This paper offers an introduction to the philosophy and science of embodied learning, conceived as both the stabilizing and expansionary process that sustains order and novelty within learners’ worlds enacted through observing and describing. Embodied learning acknowledges stability and change as the purposeful conjoined characteristics that sustain learners. It is, in many respects, a composite theory that represents work from various disciplines. This ‘naturalized epistemology’ conceives a world of fact inevitably imbued with the values that our own structural histories guarantee (...) us observers, whether acknowledged or not within our reflective awareness. These values, however, are not simple sets of preferences, for they are constituted in our individual learning histories that, for good or bad, influence the course of future learning. This conservational element of our condition is only half the story, however. The more radical aspect resides in the expansionary capacity of embodied observers to change, to enact worlds that are not pre‐given but, rather, brought forth by learners as observers and describers. Furthermore, embodied learning seeks a grounding for understanding in the often‐unexplored epistemological terrain between positivist absolutism or its mirrored polar opposite, postmodern nihilism. Its epistemological stance derives from its ontology, which is grounded in the profound obviousness that ‘everything said is said by someone’. (shrink)

Adopting the notion of “pragmatic information” as interpreted by Roederer and granted that understanding arises from genuine information processing, I show that Searle’s “Chinese Room Argument” in rejecting the thesis of Strong Artificial Intelligence and his responses to critics are sound and acceptable. The paper is a safe and secure translation of Searle’s argument into a language of information. According to the notion of information that I adopt, information and information processing are exclusive attributes of biological and artificial systems. However, (...) I will show that information-theoretically, biological brains are fundamentally different from their artificial simulations. I will argue that only biological systems, or their duplicates, are genuine information processing systems and thus capable of understanding Chinese. “Understanding”, in my proposal, denotes “phenomenal consciousness” in the context of Chalmers’ thesis of naturalistic dualism. (shrink)

To date, no definition of life has been unequivocally accepted by the scientific community. In frustration, some authors advocate alternatives to standard definitions. These include using a list of characteristic features, focusing on life’s effects, or categorizing biospheres rather than life itself; treating life as a fuzzy category, a process or a cluster of contingent properties; or advocating a ‘wait-and-see’ approach until other examples of life are created or discovered. But these skeptical, operational, and pluralistic approaches have intensified the debate, (...) rather than settled it. Given the failure of even these approaches, we advocate a new strategy. In this paper, we reverse the usual line of reasoning and argue that the “life problem” arises from thinking incorrectly about the nature of life. Scientists most often conceptualize life as a class or kind, with earthly life as a single instance of it. Instead, we advocate thinking about Earth’s Life as an individual, in the way that species are now thought to be. In this view, Life is a monophyletic clade that originated with a last universal common ancestor, and includes all its descendants. We can continue to use the category ‘life’ pragmatically to refer to similarities between various phenomena and Life. But the relevant similarities are a matter of interest and preference, not a matter of fact. The search for other life in the Universe, then, is merely a search for entities that resemble parts of Life in whatever sense astrobiologists find most appealing. This does not mean that the search for evolved complexity elsewhere in the universe or its creation in the lab are futile endeavors, but that debates over whether they count as ‘life’ are. Ironically, finally abandoning the concept ‘life’ may make our searches for evolved complexity more fruitful. We explain why. (shrink)

The consolidation of the informational paradigm in molecular biology research concluded on a system to convert the epistemic object into an operational technological object and a stable epistemic product. However, the acceptance of the informational properties of genetic acids failed to clarify the meaning of the concept of information. The “information”’ as a property of the genetic molecules remained as an informal notion that allows the description of the mechanism of inheritance, but it was not specified in a logic–semantic structure. (...) The metaphorical implications associated with the idea of genes as molecules with meaning, questioned the linguistics that seemed too foreign to molecular biology. A reformulation of the concept of information in molecular biology was developed upon the theory of Claude Shannon. The node for the structural coupling between biology, physics and information theory was the identification of an analog structure between the coded messages of Shannon’s theory. (shrink)

At the heart of evolutionary theory lays the notion of replication. Unfortunately, this notion is far less exact than the weight of its importance. In this paper, it is argued that replication always involves coding. Furthermore, when a theory of evolution is built on replication based on coding, a unifying and coherent picture arises that sheds new light on some of the controversies and open questions in contemporary biology, such as what are the roles of phylogeny and ontogeny in evolution, (...) and how to characterize and explain the increase of biological complexity. (shrink)

The recently suggested reformulation of Darwinian evolutionary theory, based on the thermodynamics of self‐organizing processes, has strong philosophical implications. My claim is that the main philosophical merit of the thermodynamic approach, made especially clear in J.S. Wicken's work, is its insistence on the law‐governed, continuous nature of evolution. I attempt to substantiate this claim following a historical analysis of beginning‐of‐the‐century ideas on evolution and matter‐life relationship, in particular, the fitness‐of‐the‐environment‐for‐life theory of the Harvard physiologist L.J. Henderson. In addition, I point (...) to an epistemological common ground underlying the studies of the “thermodynamics school” and other currently active research groups focusing on the emergence and evolution of biological organization. (shrink)

(1997). “Emergence, a domain where distinction between conception in matter and mind, and arts and sciences, are meaningless”. World Futures: Vol. 51, No. 1-2, pp. 27-46.

We offer a general definition of interpretation based on a naturalized teleology. The definition tests and extends the biosemiotic paradigm by seeking to provide a philosophically robust resource for investigating the possible role of semiosis (processes of representation and interpretation) in biological systems. We show that our definition provides a way of understanding various possible kinds of misinterpretation, illustrate the definition using examples at the cellular and subcellular level, and test the definition by applying it to a potential counterexample. We (...) explain how we propose to use the definition as a way of asking new questions about what distinguishes life from non-life and of formulating testable hypotheses within the field of origin-of-life research. If the definition leads to fruitful new empirical approaches to the scientific problem of the origin of life, it will help to establish biosemiotics as a legitimate philosophical approach in theoretical biology and will thereby support a theological appropriation of the biosemiotic perspective as the basis of a new theology of nature. (shrink)

This paper calls attention to a philosophical presupposition, coined here the continuity thesis which underlies and unites the different, often conflicting, hypotheses in the origin of life field. This presupposition, a necessary condition for any scientific investigation of the origin of life problem, has two components. First, it contends that there is no unbridgeable gap between inorganic matter and life. Second, it regards the emergence of life as a highly probable process. Examining several current origin-of-life theories. I indicate the implicit (...) or explicit role played by the continuity thesis in each of them. In addition, I identify the rivals of the thesis within the scientific community — the almost miracle camp. Though adopting the anti-vitalistic aspect of the continuity thesis, this camp regards the emergence of life as involving highly improbable events. Since it seems that the chemistry of the prebiotic stages and of molecular self-organization processes rules out the possibility that life is the result of a happy accident, I claim that the almost miracle view implies in fact, a creationist position. (shrink)