"John J. Kineman" wrote:
[snip]
Are there macroscopic physical structures that transcend the
> physical, or alternatively, are we now to believe that all physical
> structures actually transcend the physical - in which case what is the
> difference between living and non-living?
John:
I am willing to see how foolish I can be and how many mistakes I can
make in a couple of paragraphs, so I'll take a crack (wag) at responding
to your challenge. As you know, I think that all physical structures
involve non physical phenomena or information. To put it another way,
both living and non living macro physical structures involve space,
time, mass, energy and information. If we pretend or come to some
mutual agreement between ourselves that lets us create some discrete
categories for the sake of learning more about these structures, then we
can define these differences any way we choose.
In contrast to Mario, I am convinced that there is such a phenomena as
free will. So to me, these choices are just our consensual free will
choices in action. And I think that so long as there is some practical
value that comes from the definitions and categories we agree to that
also helps us to understand and deal with these physical and non
physical differences, then we ought to continue to using them. From my
observations, the difficulties usually come when we assume that there is
only one correct way of defining and/or categorizing these differences.
This is especially true when we are dealing with compound relations such
as what we find in living systems.
I think part of what Don is saying is that in the cases where we can
create a model that is a good working replica of a natural system or
component, the degree of interaction at the informational level of the
natural system is relatively simple and understandable in terms of a
single model that we can create. On the other hand, compound
interactions and relations between natural systems or components cannot
be modeled or simulated in a way that allows us to fully understand and
deal with the resulting compound physical and non physical differences.
These compound differences are the properties that we can only begin to
understand because they come from the modeling relation.
Norm
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