Philosophers
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David Mermin George Miller Stanley Miller Ulrich Mohrhoff Jacques Monod Vernon Mountcastle Emmy Noether Donald Norman Alexander Oparin Abraham Pais Howard Pattee Wolfgang Pauli Massimo Pauri Wilder Penfield Roger Penrose Steven Pinker Colin Pittendrigh Walter Pitts Max Planck Susan Pockett Henri Poincaré Daniel Pollen Ilya Prigogine Hans Primas Zenon Pylyshyn Henry Quastler Adolphe Quételet Pasco Rakic Nicolas Rashevsky Lord Rayleigh Frederick Reif Jürgen Renn Giacomo Rizzolati A.A. Roback Emil Roduner Juan Roederer Jerome Rothstein David Ruelle David Rumelhart Robert Sapolsky Tilman Sauer Ferdinand de Saussure Jürgen Schmidhuber Erwin Schrödinger Aaron Schurger Sebastian Seung Thomas Sebeok Franco Selleri Claude Shannon Charles Sherrington David Shiang Abner Shimony Herbert Simon Dean Keith Simonton Edmund Sinnott B. F. Skinner Lee Smolin Ray Solomonoff Roger Sperry John Stachel Henry Stapp Tom Stonier Antoine Suarez Leo Szilard Max Tegmark Teilhard de Chardin Libb Thims William Thomson (Kelvin) Richard Tolman Giulio Tononi Peter Tse Alan Turing C. S. Unnikrishnan Francisco Varela Vlatko Vedral Vladimir Vernadsky Mikhail Volkenstein Heinz von Foerster Richard von Mises John von Neumann Jakob von Uexküll C. H. Waddington John B. Watson Daniel Wegner Steven Weinberg Paul A. Weiss Herman Weyl John Wheeler Jeffrey Wicken Wilhelm Wien Norbert Wiener Eugene Wigner E. O. Wilson Günther Witzany Stephen Wolfram H. Dieter Zeh Semir Zeki Ernst Zermelo Wojciech Zurek Konrad Zuse Fritz Zwicky Presentations Biosemiotics Free Will Mental Causation James Symposium |
Howard Pattee
Howard Pattee is retired Professor Emeritus at SUNY, Binghamton, in the Department of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering
Pattee was cited at the 1967 International Union of Biological Sciences Symposia on Theoretical Biology as offering one of two pre-life systems with potential for variability and heredity (for Pattee, tactic copolymers). The other was A. G. Cairns-Smith's replication, with variations, of macromolecules on clays. See C. H. Waddington's report in Nature.
Pattee criticized the symposium attendees for claiming that biology was simply "physics and chemistry" without citing a single law of physics.
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Although the chemical bond was first recognized and discussed at great length in classical terms, most physicists regarded the nature of the chemical bond as a profound mystery until Heitler and London qualitatively derived the exchange interaction and showed that this quantum mechanical behavior accounted for the observed properties of valency and stability. On the other hand, it is not uncommon to find molecular biologists using a classical description of DNA replication and coding to justify the statement that living cells obey the laws of physics without ever once putting down a law of physics or showing quantitatively how these laws are obeyed by these processes.When someone pointed out the necessity of segregating the prograrnme and the rnachinery of the computer, which corresponds in biological terms to the separation of genome and phenotype, the conference organizer, C. H, Waddington, reported that Pattee said, the logic of this necessity has been discussed by von Neumann in Theory of Self Reproducing Automata (University of Illinois Press, 1966). Pattee put the same point in another way when he emphasized that an effective hereditary system requires both a memory store, which must be constructed of rather inactive materials if it is to be stable enough and a mechanism not only for being replicated but also for affecting its surroundings. Whether it is theoretically possible to conceive of a substance which is sufficiently unreactive to be an efficient store and also sufficiently reactive to affect the environment is perhaps debatable. In practice, however, it is clear that living things on this Earth have not discovered such a material. They have in general settled on the rather unreactive DNA as the memory store and on RNA and proteins to decode this into enzymes which participate both in the replication of the store and in interactions with the environment. Following this line of thought, Pattee raised a question from the point of view of quantum mechanics, which seemed perhaps rather recondite to many of the biologists present. The stability of the algorithms stored in DNA is ensured by quantum mechanical processes which define the configuration of single DNA molecules. Their replication and decoding depend on the actions of enzymes, such as the polymerases, which ensure that the bases in a single strand of DNA are paired up correctly with the complementary bases to form the second strand or the corresponding RNA. The existence of such enzymes cannot, he claims, be deduced from the fundamental laws of physics. They are acting as "non-holonomic" constraints to limit the degrees of freedom of the whole system. Their origin at some very early stage of evolution is one of the major problems. Moreover, the stability of the algorithms stored in DNA is ensured by quantum mechanical processes, but the polymerases decode this into quantities of proteins and other cell constituents sufficiently large to operate according to the laws of classical physics. We are confronted therefore With an example of a "quantum measurement", a matter which seems to cause theoretical physicists many headaches.In later years, Pattee rarely cited the importance of quantum physics, which is the critical element for the creation of new information. In 1969, Pattee asked the basic question about the connection between matter and symbols that he was to pursue the rest of his life: How do we tell when there is communication in living systems? Most workers in the field probably do not worry too much about defining the idea of communication since so many concrete, experimental questions about developmental control do not depend on what communication means. But I am interested in the origin of life, and I am convinced that the problem of the origin of life cannot even be formulated without a better understanding of how molecules can function symbolically, that is, as records, codes, and signals. Or as I imply in my title, to understand origins, we need to know how a molecule becomes a message. More specifically, as a physicist, I want to know how to distinguish communication between molecules from the normal physical interactions or forces between molecules which we believe account for all their motions. Furthermore, I need to make this distinction at the simplest possible level, since it does not answer the origin question to look at highly evolved organisms in which communication processes are reasonably clear and distinct. Therefore I need to know how messages originated.During symposia on theoretical biology in the late 1960's, Pattee used John von Neumann's theory of self-reproducing automata to argue for the causal power of symbols over the biological world. Von Neumann had distinguished the abstract "description" (the coded symbols carrying the structural information of the self-replicating machine) from the actual material "construction" of the automaton. Pattee identified von Neumann's "description" with the linear sequence of genetic code in the genotype. He identified von Neumann's "construction" with the building of the three-dimensional phenotype. There are two different things going on in biology, the abstract information coded in the "software" and the concrete material information structure or "hardware." Pattee saw the symbolic description as in charge of the physical instantiation and said that "life is matter controlled by symbols," making the connection to a biosemiotic description of life.
Constraints
As a physicist, Pattee assumes that deterministic physical laws govern all dynamics, which can in principle be computed given the initial conditions and the boundary conditions. Pattee, and many of today's biosemioticians, e.g., Terrence Deacon, prefer to call the initial and boundary conditions "constraints." Pattee says that his concept of constraint is not easily understood. This has led to considerable confusion when applied to biosemiotics, whose practitioners know little about dynamics and their readers even less.
Pattee describes the upper level in a hierarchical system as producing constraints on the dynamical motions of the lower levels. Thus, Roger Sperry's "downward causation " of the molecules in a rolling wheel constrains their motions to those of the wheel's motion.
Quantum mechanics is a statistical theory. The appearance of deterministic classical dynamics is because macroscopic objects have large numbers of particles and quantum effects can be "averaged over." Macroscopic objects are "adequately determined - for all practical purposes."
Pattee is aware that some physical situations cannot be described dynamically, particularly those involving a large number of particles, but must be described statistically. He thinks that the microscopic collisions of material particles are time-reversible and describable dynamically. He defines his important term "constraint" and explains the need for two different "descriptions" in hierarchical systems,
The common language concept of a constraint is a forcible limitation of freedom. This general idea often applies also in mechanics, but as we emphasized in the beginning, control constraints must also create freedom in some sense...fundamental forces do indeed "limit the freedom" of the particles ... the fact is that they leave the particles no freedom at all. The physicist's idea of constraint is not a microscopic concept. The forces of constraint to a physicist are unavoidably associated with a new hierarchical level of description...forces of constraint are not the detailed forces of individual particles, but forces from collections of particles or in some cases from single units averaged over time. In any case, some form of statistical averaging process has replaced the microscopic details. In physics, then, in order to describe a constraint, one must relinquish dynamical description of detail. A constraint requires an alternative description. Now I do not mean to sound as if this is all clearly understood.
Origin of Life and the Problem of Measurement in Quantum Mechanics
For a 1969 colloquium of scientists hoping to get "beyond" the problems in quantum theory, Pattee wrote the very provocative article, "Can Life Explain Quantum Mechanics." In it, he argued that,
The physical meaning of a recording process in single molecules cannot be analysed without encountering the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, nor can the symbolic aspects of the genetic description be understood without an interpretation of the matter-symbol relation at an elementary physical level.In 1996, Pattee wrote about the difference between dynamical controls, thought to follow deterministic, time-reversible physical laws, and his symbolic or semiotic controls, which emerge in a higher level of a hierarchical system: In 2000, Pattee emphasized the time reversible nature of all dynamical processes Causation is gratuitous in modern physicsThe Newtonian paradigm of state-determined rate laws derived from a scalar time variable and explicit forces only strengthens the naive concept of one-dimensional, focal causation. Reductionists take the microscopic physical laws as the ultimate source of order... The fundamental problem is that the microscopic equations of physics are time symmetric and therefore conceptually reversible. Consequently the irreversible concept of causation is not formally supportable by microphysical laws, and if it is used at all it is a purely subjective linguistic interpretation of the laws. Hertz (1894) argued that even the concept of force was unnecessary. This does not mean that the concepts of cause and force should be eliminated, because we cannot escape the use of natural language even in our use of formal models. We still interpret some variables in the rate-of-change laws as forces, but formally these dynamical equations define only an invertible mapping on a state space. Because of this time symmetry, systems described by such reversible dynamics cannot formally (syntactically) generate intrinsically irreversible properties such as measurement, records, memories, controls, or causes. Furthermore, as Bridgman (1964) pointed out, "The mathematical concept of time appears to be particularly remote from the time of experience." Consequently, no concept of causation, especially downward causation, can have much fundamental explanatory value at the level of microscopic physical laws.
Jesper Hoffmeyer claims that his duality of digital codes and analog codes can transcend Pattee's "epistemic cut"
At a 2015 workshop at UC Berkeley, From Information to Semiosis, Pattee described his idea of "symbol-based self-replication," based on John von Neumann's logic,which requires a clear distinction between descriptions and constructions, where descriptions are time-independent and construction vary in time. He describes a "cut" that is a distinction between the self and the non-self.
A description requires a symbol system or a language. Functionally, description and construction correspond to the biologists’ distinction between the genotype and phenotype. My biosemiotic view is that self-replication is also the origin of semiosis. I have made the case over many years (e.g., Pattee, 1969,1982, 2001, 2015) that self-replication provides the threshold level of complication where the clear existence of a self or a subject gives functional concepts such as symbol, interpreter, autonomous agent, memory, control, teleology, and intentionality empirically decidable meanings. The conceptual problem for physics is that none of these concepts enter into physical theories of inanimate nature Self-replication requires an epistemic cut between self and non-self, and between subject and object. Self-replication requires a distinction between the self that is replicated and the non-self that is not replicated. The self is an individual subject that lives in an environment that is often called objective, but which is more accurately viewed biosemiotically as the subject’s Umwelt or world image. This epistemic cut is also required by the semiotic distinction between the interpreter and what is interpreted, like a sign or a symbol. In physics this is the distinction between the result of a measurement – a symbol – and what is being measured – a material object. I call this the symbol-matter problem, but this is just a narrower case of the classic 2500-year-old epistemic problem of what our world image actually tells us about what we call the real world.Pattee connects his "epistemic cut" with the Heisenberg - von Neumann "Schnitt" somewhere between the measurement apparatus and the observer's mind. This led to the faulty idea that wave functions would not collapse without conscious observers. John Bell asked whether the observer needs a Ph.D. and where this "shifty split"is located. Bell made a drawing of the "shifty split," which we annotate with the moment that a measurement becomes possible, the moment when irreversible information is created. As Pattee noted years ago, this is the moment when a semiotic record is created. ![]()
References
How does a molecule become a message?
Can life explain quantum mechanics?
Physical Problems of Decision-Making Constraints/a>
Pattee's Papers on Academia.edu
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