[js1138]

The article calls it inverse causality - I think of it as temporal non-locality. In other words, the anticipation or awareness or foreknowledge of what has not yet happened is not knowable autonomously at the level which must obtain that insight to advance.

I believe I've pinged you asking for observed instances of foreknowledge.

[Alamo-Girl]

I believe I've pinged you asking for observed instances of foreknowledge.

And I have answered your request directly at post 145 by excerpting that section from the original article.

The author cites Michael Ruse’s example of stegosaur plates, that they begin forming in the embryo but only have a function in the adult—supposedly for temperature control.

Off the top of my head, I would put antifreeze proteins on the table - or perhaps drought adaptation in wheat.

Such things occur at the highest level in the AP model.

Achieving autopoiesis from the lower levels remains the best and most important example.

Autopoiesis means automatic creation. The key element in autopoiesis - according to Maturana who coined the term - is autonomy, that an autopoietic system is self-contained or local.

A biological cell is autopoietic, it is self-contained. Wikipedia describes it as follows:

The eukaryotic cell, for example, is made of various biochemical components such as nucleic acids and proteins, and is organized into bounded structures such as the cell nucleus, various organelles, a cell membrane and cytoskeleton. These structures, based on an external flow of molecules and energy, produce the components which, in turn, continue to maintain the organized bounded structure that gives rise to these components. An autopoietic system is to be contrasted with an allopoietic system, such as a car factory, which uses raw materials (components) to generate a car (an organized structure) which is something other than itself (the factory).

The article continues with an interesting contrast in that so many investigators offer self-organizing complexity as the probable cause of the emergence of something new in biological life. A thing becomes different or more than it was, requiring a new term to describe what it “is.” A property becomes evident requiring a new term to describe it, etc.

Self-organizing systems are not autonomous, i.e. autopoetic.

I usually put it this way: that order cannot rise out of chaos in an unguided physical system. Period. There are always guides to the system. Even at the lowest level, space/time and physical laws are guides to the system. Self-organizing systems have guides. Cellular automata has guides, etc.

Therefore, autopoiesis in a biological cell – which is autonomous and yet obtains for such temporally non-local insight (anticipating, foreknowing or being aware of the need for maintenance and repair) – is the best example.

Or to put it another way, at the lower level there is no local (autonomous) capability to be aware, anticipate or foreknow and thus attain autopoiesis. Temporally speaking (timewise) - that insight is not local.

[Diamond]

I believe I've pinged you asking for observed instances of foreknowledge.

A code is an instance of foreknowledge. In every case where the origin of a code (defined as a communication channel with an input alphabet A and an output alphabet B) is known, it is the result of foreknowledge. DNA code is a encoding / decoding mechanism isomorphic with Shannon's model. The DNA molecule represents something other than itself. It is reasonable therefore to infer as a defeasible hypothesis that it too, is the product of intelligence.

The hypothesis of invention by incremental change than you mentioned in your #279 as a possible source for chemistry evolving by 'trial' and 'error' an instance of a structure that can continue evolving, eventually into the staggering specified complexity of a genetic code, would come at a cost; namely, a huge amount of time (not to mention other insurmountable costs such as genetic load and biological constraints)

Even given an astoundingly fortuitous series of concatenations of atoms and molecules that would be necessary to eventually produce a genetic code, if such a thing were possible, consider all the types and varieties of codes under the sun in the animal kingdom that are themselves derivatives of genetic code. Bee waggle dance code; pheromone codes, variously operating by smell or contact reception; acoustic signals code, as in bird songs; electrical signals code, in with sharks and some fish, etc. What the law of invention would require is for chemistry to evolve not only DNA code, but then DNA code evolving these many other types of codes independently!

I think the sun would have already suffered heat death before these derivative DNA codes that we observe would ever have come to pass, without some higher force or power than mutation noise plus blind trial and error at work.

Cordially,