> On Apr 9, 2017, at 7:41 PM, John F Sowa <s...@bestweb.net> wrote: > > The surface is a vague boundary. All plants and animals have > exterior cells that are dead or dying (hair, skin, scales, bark) > and they have secretions (sweat, tears, oils, sap, resins). > > The outer layers are always mixed with liquids and solids from > all kinds of sources (living or non-living), and they are subject > to various abrasions and adhesions -- deliberate or accidental > (e.g., a bird preening its feathers, animals scratching, grooming > themselves or others, rolling in the dust, or washing in water). > > Even the interior is not well defined. There are many more billions > of bacterial cells than human cells in and on the human body. Some > of them are pathogens, but most are *essential* to human health.
This seems right, although the word vague in a Peircean sense might not quite fit. I think not well defined is a better way to put it. I especially like the point you and Kirstima make about non-human cells. Our body is very much a symbol in a certain sense that when examined closely does not have the type of unity we like to imagine. Even ignoring the issue of the human biome, we’re finding that even the DNA of our food can end up in odd places of our body, potentially interacting in more complex ways than we can yet determine. In the bodies of mothers the remnants of their children’s DNA can remain and have effects. Lines become blurry and complex. Even the very notion of inside and outside fail us. (Is the digestion system ‘inside’ and if so when?) > Very few molecules exist in isolation. For example, salt (NaCl) > rarely consists of Na-CL pairs. In a crystal, the atoms are > organized in a lattice where each atom is surrounded by atoms > of both kinds. In water, Na ions float independently of CL ions. And the very notion of atoms and molecules when examined more technically is better seen as a quantum field which is itself a type of potentiality. We simplify both because we have to in order to reason about these things, but also because our simplifications work most of the time. Even if we could create a gigantic complex Hamiltonian to express the field of salt crystal, it wouldn’t necessarily help us. > I agree that biology is not reducible to chemistry or physics. > But I'd say that the major difference was caused by the first > quasi-minds, which created the first non-degenerate Thirdness > (purpose, goals, or intentions). I’d more put it that biological descriptions typically aren’t reducible to chemistry or physics. Although for all the problems philosophy of science created here in the 50’s through 70’s attempting to make the reduction, I think it did perhaps help in getting biologists to think more carefully about the type of descriptions they make.
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