Abstract
Multiple sciences have converged, in the past two decades, on a hitherto mostly unremarked question: what is observation? Here, I examine this evolution, focusing on three sciences: physics, especially quantum information theory, developmental biology, especially its molecular and “evo-devo” branches, and cognitive science, especially perceptual psychology and robotics. I trace the history of this question to the late 19th century, and through the conceptual revolutions of the 20th century. I show how the increasing interdisciplinary focus on the process of extracting information from an environment provides an opportunity for conceptual unification, and sketch an outline of what such a unification might look like.
Highlights
Science is distinguished from speculation by its grounding in observation
What “observation” is, has been largely neglected. What does it mean to “ask a question of Nature” and receive a reply? How are the sought-after observational outcomes obtained? Even in quantum theory, where the “measurement problem” has occupied philosophers and physicists alike for nearly a century, the question of how observations are made is largely replaced by far more metaphysical-sounding questions of “wavefunction collapse” or the “quantum-to-classical transition”
As in [10,11], the focus here is on the formalized sciences, working “upwards” from the precise but relatively simple formal description of observation employed in physics toward the higher complexity needed for the life sciences
Summary
Science is distinguished from speculation by its grounding in observation. What “observation” is, has been largely neglected. Viewing a substantial fraction of current science as being fundamentally about observation, as opposed to some specialized domain or other, allows us to collapse a large amount of disparate ontology into a few very general concepts, and to see how these concepts inform science across the board While suggestions along these lines have been made previously within the cybernetic and interdisciplinary traditions (e.g., [3,4,5,6,7,8,9]), developments in the past two decades in quantum information, cognitive science and the biology of signal transduction, among other areas, render them ever more compelling and productive. How the answers to these various questions, tentative, might be integrated into a theoretically-productive framework is briefly considered
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