Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

This is a sort of pattern. (1) We create categories and concepts that rely on categories: molecules, organisms, species, galaxies; water, rebecca, potatoes, multiple personality disorder. (2) We use those categories to describe and understand things, engineer and theorize using them. We have evolution and chemistry and potato salad recipes. (3) Then we discover that these categories aren't really real. They're real, like, but not really real, you know what I mean. Tasmanian devils are being decimated by a contagious cancer. A mutated cell in some devil reproduced until it was lumps, then the devils bit another delve in the face (they're not nice animals) and some of that cancer jumped into another one and spread. Now, that cancer has outlived his maker and is going around spreading in the world with complete disregard for the concepts of organism or species and behaving like a bacteria, virus or somesuch. Instead of spreading normally like the rest of the devil by sexy with other devils it jumps into the other devil's face (sometimes during sex, they are not nice animals). Maybe one day it will evolve into our replacement. Maybe it will find symbioses with sheep and become a beneficial gut fauna (it is a taste devil after all).

We make up these categories for convenience. They are not obligated to comply.

This, and a lot of related observations are discussed at length in articles in [0]. Highly recommended!

Personally, I like to imagine concepts as boundaries in the abstract multidimmensional "thingspace" - you can cast and recast them as you like, but some are more useful than others. Some things naturally group together along one axis but spread out when you look along another one. The most important point is, concepts are tools of understanding and communication that we invent, not parts of reality itself. They're multiple ways of drawing a map, each with different focus, but each representing the same territory.

[0] - https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/A_Human's_Guide_to_Words

Exactly! Language is a reduction of reality. A way for finite pattern recognizing feedback loops like ourself to deal with the patterns we experience around us. And to make some provincial sense of them.

In reality it's all patterns overlapping other patterns with no clear divide other than the one language forces upon it.

I kind of wonder if there's something else going on as well.

I mean, on one hand these categories are uncomfortably loose. Not just obviously made up ones like race or species. Things like molecules and galaxies are uncomfortably loose categories rather than actual things. Thingness seems to be a matter of degrees everywhere.

On the other hand, reality seems to make use of these close enough categories just like we do. It's building stuff out of molecules, stars and galaxies. It's evolving new species and problem solving using organisms and species despite the leaks in the abstractions.

I don't think its just a matter of crutches for our puny human perception. Something fishy is ging on.

This topic is, I think, most succinctly explained in Isaac Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong[1]. These concepts which rely on categories that you describe are wrong, but they're far less wrong than many other ideas. Don't forget that often science is used for prediction, and for prediction a good approximation is very useful. Yes, Tasmanian devils are a counterexample to the idea that cancers are never communicable, but it's an extremely rare counterexample. One can achieve great results in the study of cancers based on the assumption that cancers are never communicable.

[1] http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

The posterchild for categorization failure is 'species'. The closer you look at what a species is the more nebulous it becomes.

Most of the models that we use everyday are "leaky abstractions". They are useful in most contexts, but they get fuzzy at their boundaries.

My favourite example is the "chicken and egg" problem. The difficulty of it is to define what a chicken is, everything is trivial afterwards. The answer, IMHO, is that "a chicken" was born from an egg put by a "non-chicken".

It seems to me that difficulty is not so much defining what a chicken is, but what a chicken egg is - is it an egg laid by a chicken, or an egg a chicken hatches from?

Just pick one. That's easier than picking the bird that is a chicken whose parent is not a chicken.

Sorry to be pedantic - but every model is, by definition, an approximation of reality. Everything we experience is a blurry rendition of the inconceivable volume of information dancing around us.

To look at models as 'blurry' is misleading. Models are imperfect, but the imperfect model can be more crisp than the underlying reality.

Newtonian physics are very useful and less blurry than reality.

More relevant, categories are useful and less blurry than reality. There doesn't need to be a sudden major difference between a chicken and a not-chicken. They only need to have a clear distinction in the model.

For comparison, let's look at integers. 11 is very similar to 12, and 13 is at least as similar, but 11 and 12 are not-teen and 13 is teen. There's no ambiguity, there is only the definition of the category/model "teen".

The distinction is arbitrary, but there's still a distinction. You can easily "draw a line" as the sibling comment says.

Re: Blurry, I think that and Dancing are Thru the glass darkly type references.

I really like Richard Dawkins explanation of this, where he has you imagine taking a photo of yourself from your are born to you reach adulthood with 1 minute intervals.

If you stack these pictures, there is no single picture you can pull out and say: "Here I transitioned from child to adult" e.g. Likewise with animals and evolution. Changes are so minute that you can speak of a transition from one species to another happening at the point of birth.

Only when you look at pictures of yourself far away from each other in the pile can you start differentiating them. Likewise with animals.

Exactly, they are minute because they are constant. We are in constant flux so to speak.

Also Dawkins posits a relatively good empirical definition of species boundaries (although I'm not quoting him verbatim, and I may be extending/synthesizing some of the ideas somewhat), but...a species is basically the pool of organisms available at a period of time that can generate progeny that themselves can generate progeny. That is, they have replicator compatibility...

Under that definition, humans make a species. Horses make a species, donkeys make a species, but mules do not. Apparently in the world of Star Trek, Klingons and humans make a species: Worf (Klingon) had a child with a half-human/half-Klingon woman, and Tom Paris (human) had a child with a half-human/half-Klingon woman. Not sure about Vulcans and Romulans...obviously they can mate, but I'm not sure Spock himself can have children, perhaps we'll find out in a future movie. In Futurama, Kiff reproduced with Leela.

As to the concept of a human as a "super-organism", the problem with bacteria being part of the equation is that they do not transmit their replicator payload through the germ-line transmission vector. They are not integrated into the next generation in whole or in part. Via the concept of the extended phenotype they may alter and extend their environment to improve their chance of success (and often mothers and children have the same bacteria flora), but it's better to think of it as symbiosis (or in the worst case, parasitism) than true "super-organism" reproduction. (Me thinks!)

> a species is basically the pool of organisms available at a period of time that can generate progeny that themselves can generate progeny

That's what we learned in high-school too, but as you mentioned, it doesn't make sense for donkeys, nor does it work for ring species[1], or organisms that reproduce asexually[2]. Mules can occasionally become mothers[3].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asexual_reproduction

3. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1226025...

I wasn't familiar with the term "Ring Species" (I've only gotten interested in evolutionary biology in the past few years), although I had considered that a "pool" might have a relatively fluctuating degrees of mutuality and incompatibility among candidate members.

Also, I hadn't considered to qualify "sexual reproduction", as asexual reproduction might be better thought of as strains (perhaps), the classification systems for simpler organisms tends to be more structural than fecund. In my defense, I tend to refer to organisms as assemblages of organs of which simpler biota can loosely be said to possess, though I always thought of the "organs" of single-cellular creatures as organelles as they are not made up of "tissue" as they are in multi-cellular organisms.

> Horses make a species, donkeys make a species, but mules do not.

Rarely, sometimes mules are fertile.

And as far as humans, no one's entirely sure that chimps and humans aren't inter-fertile... at least at the level of horses/donkeys.

Exception, not the rule, but I did warn it was a relatively good empirical formula, not a law of nature :-) I am of the mind that categories such as species are mental constructs to turn the phenomenal world into an approximate model-space so that understanding and action planning can be improved.

So for me rather than concepts like "species" being meaningless, they can have meaning (or at least value), but best not to think of them as iron laws. Mostly the point I was hoping to get to in my root response before I diverted myself reading my own text while typing it.

It's easier to create iron laws for categorical manipulation than it is to place observations into categories to begin with.

In Star Trek Enterprise a body from the future had DNA fragments from something like a dozen different "species". Vulcans, Klingon, and Human were all included.

The thing about life boundries though in biology is that the more you know the less it makes sense. All bacteria are technically a single species, as are Archaea. Virus's aren't considered alive at all, though they do evolve. Then there are asexual creatures entirely. I vaguely recall a lizard that has no real genetic diversity because they are all females that reproduce without any sex, and there are no males. So... they're not a species either, but are still reproducing. Biology is screwy.

And all navel oranges are effectively clonal (with the requisite amount of replication drift). Dawkins chief subject of study was insects, so his books are filled with descriptions (and math!) of genetic similarity and divergence within different insect colonies. Some insect species have colonies whose members have a better than (human) sibling relationship with their "sisters", and in fact may even be (1/2) clonal instances of the queen, and full clonal instances of each other. The workers themselves are non-fecund, but their genes replicate on through the fertile queen. We certainly don't want to say the sterile workers are without species, and it may make more sense to think of the insect colony as a "super-organism"...if we could get past the fact that tissues and organs are distributed, but the long term success of the genetic line is concentrated in the germ-line.

This is somewhat complicated by royal jelly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_jelly

Post menopausal woman and some adult workers have both lost the ability to reproduce. But, they did have it in the past.

Which suggests the question; should we consider tribes a 'super' organism? As it includes and benefits from sterile members. What about things like monastic orders or wolf packs whose members forgo reproduction?

Isn't that a bit like complaining about definitively stating in which square a chess piece currently sits because previously it had been on other squares?

The answer, IMHO, is that "a chicken" was born from an egg put by a "non-chicken".

And the thing is, you could not determine when exactly the non-chicken became the chicken i.e. when it is chicken enough. You could not draw a line.

Richard Dawkins gives a fantastic and compact illustration of this problem here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz8KEF8oid0

Nonsense, you just use git bisect to find the oldest ancestor that can still mate with a modern chicken and produce fertile offspring and there's your first chicken.

I think you'd enjoy this philosophical dive into why we have categories and how to properly use them.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-mad...

> They're real, like, but not really real, you know what I mean.

You mean.. the real reality? The reality that can't be easily explained through observation and empirical evidence? The reality that can't be perceived through our basic physical senses? The reality where causation and correlation don't mean a thing? If you mean that reality... there's no such thing, and even if there is, there's no point in talking about it, it's way beyond our reach.

If you mean the reality in which we've done most of the division and classification work very poorly due to lack of data... I know what you mean.

> there's no point in talking about it, it's way beyond our reach

All of humanity's scientific progress has been a step-by-step widening of the circle of our knowledge into that vast universe of the unknown. There is certainly a point in acknowledging it, acknowledging its vastness in comparison to what we actually know, and looking for the next tiny pebble we can chip out of that wall of ignorance.

All of humanity's scientific progress has been built gradually upon principles, that have been the same for ages. Start experimenting with the fundamentals and you start wandering in a sea of abstractness - holographic universe, multiverse, one-electron universe... you name it. Theories that you can either prove or disprove and theories that bring no progress.

That's just my opinion of course.

> Theories that you can either prove or disprove and theories that bring no progress.

Of course you can "prove"/"disprove" them, otherwise they wouldn't be discussed by scientists but by philosophers or theologians. For theories to be different, there must be an experiment that in principle could be done, for which each of them predicts different result. If we get around doing that expriment, we'll learn which theory is the right model.

This is an universal principle of science and applies at every level - both fundamentals and macro/practical.

It's not way beyond our reach [1], how can you even say that?

As Celia Green says: "Only the impossible is worth attempting, in everything else one is sure to fail."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman

Algebraists were way ahead of the curve: look at the properties of an object with respect to an operation.

i.e. integers are commutive under addition and multiplication but not under subtraction or division.

The way that can be followed isn't the real way.

The name that can be named isn't the real name.

etc.

>Then we discover that these categories aren't really real. They're real, like, but not really real, you know what I mean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)

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