinterpreted through a qualitative organicist tradition in biology. This allows for emphasizing the differences between (1) an organism as a general semiotic system with vegetative and self-reproductive capacities, (2) an animal body also with sentience and phenomenal states, and (3) higher forms of anthroposemiotic systems such as humans, machines and robots. On all three levels, representations (or sign action) are crucial processes. The “representationalism” invoked by critiques of cognitive science and robotics tends to focus only on simplistic notions of representations, and must be distinguished from a Peircean or biosemiotic notion of representation. Implications for theorizing about the physical, biological, animate, phenomenal and social body and their forms of autonomy is discussed. Key Words: biosemiotics, autonomy, organicism, representationalism, robots, levels of reality.

EVOLUTION & CYBERNETICS, 2019

The Cybernetic aspect reveals both the true motive and the meaning of the gradual process of change and development over millions of years. We have analyzed our formalized model and valued functioning using The Measure of the Abilities. The Measure of the Abilities can increase only. The Measure of Abilities is a continuum (a set of continuous and inseparable) of three hypostases. With an increase in The Measure of Abilities three characteristics increase always: (1) the Memory volume; (2) the speedy transmission of sensory and motor impulses; (3) the reliability and robustness of Memory. All three hypostases of The Measure of Abilities are changed simultaneously and in the same direction, increase only. The article is focused on biologists and cybernetics. Formalized model and its the phenomenological description Our article is continuing the work "Conrad Hal Waddington and Can We Find a New Idea?" The author proposed a formalized model of living being and its phenomenological description (Kireev, 2019-1). Our model consists of "black box" (Ashby, 1956) with one input and one output (Fig.1). Such a model reflects both the relationships between stimuli and responses and the causal mechanisms of animal behavior. Stimuli come on entrance one by one. The responses appear on output as a result of the model functioning after receipts its own stimulus.

Early modern automata, understood as efforts to ‘model’ life, to grasp its singular properties and/or to unveil and demystify its seeming inaccessibility and mystery, are not just fascinating liminal, boundary, hybrid, crossover or go-between objects, while they are all of those of course. They also pose a direct challenge to some of our common conceptions about mechanism and embodiment. They challenge the simplicity of the distinction between a purported ‘mechanistic’ worldpicture, its ontology and its goals, and on the other hand an attempt to understand ourselves and animals more broadly as flesh-and-blood, affective entities (that is, not just breathing and perspiring, but also desiring and ‘sanguine’ machines, as La Mettrie might have put it). In what follows I reflect on the complexity of early modern mechanism faced with the (living) body, and its mirror image, contemporary theories of embodiment. At times, embodiment theory seems to be governed by a fascination with what the Artificial Life researcher Ezequiel Di Paolo has called ‘biochauvinism’ (Di Paolo, “Extended Life”): an unquestioned belief that ‘living bodies are special’. Yet how does the theorist define this special status? The question is apparently a simple one, or at least promptly yields an aporia which appears simple: to borrow a provocative phrase from Terry Eagleton, embodiment theory is obsessed by the body but terrified of biology. Yet at the same time, at least since Hubert Dreyfus and Andy Clark’s groundbreaking works, embodiment has been a legit part of cognitive science, yielding the even more recently emerged field of ‘embodied cognition’ (see the work of Larry Shapiro), which seeks to depart from traditional cognitive science, especially the latter’s understanding of cognition as computational, in order to instead underscore “the significance of an organism’s body in how and what the organism thinks,” in Shapiro’s words.

Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, 2010