A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself and its complementary strand | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... - this looks super cool, but does it really relate to the origin of life?

Imagine! I mean, imagine how hard it is for a quadratic equation to understand itself! Imagine how hard it is for that statement to have any meaning whatsoever!

I like thinking of the gene regulatory network as an organ - a little chemical brain. And it seems reasonable to think of the adaptive responsiveness of the cell as reflecting a kind of cognition.

Updated Chapter 1 of my lectures notes for the Evolutionary Systems course. casci.binghamton.edu/academics/i-...

What child is this? Look to the father.

New paper led by @amahury.bsky.social published in JRS Interface: "Closing the loop: how semantic closure enables open-ended evolution?" royalsocietypublishing.org/rsif/article...

The gift that keeps on giving.... www.amazon.com/Behavior-Dim...

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

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...

"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

RNA xkcd.com/3056

🚨 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 www.cell.com/trends/genet... - really delighted to see this in print in @cp-trendsgenetics.bsky.social! 😊

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.

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...

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.

Collection of papers by Howard Pattee is excellent especially with the overview papers. Pattee was really ahead of his time in so many ways: organization, constraints, levels of analysis, symbols, etc. Chapters 5 and 6 on levels of analysis or Hierarchical Control as he calls it are must reads.

I created that picture after reading @dpwaters.bsky.social's book "Behavior & Culture in One Dimension" the idea being that 3D systems are made from #matter and #energy that modulate (change) each other's #form which can "emerge" as system memorized #information when recorded as 1D temporal sequence

It has come to my attention that more people have not read my book than have actually read it. This is the perfect season to rectify this admittedly lopsided situation. Thank you. 1dimensional.com

“How do we know when physical structures like a DNA molecule or a magnetic tape are also descriptions of systems? How do we know, in fact, that the marks on this page or the symbol vehicles of formal mathematical expressions are also descriptions?” When is a molecule a message? Pattee

Nic Rouleau & I: checklist to go through when settling on opinions about AI, diverse intelligence, unconventional cognition, consciousness, mind/machine issues, etc. When you read (or write) about these topics, run the perspective through this, to kick the tires. 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Further to the thread on Sharma et al. on Assembly Theory (AT) posted earlier today at that other place. . .  Complexity arises both through construction (as in AT) and configuration (as not in AT). An enzyme is a complex molecule that is constructed from amino acids. 1/n