What Is an Individual? Biology Seeks Clues in Information Theory
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
Rather than trying to find fancier ways to define the lines, are there lines at all? Perhaps fuzzy grouping opens up more powerful models. What began as co-evolutionary theory is way more continuous.
I was at SFI in the 90s, before the big push mentioned in this article. I remember a conversation about it, discussing perhaps there isn't such a thing as an individual. It wasn't even said as if radical (e.g., by that point the Selfish Gene (1976) and The Extended Phenotype (1982) were well established, and way behind any 'cutting edge'). So I suspect it isn't quite 'finding the individual' that the article author keeps focussing on. But more 'models that abandon individuality'.
I generally suspect that a problem with large swathes of human thought are discretising continuous reality. That's definitely a core SFI view too. Or at least was in the 90s.
Sounds pretty Buddhistic.
But despite the hundreds of fuzzy groupings/fuzzy set theory/whatever, that never happened, has it?
> Because they're trying to find a solution to the sorites paradox,
Exactly and explicitly the opposite!
Why assume that dynamics are crisp if 'individual' isn't?
But that doesn't happen to these guys and gals who work on fuzzy logic, does it?
Ah, I see. That was our disconnect. That's the opposite of the idea. The logic is just to abandon a discrete boundary (physics does this in many cases). I think my use of 'fuzzy' might have sparked a different debate.
Not one I find convincing (if Science then Philosophy, not Philosophy ∴ not Science ? um...) but I don't much rate 'fuzzy logic' for mathematical reasons. That's another rabbit hole! Thanks for clarifying.
I think the solution may be to drop Aristotelian categoricism and opt for fuzzy logics and fuzzy set theories.
Relatedly, causal continuity is also another solution philosophers often give for personal identity today re the transporter/cloning problem.
I don't know that we can say this. We each look at the world through a particular perspective, but there's no necessity forcing us to say that we're the only one looking at the world through that perspective. I don't even think there's a necessity forcing us to identify with whoever was looking at the world from that perspective a moment ago, because memory is part of the body. We could be an infinite number of consciousnesses superimposed upon each other, blinking in and out in an instant. Consciousness could be a quality of every point in existence, but it only sees itself as a consciousness during the instant that stationary point is being passed through by a moving human body.
A current point-of-view doesn't require a lot of things you'd expect out of individuality. Not that I necessarily think that this must be how everything works, but if it isn't required in order to explain the subjective experience of self, why not use Occam's Razor?
I suspected life could be thought as a self replicating and self improving algorithm like physical process. Very encouraging to see the information theory and biology are being used in this context.
I like focusing on the temporal aspects rather than snapshots in time. I like the concept of nesting since it nicely encompasses the role of mitochondria. I like the concept of continuous individuality as applied to cell colonies and eusocial insect colonies. Information theory certainly should be applied to DNA/RNA mechanisms.
It feels like the theorists are dancing around our inability to describe emergent systems properly. Perhaps an information theory centric approach should be applied to describing emergent systems. Such an approach may indirectly describe the strange edge cases in biology that are made up a multitude of emergent systems.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12064-020-00313-7