Dennis P Waters

By "memory" you mean long-term perception?

Humans, of course, are the ultimate allosteric devices, almost infinitely reconfigurable.

It appears that Rider used the prospective WCC sale funds as collateral for loans that funded operating deficits. The money they got from the sale repaid those loans. So there's nothing left.

I doubt von Neumann would agree that DNA sequences are computer code. As he wrote in TSRA, "by axiomatizing automata in this manner, one has thrown half of the problem out of the window, and it may be the more important half." It's the stuff that can't be formalized that's interesting.

I continue to think the the more interesting question is "how does language acquire children?"

Thanks to #ComplexityCat (@amahury.bsky.social‬) for dredging up this old paper and providing thoughtful comments. I should point out that this paper forms the basis of chapter 4 ('The Grammar of Extension') in my book Behavior and Culture in One Dimension. amahury.github.io/posts/review...

Today #complexitycat reviews an article by @dpwaters.bsky.social, who has proposed a synthesis between Dawkins' extended phenotype and Gibson's theory of affordances. What's the next step towards a synthesis between physical biosemiotics and ecological psychology?👇🐈‍⬛
amahury.github.io/posts/review...

AI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That’s OK | Quanta Magazine The brain’s astounding cellular diversity and networked complexity could show how to make AI better.

"A maggot knows things about the outside world in a way that no computer does." Read @yaseminsaplakoglu.bsky.social fun + fascinating feature: AI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That’s OK www.quantamagazine.org/ai-is-nothin...

Going thru some old journals and found this amazing TOC. Pattee, Rosen, Richerson & Boyd, Goodwin, Tullock....all in one place. Journal of Social & Biological Structures 1:2 (April 1978). Pretty sure this is the first Pattee paper I read.

How do you simulate a brain in any detail with a simple digital (or even quantum) computer? "Making a connection" in the brain is not just "information processing." It's physical. There is no workable "software" driving the mind. It is the "hardware" that is messy and unique, and constantly changing

However, in the biological world, an awful lot of information is transmitted via sequences.

RNA xkcd.com/3056

To begin to grasp pleiotropy one only needs a child with Fragile X Syndrome.

🚨 New paper! 🚨 by Yoolim Kim, @helenamiton.bsky.social, Marc Allassonnière Tang, & myself, in Journal of Memory and Language. We tried to do for letter shapes what phonologists did for speech sounds. doi.org/10.1016/j.jm... A 🧵 (1/14)

DNA and text are not two different things. They are two different examples of one sort of thing.

The Genomic Code: the genome instantiates a generative model of the organism How does the genome encode the form of the organism? What is the nature of this genomic code? Inspired by recent work in machine learning and neuroscience, we propose that the genome encodes a generat...

The Genomic Code: the genome instantiates a generative model of the organism www.cell.com/trends/genet... - really delighted to see this in print in @cp-trendsgenetics.bsky.social! 😊

The huddle is rate-independent. There is no relationship between the length of the huddle and the length of the play. The huddle could be half or twice as long without changing the rate of the play. The play is rate-dependent. Slight changes in rate have a large impact on the outcome of the play.

The game of American football is an example of 1-dimensional sequences constraining 3-dimensional behavior. The huddle is an exchange of sequences in the form of speech. These constrain the dynamical behavior of players in the subsequent play. Once the play commences the dynamics take over.

Sequences will be sequences.

The Poetry Fan Who Taught an LLM to Read and Write DNA | Quanta Magazine By treating DNA as a language, Brian Hie’s “ChatGPT for genomes” could pick up patterns that humans can’t see, accelerating biological design.

Curious about the burst of LLMs that claim to interpret DNA and genomes? Read our interview with the creator of one such tool: www.quantamagazine.org/the-poetry-f...

They may regret not selling it when they could.

If it is universally nonreactive then it is lawful in the Pattee sense. @vanessaseifert.bsky.social

When Pattee says rules are local he means "not universal." Are there situations in which they do not hold? Not a chemist but I wonder whether there are extremes of temperature, pressure, radiation, etc. in which gold can become reactive. If so, "gold is nonreactive" is more of a rule than a law.

I get that. The question of where to draw the line still troubles me. Embodied contributions to behavior are a fine test case. Does a single cell possess (exhibit?) cognition? A dragonfly? Or do you need language or mathematics or code? Also, what is the relationship of cognition to affordances?

Well, if we're trolling for first principles here, here's a naive question: What does the concept of "cognition" (however defined) actually buy us? Can we get along without it? And if not, what are the underlying assumptions that support that?

That would be Charles Bennett. Sometimes you get Dennett on the brain, I know.

As Howard Pattee wrote in 1982: "Cells do not have feet or ears, but they have motility and irritability, which are basic functions of feet and ears....I suggest that brain-level psychologies are not likely to converge until we have some agreement on the foundations of cell psychology."

I only met Rosen once, at a General Systems meeting in Washington in the 1980s (introduction arranged by Howard Pattee). Rosen and Pattee (and Ludwig von Bertalanffy) collaborated when they were at the Center for Theoretical Biology at SUNY Buffalo in the early 70s. They were complementary thinkers.

I've just been told about this website collecting the works, published and unpublished, of Robert Rosen, who was a profound thinker on all kinds of issues, especially in the life sciences. Seems like a great resource.
www.rosenlife.org

No one else comes close as an influence on my thinking on evolution, complexity, self-organization, symbol sequences vs. dynamics, the whole lot really.