[Gary]

There is a new emerging perspective, I think, and it is being worked through by people like Dr. Federico Faggin, the first person to build a microprocessor chip, and other authors and contributors to the Essentia Foundation whose goal is to demonstrate that there is a serious problem with modernity in its privileging of materialism (the ‘Things’) over relationality (the ‘Connections’), when, in fact, it is relationality that is the ground of being, the ontological ground–as is being argued in his work by Dr. James Filler. And it came up in full force, I think, in the ‘Thinking with Iain McGilchrist’ conference that occurred at the end of March in San Francisco sponsored by the Center for Process Studies and the California Institute for Integral Studies during which several people delivered their responses to the McGilchrist Divided Brain Hypothesis.

And the whole idea that fabricated machines and living organisms are somehow ‘equivalent’ has been shown to be absolutely false by theoretical biologist, the late Robert Rosen, whose papers and books, especially the last two of his life, ‘Life Itself’ and ‘Essays on Life Itself’, both published by Columbia University Press (this is not the first time I have mentioned them on this website!), make a convincing argument, using the mathematical theory of categories, that living organisms far exceed fabricated mechanisms in their entailment capacity and are fundamentally, categorically distinct from mechanisms which are limited to conforming to the mechanistic formalism that was Newton’s favorite alchemical construct. So mechanisms are constrained to a basic formalism, which means they operate in the context of an ‘ontology of states’. Not so for living organisms. What is the difference? Living organisms as relational systems contain ‘closed causal loops’ operating on a temporal continuum. Fabricated mechanisms do not. Living organisms are not strictly deterministic. Fabricated mechanisms are, by definition Living organisms require impredicative mathematics. Fabricated mechanisms can be readily understood with predicative mathematics. Living organisms are NOT computable nor do they function algorithmically. Fabricated mechanisms are both. Living organisms are open to efficient causation. Fabricated mechanisms are closed to efficient causation. Living organisms have ‘complex’ dynamics. Fabricated mechanisms have ‘simple’ dynamics. For living organisms, the semantic description EXCEEDS the syntactic description because their behavior is context-dependent (see Timothy Eastman’s book, ‘Untying the Gordian Knot‘), as is the case for a natural language. For fabricated mechanisms, the semantic description and the syntactic description are EQUIVALENT. If you know the structure, you can predict the function for a fabricated mechanism–not so for an organism, as is the case for a computer language. This is all to support the fundamentally important argument that Iain makes that there is no such thing as ‘Artificial Intelligence’–it is an oxymoron. Nothing fabricated and artificial can manifest the adaptive intelligence across varying contexts of a living organism. It might approximate it in some limited context, but that is about it. Living organisms have significantly elevated entailment power as compared to fabricated mechanisms.

rowman.com

Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context

Untying the Gordian Knot shows how the fundamental notions of process, logic and relations, woven with triads of input-output-context, can be combined with quantum distinctions associated with act...