Howard, interesting definition!
[A phenomenon is information resulting from an individual subject's detection of a physical interaction.]
HP: This definition is just an extension of the classic definition to subhuman organisms.As a broad academic discipline phenomenology may be summarized as the study from a first person point of view of what appears to subjective human conscious experience. As a historical philosophical movement phenomenology was often motivated by the belief that subjective human experience is the proper foundation of all philosophy. I am exploring phenomena from a broader physical and evolutionary point of view. I consider a phenomenon as the subjective result of a physical interaction with an individual organism. That is what human senses do. Physically a phenomenon is equivalent to a detection or measurement. What is detected is determined by the organism as a self or subject.
GF: Applying this to your proposition, then, I have to ask: Who or what was the individual subject who detected the first self-replication, so that the information resulting from that detection thus qualifies as the first phenomenon?
HP: The cell that is replicated. It must detect the information that defines the self that is self-replicated. Most of this information is in the gene.
Or are you saying that the first self-replication was not a physical occurrence or interaction, but was the information resulting from detection of some other process?
HP: It was obviously a physical occurrence but is was a phenomenon only for the cell that interpreted it, just like a physical occurrence that is a phenomenon for the human that interprets it.
Either way, I have a hard time imagining the first detector.
HP: I agree it takes a little imagination to see the correspondence if you believe that only humans experience phenomena.
Howard
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