I suspect the science isn't quite 'seeking the individual'.
Rather than trying to find fancier ways to define the lines, are there lines at all? Perhaps fuzzy grouping opens up more powerful models. What began as co-evolutionary theory is way more continuous.
I was at SFI in the 90s, before the big push mentioned in this article. I remember a conversation about it, discussing perhaps there isn't such a thing as an individual. It wasn't even said as if radical (e.g., by that point the Selfish Gene (1976) and The Extended Phenotype (1982) were well established, and way behind any 'cutting edge'). So I suspect it isn't quite 'finding the individual' that the article author keeps focussing on. But more 'models that abandon individuality'.
I generally suspect that a problem with large swathes of human thought are discretising continuous reality. That's definitely a core SFI view too. Or at least was in the 90s.
"Fuzzy X theory" are all crank theories. Why? Because they're trying to find a solution to the sorites paradox, and if it were as simple as some new system/mathematics/framework, then there would no longer be a sorites paradox and philosophers would say "whew, job done!" and cite the inventor alongside Aquinas or Aristotle as the three greatest philosophers who ever lived.
But despite the hundreds of fuzzy groupings/fuzzy set theory/whatever, that never happened, has it?
If someone has a fuzzy logic that definitively answers questions such as "what is the boundary between an individual and a system?" then he or she did the same thing Newton and Leibniz did with Xeno's paradoxes, and he or she would go down in history as both the greatest philosopher and a mathematician equal to Leibniz.
But that doesn't happen to these guys and gals who work on fuzzy logic, does it?
> If someone has a fuzzy logic that definitively answers questions such as "what is the boundary between an individual and a system?"
Ah, I see. That was our disconnect. That's the opposite of the idea. The logic is just to abandon a discrete boundary (physics does this in many cases). I think my use of 'fuzzy' might have sparked a different debate.
Not one I find convincing (if Science then Philosophy, not Philosophy ∴ not Science ? um...) but I don't much rate 'fuzzy logic' for mathematical reasons. That's another rabbit hole! Thanks for clarifying.
This reminds me of the problem of the many (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/problem-of-many/), which I have a feeling won't have a satisfying solution within my lifetime. I think these issues may have practical good-enough solutions, but may never be "solved" since it's so open-ended and fundamentally vague/ambiguous.
As a hard determinist that believes everything is just genetics, environmental factors and how the order of events/forces play out. I assume an individual is exactly the foregoing. We get patterns, we all share but also unique sequences and that separate what's common from individual status.
Because nobody can be in the same place at the same time (strictly speaking), everybody has a different circumstance, action radius and experience, even if all other things like genetics would be equal.
> Because nobody can be in the same place at the same time (strictly speaking)
I don't know that we can say this. We each look at the world through a particular perspective, but there's no necessity forcing us to say that we're the only one looking at the world through that perspective. I don't even think there's a necessity forcing us to identify with whoever was looking at the world from that perspective a moment ago, because memory is part of the body. We could be an infinite number of consciousnesses superimposed upon each other, blinking in and out in an instant. Consciousness could be a quality of every point in existence, but it only sees itself as a consciousness during the instant that stationary point is being passed through by a moving human body.
A current point-of-view doesn't require a lot of things you'd expect out of individuality. Not that I necessarily think that this must be how everything works, but if it isn't required in order to explain the subjective experience of self, why not use Occam's Razor?
I suspected life could be thought as a self replicating and self improving algorithm like physical process.
Very encouraging to see the information theory and biology are being used in this context.
There are some core truths in the paper The information theory of individuality [1] but it feels like some important ingredients have been discarded; maybe I just need to spend some more time with the ideas. From a software perspective, it is equivalent to a shift in focus on an object instance but discarding the concept of the class along the way.
I like focusing on the temporal aspects rather than snapshots in time. I like the concept of nesting since it nicely encompasses the role of mitochondria. I like the concept of continuous individuality as applied to cell colonies and eusocial insect colonies. Information theory certainly should be applied to DNA/RNA mechanisms.
It feels like the theorists are dancing around our inability to describe emergent systems properly. Perhaps an information theory centric approach should be applied to describing emergent systems. Such an approach may indirectly describe the strange edge cases in biology that are made up a multitude of emergent systems.
Rather than trying to find fancier ways to define the lines, are there lines at all? Perhaps fuzzy grouping opens up more powerful models. What began as co-evolutionary theory is way more continuous.
I was at SFI in the 90s, before the big push mentioned in this article. I remember a conversation about it, discussing perhaps there isn't such a thing as an individual. It wasn't even said as if radical (e.g., by that point the Selfish Gene (1976) and The Extended Phenotype (1982) were well established, and way behind any 'cutting edge'). So I suspect it isn't quite 'finding the individual' that the article author keeps focussing on. But more 'models that abandon individuality'.
I generally suspect that a problem with large swathes of human thought are discretising continuous reality. That's definitely a core SFI view too. Or at least was in the 90s.