
What Is an Individual? Biology Seeks Clues in Information Theory - pseudolus
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-an-individual-biology-seeks-clues-in-information-theory-20200716/
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sago
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.

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Konohamaru
"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?

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sago
Weird.

> Because they're trying to find a solution to the sorites paradox,

Exactly and explicitly the opposite!

Why assume that dynamics are crisp if 'individual' isn't?

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Konohamaru
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?

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sago
> 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.

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oehtXRwMkIs
This reminds me of the problem of the many
([https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/problem-of-
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.

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guerrilla
Yea and the sorties paradox
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox)

I think the solution may be to drop Aristotelian categoricism and opt for
fuzzy logics and fuzzy set theories.

Relatedly, causal continuity is also another solution philosophers often give
for personal identity today re the transporter/cloning problem.

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greyface-
An individual is a boundary between self and not-self that acts to extract
negentropy from not-self and incorporate it into self.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
Doesn't that include humanity itself? And states, and corporations?

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abellerose
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.

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deltron3030
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.

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pessimizer
> 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?

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mavdi
Fascinating read.

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.

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sradman
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.

[1]
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12064-020-00313-7](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12064-020-00313-7)

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curation
An individual in what context?

