Philosophical Darwinism {ReadingNotes}

Philosophical Darwinism: On the Origin of Knowledge by Means of Natural Selection by Peter Munz - ISBN 0415086027 - Routledge 1993

note that this was finished much earlier but without recall, recall starts a month before the current date to already start with very spaced recalls

Motivation

Quote from Cziko's WithoutMiracles regarding a fish being a model of its environment (cf its references).

Pre-reading model

Draw a schema (using PmGraphViz or another solution) of the situation of the area in the studied domain before having read the book.

Reading

• introduction
  • distinction between knowledge and science and their respective roles, without having to use certainty as a distinction
    • science having to be public
    • knowledge potentially private
  • role of knowledge in social evolution
    • dividing in groups in order to have social stability
      • even if having to use "false knowledge"
      • emergence of dogma in order to insure that bounds will not be questionned
  • cell as a start for cognition
    • membrane as a selector of information by filtering what is good or not
      • a failure to do so resulting directly in death thus selection
    • no reference to Varela or Stewart with Life=Cognition (paper, short ppt)
      • eventually to expand it The World as Evolving Information by Gershenson, Dr Carlos (2007)
  • study of the adaptive advantage of consciousness
    • despite the delay it causes
    • the difficulty to study it as an imprecisely defined concept
      • tied to language
    • moving from two-dimensional language
      • entirely descriptive and based solely on agents communication
    • to three-dimensional language
      • allowing the manipulation of non-existing objects
      • not being a mere extension but providing radically new affordances
        • with the high "price" of postponing action
      • "The most important aspect of having a three-dimensional language is that it enables the organism to go beyond the information given." p23
        • consequently allowing the process of finding mistakes to gain further information
• main thesis in part IV
  • page 154, chapter V of part 4 - The Nature of the Mirror :
    • "Each organism is a theory about its environment."
    • regarding the concept of mirror see Konrad Lorenz's BehindTheMirror
      • quoted several times in the book
• the hypercycle from part V.II
  • The Hypercycle : A principle of natural self-organization, Manfred Eigen and Peter Schuster, 1997
  • Models of molecular-genetic systems origin by V.G. Red'ko, Principia Cybernetica Web, 1998
  • Hypercycles by V.G. Red'ko, Principia Cybernetica Web, 1998
  • Manfred Eigen from Wikipedia
    • German biophysicist who won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on measuring fast chemical reactions.
  • Quasispecies model a description of the process of the Darwinian evolution of certain self-replicating entities within the framework of physical chemistry.

See also

• Peter Munz section in Evolutionary Epistemology, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• reference in 1.3 Descriptive versus Prescriptive Approaches section in Evolutionary Epistemology, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• notes on related books
  • WithoutMiracles
  • Kuhn
  • Popper
  • EvolutionaryEpistemologyAsAScientificMethod
• Issues in Evolutionary Epistemology, SUNY series in Philosophy and Biology 1989
• Taking Popper seriously by Michael Bradie review, Biology and Philosophy 1996
• Review of Peter Munz, Philosophical Darwinism by J. W. Smith and E. Moore, Explorations in Knowledge 1995
• Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty, Princeton University Press 1981

Overall remarks and questions

One consequence of Munz's theory is that everybody (mathematicians, computer scientists, etc) building and converting models into tools, is making human beings embodying those models functionally useless in our society.

• today it already is fundamental to be able to select the correct mathematical model and the relevant algorithmic model
  • it augment the ROI of software based on the resources need by the hardware but also the complexity of maintenance thus the cost of the overall structure
• but also in the past, the ability to select the right model embodied by another human
  • by choosing the right person to cooperate with or delegate to the correct person, the ability to hire the correct person... thus selecting the adapted model!

Synthesis

So in the end, it was about X and was based on Y.

Critics

Point A, B and C are debatable because of e, f and j.

Vocabulary

(:new_vocabulary_start:) inchoate to bestow ado slapdash modicum sensum to surmise innocuous an adze stultifying to bandy adroit innuendoes mendacious to wend (:new_vocabulary_end:)

Post-reading model

Draw a schema (using PmGraphViz or another solution) of the situation of the area in the studied domain after having read the book. Link it to the pre-reading model and align the two to help easy comparison.

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• UncategorizedBook

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