Hi List, couldn't agree more with Gregg's synthesis, but would like to add one more 'lynchpin', the concept of phenotype as agent (see attached). It is essentially the idea that unlike phenotype as the characteristics of the organism, it is actually the medium through which epigenetic 'marks' are collected to inform the next generation of on-coming change in the environment. The former way of thinking about phenotype is descriptive, whereas the latter is mechanistic. If you follow that logic, we never leave the unicellular state, we just modify the phenotype to obtain information in an ever-changing environment. Lewis Carol expressed this idea in Alice in Wonderland, the Red Queen running as fast as she could to stay in place......think of the biology as a bee hive, the Queen delegating the workers to nominally collect pollen, but in reality to collect epigenetic data from the environment. Once the Queen is sated, she flies away, the hive collapses, and she forms another hive......the Queen is like the zygote, which must be informed in order to perpetuate the species. Hope that made sense. Withthebestofintentions, John

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019 at 8:38 AM Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hi List,

There was an interesting exchange on Alexander Bard’s list on what was termed “vectors of emergence”. It turned out that a few weeks ago, I was brainstorming with that idea. Attached is the pp I generated a few weeks ago, that happened to be called “Vectors of Emergence.” For those who are following my language system, the iQuad concept is my representation of the “digital singularity” at the fifth joint point.

Here is how I described it on the other list:

The Tree of Knowledge System is an emergent naturalist metaphysical approach to the empirical universe. Aligning with modern science, it describes the universe as an unfolding wave of behavioral complexity, and it follows from this that behavior, complexity, change, emergence are all central, foundational concepts that we use to map the universe. The ToK argues that there are four “Great” emergences. Matter from Energy, Life from Matter, Mind from Life, and Culture from Mind. The metaphysics of the ToK gives rise to what I call “The Periodic Table of Behavior” which is a taxonomy of behavioral kinds (i.e., kinds of behaviors in the universe that we can empirically study from a modern science perspective). A new feature of the ToK/PTB is that it divides complexity into both levels and dimensions, rather than a single dimension.

Best,
Gregg

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