Abstract
The external worlds do not objectively exist for living systems because these worlds are unknown from within systems. How can they escape solipsism to survive and reproduce as open systems? Living systems must construct their hypothetical models of external entities in the form of their internal structures to determine how to change states (i.e., sense and act) appropriately to achieve a favorable probability distribution of the events they experience. The model construction involves the generation of symbols referring to external entities. This paper attempts to provide a new view that living systems are an inverse-causality operator. Inverse causality (IC) is an algorithmic process that generates symbols referring to external reality states based on a given data sequence. For applying this logical model involving if–then entailments to living systems involving material interactions, the cognizers-system model was employed to represent the IC process; here, living systems were modeled as a subject of cognition and action. A focal subject system is described as a cognizer composed of sub-cognizers, such as a sensor, a signal transducer, and an effector. Analysis using this model proposes that living systems invented the “measurers” for conducting IC operations through their evolution.
Highlights
Living systems need to survive and reproduce in their uncertain environments
Phenomenological stance, inverse causality plays an essential role in generating symbols referring to states of the external world, embodied as the states of internal components
Inverse causality (IC) operates on one-to-many state changes, which requires the system to have the machinery for repeatedly returning to an original state
Summary
Living systems need to survive and reproduce in their uncertain environments. This representation is the externalist view of living systems, i.e., seeing living systems and their environments as objects from an external observer, such as a biologist. The model construction by living systems involves the generation of symbols for external entities (e.g., producing second messenger molecules or neural activity patterns) and functions to process them in their specific way for survival and reproduction. The internalist stance illuminates how living systems construct their specific models for their hypothetical external worlds based solely on the phenomena (events, percepts, or data) they each have. (The former view includes the idea that the interaction between the subject and the reality produces data, which is an externalist view that admits the subject and the external entities both as objects.) The former sense of data is the ordinary type of information, such as Shannon’s information: a message sent from a person to a receiver [22]. We describe a focal subject as a cognizer composed of sub-cognizers, such as a sensor, a signal transducer, and an effector; we explore how the subject system can generate symbols for the external reality or entities using the IC operation; and, we discuss how this symbol generation can link to effector actions to affect the probability distribution of events that a focal living system experiences
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