DJ Strouse

My Goodreads Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Interested in cybernetics, theoretical biology, and philosophy but still find Dan Brown novels to require mental gymnastics? Put on your philosophical training wheels and give “Tree of Knowledge” a spin!
A mixture of dated scientific ideas, profound frameworks for thinking about living organisms, and unnecessarily complicated jargon, ToK is essentially the children’s menu version of Maturana and Varela’s Autopoiesis and Cognition papers on living organisms, communication, and consciousness.

I highly recommend reading ToK before Autopoiesis and Cognition and possibly even foregoing Autopoiesis and Cognition altogether. ToK is not only more clearly written but is laden with examples, something lacking in the uncompromisingly sterile Autopoiesis and Cognition.

The rest of this review is a summary of the deep and profound wisdom I gleaned from the Chileans, so you may want to skip it if you haven’t read the book yet.

ToK’s more gentle approach (along with post-reading conversations with a Chilean economist and Italian physicist) helped clear up a question I had after Autopoiesis and Cognition: if a unity is so deeply coupled with its environment, how does one uniquely define its morphological boundaries? It may seem obvious to look at me, carve a 2D surface over my skin, and call me a closed system, but give me a week without a consistent supply of low-entropy energy and I’ll quickly succumb to the second law of thermodynamics. The key trick is this: unique boundaries there are not. “Everything said is said by an observer.” An observer selects the features by which a unity will be defined through their shared domain of interactions. Different observers (and even the same observer at different times with different goals) will have different domains of interactions and will define a unity in a different way. For example, a given university may be a set of assets and liabilities, a collection of students, a football team, a physical space, or some combination of these things, depending on who you ask.

Some more notes:

• Referring to a unity implies an act of distinction.
• Replication, copy, and reproduction can be distinguished by the amount of historicity in each process. Replication (repeated generation) is ahistorical. Copy (creation from a mold) is historical if iterated. Reproduction (the fracture of a unity to create two unities of the same class), however, is necessarily historical.
• Heredity and variation are strongly complementary features. Heredity is the preservation of structure in a historical series of unities. Variation are the differences of structure in that series. Different components of a unity may exhibit different degrees of heredity and variation.
• Unities may couple via inclusion (think organelles) or recurrent coupling with the maintenance of individual identities (individual humans).
• The environment does not instruct an organism; it only triggers internal dynamics. To phrase it differently, the space of possible reactions to an environment is defined in the internal structure of an organism; the environment does not inject behavioral commands into an organism in any way. To phrase it differently yet again, environmental stimuli modulate, they do not control. Environmental input is imply one more “voice” in the “conversation” of internal dynamics.
• Organisms must exhibit variance of the time scale of their environment (and in a complementary “direction”) in order to adapt (remain coupled).
• Adaptation in response to a single change in the environment affects the organism in a global way. A small change in structure may occur to accommodate one new feature of the environment, but through an internal domino effect, alter the way an organism interacts with other features.
• The simplest neural systems allow detection of correlations between inputs on a sensory surface.
• A nervous system expands our possible behaviors by inserting a network with a huge range of possible patterns between our sensory and motor surfaces.

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Tags:   cognition · cons · cybernetics · neuroscience · psychology · theoretical biologyNo Comments