Molecular Ethology, An Immodest Proposal for Semantic Clarification - Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition - page 164

+•

Ú

H i =- yy yy ◊ *ln ◊ *

(64)

i i i i

-•

for the i th eigenstate.
It is significant that indeed for the two crystals C + and C - the change in
the ratio of energy to entropy for charging (D E = e ( V ( x n ) - V ( x n +2 ) ) goes
into opposite directions:

-

D
D

E
H

Æ Ê
Ë

ˆ
¯

C -

> 0

+

D
D

E
H

Æ Ê
Ë

ˆ
¯

C + < 0

This shows that the two crystals are quite different animals: one is dead
(C - ), the other is alive (C + ).

IV. Summary

In essence this paper is a proposal to restore the original meaning of con-
cepts like memory, learning, behavior, etc. by seeing them as various mani-
festations of a more inclusive phenomenon, namely, cognition. An attempt
is made to justify this proposition and to sketch a conceptual machinery of
apparently sufficient richness to describe these phenomena in their proper
extension. In its most concise form the proposal was presented as a search
for mechanisms within living organisms that enable them to turn their envi-
ronment into a trivial machine, rather than a search for mechanisms in the
environment that turn the organisms into trivial machines.
This posture is justified by realizing that the latter approach—when it
succeeds—fails to account for the mechanisms it wishes to discover, for a
trivial machine does not exhibit the desired properties; and when it fails
does not reveal the properties that made it fail.
Within the conceptual framework of finite state machines, the calculus of
recursive functionals was suggested as a descriptive (phenomenological)
formalism to account for memory as potential awareness of previous inter-
pretations of experiences, hence for the origin of the concept of “change,”
and to account for transitions in domains that occur when going from
“facts” to “description of facts” and—since these in turn are facts too—to
“descriptions of descriptions of facts” and so on.
Elementary finite function machines can be strung together to form
linear or two-dimensional tesselations of considerable computational flexi-
bility and complexity. Such tesselations are useful models for aggregates of
interacting functional units at various levels in the hierarchical organi-
zation of organisms. On the molecular level, for instance, a stringlike
tesselation coiled to a helix may compute itself (self-replication) or, in