Department of BioEngineering

Nagaoka University of Technology

Nagaoka 940-21, Japan

kmatsuno@voscc.nagaokaut.ac.jp

Relationship between empirical sciences and emergent phenomena is subtle. Although the rigor of empirical sciences is applicable to emergent phenomena in the product, the same rigor cannot be expected to those in the making. In view of the fact that the rigor of empirical sciences rests upon the equivalence between experiencing and describing the experience, emergent phenomena raise the issue of whether experiencing and describing could be identical. An arbitrary descriptive subject that remains external to any descriptive object can make experiencing equivalent to describing by associating itself with the sole experiencing agent. This association of the descriptive subject with the experiencing agent renders measurement external to what is to be measured. Empirical sciences as an endeavor for external description of external measurement, however, set limitations upon emergent phenomena to be described.

Emergent phenomena to be described assume an external descriptive subject as with empirical sciences, but let experiencing agents be internal to the descriptive object while prohibiting the descriptive subject from becoming the sole measuring agent. Coping with emergent phenomena is an endeavor for external description of internal measurement as compared to empirical sciences.

External description representing empirical rigor fulfills the principle of the excluded middle. When external description of external measurement is attempted as an established enterprise of empirical sciences, the measurement also comes to fulfill the principle of the excluded middle. In contrast, external description of internal measurement is not required to fulfill the principle of the excluded middle at each internal measurement because external description refers only to global descriptive consistency in the product, and not to that in the making. Exactly for this reason, external description of internal measurement is competent in coping with emergent phenomena as letting a concrete and de novo embodiment of the principle of the excluded middle come into being.

A particular instance of external description of internal measurement is adaptation met in evolutionary processes in biology. Adaptation is by no means a consequence of each local and internal measurement aimed at adapting to others internally, but a linguistic constraint required for fulfilling the principle of the excluded middle in the resulting external description. Describing emergent phenomena is in the linguistic capacity of external description coming to terms with the principle of the excluded middle.

Describing emergent phenomena succumbs inescapably to internal confrontation between two different types of agent. One is the author of description, and the other is an agent experiencing emergent novelty. Any objective description requires the author to remain external to the description itself, while emergent phenomena internalize those agents experiencing novelties. A serious question that may come up at this point is whether or not the author of description and the agent experiencing emergent novelty could be identical.

If the author and the experiencing agent are one and the same as facing emergent phenomena, both the description and the descriptive object to be experienced will remain external to the act of describing and experiencing. External description prohibiting itself from referring to its author certainly satisfies the condition necessary for being objective and perspicuous in its own right (Farre, 1994). Likewise, the presence of the object to be experienced externally assumes that the experiencing agent performs measurement externally and that perspicuous objectivity of the outcome is its natural consequence.

External description of external measurement, however, suffers from its methodological peculiarity of seeking the origin of emergent novelty solely outside what has been experienced and described. Measurement external to an object exhibiting an emergent novelty has nothing to do with the process of giving rise to the very emergent phenomenon. The present externality of emergent novelty is totally vulnerable to what cannot be described and experienced externally. Only the consequence of emergent phenomena is visible to external description of external measurement. If it is intended to decipher how emergent phenomena could come into being, one would have to go beyond external description of external measurement. In order to accomplish the present objective, let us first examine how external description of external measurement would proceed in its more details.

Emergent phenomena require both duration in time and variations acting upon it. If measurement is external in the sense that an object out there exists exactly as it is as measured externally and if the consequence of the measurement is describable without any reference to the author, the notion of duration in time can be sanctioned without any recourse to variations to be imposed. Galilean inertia just happens to be the case. However, the notion of duration met in evolutionary processes at least during the last 3.9 billion years on the earth is quite different from that of Galilean inertia. Molecular replication as a common denominator of the emergent phenomena called life on the earth makes it inevitable to be accompanied by the process of generating variations or making products successively without any interruptions (Kuppers, 1990).

Variable duration is inherent to molecular replication, and is totally foreign to invariant duration unique to Galilean inertia (Matsuno, 1985). External description of external measurement would make the occurrence of molecular replication no more than an extremely unlikely event paraphrased as a frozen accident. In fact, quantum mechanics understood as external description of external measurement cannot raise such a replicating molecule by itself (Wigner, 1970). Evolutionary emergence of replicating molecules presumes a unilateral sequence of synthetic molecular reactions in which some of the products re-enter into an arbitrary stage in the whole reactions as further reactants, while every reaction or interaction conceivable within external measurement of quantum mechanics is bilateral as admitting both associative and dissociative reactions eve1ywhere at the same time.

Invariant duration cannot serve as an evolutionary precursor of variable duration because of their intrinsic incommensur-ability. The same difficulty also applies to the notion of natural selection understood as differential retention of slightly modified heritable traits (Depew and Weber, 1994). Underlying natural selection is also variable duration. In particular, if one raises a question of how natural selection could come into being, it would not be feasible any more to have recourse to an onset of molecular replication because both are grounded upon the same notion of variable duration. The present impasse may suggest to us either that the question asking the evolutionary onset of variable duration would be in itself wrongly formulated or that external description of external measurement by itself be methodologically incompetent in coping with such question.

At this point, it is worth pointing out that the relationship between description and measurement is not restricted to the case that both are external. One cannot deny the historical fact such that external description of external measurement has greatly contributed to the promulgation of objective and rigorous sciences over the last few hundred years. Nevertheless, the externality of both description and measurement is no more than merely one frame of reference conceived from and applied to the pair. Measurement in its rudimentary form presumes our sense perception, and description is framed upon our natural languages serving as the infra-structure.

Externalization of both description and measurement is simply a consequence of applying a form of abstraction to both of them by eliminating any agential capacity from the object of description and experience. Otherwise, describing experiences remains internal in the sense that the one who measures and describes the experience of its own is constantly measured and described by others internally as in ordinary conversations in everyday life. The present internal chain of description and measurement has neither its beginning nor end. The agents of both description and measurement are internalized in their mutual acts. This way of looking into the interplay between the two suggests an occurrence of internal description of internal measurement as an opposite extreme case.

In ordinary conversations in everyday life, everybody as an agent of measuring and describing is constantly measured and described by others. This is exactly the problem area which traditional rigorous sciences have shrewdly avoided up until now. It is of course legitimate to observe that rigorous sciences cannot derive from ordinary conversations that constantly have recourse to the speakers. That rigorous sciences cannot be brought about from mere ordinary conversations rests upon the indefiniteness of the viewpoint of each internal description attempted there. What is unique to internal description is the recursiveness of letting itself be an object to be further measured by others internally within the framework of on-going ordinary conversations. Henceforth, indefinite continuation of ordinary conversations is found to be within indefinite succession of internal description of internal measurement.

The context of ordinary conversations, however, constantly varies with their progression. There is no universality nor a priori invariance in the context in the making. The variability of the context in an unprecedented manner is an undeniable empirical fact in ordinary conversations. Curiously enough, however, ordinary conversations, if properly abstracted, can happen to give birth to objective description and rigorous sciences. In order to objectify ordinary conversations in everyday life, it would again be required to externalize either description or measurement. If both description and measurement are externalized as in traditional rigorous sciences, a cost would inevitably be incurred. No descriptive enterprise coping with historicity and evolutionary processes could be expected therefrom. If experiencing and describing emergent phenomena are intended beyond those implied by internal description of internal measurement, either description or measurement would again have to be externalized.

If the external object exists as perceived by our sense organs, this would guarantee the occurrence of experiences upon which rigorous empirical sciences could stand. However, experiences by themselves cannot result in objective and rigorous sciences, the latter of which depend entirely upon how these experiences could be described. Internal description of internal measurement as practiced in ordinary conversations in everyday life certainly provides an infra-structure upon which rigorous sciences could be constructed. What is required for this construction is an abstraction. The present application of an abstraction, though a necessary condition for deriving objectivity therefrom, may induce further reverberations. In fact, if an abstraction of eliminating any agential capacity of measurement from an object to be measured is taken in the form of external measurement, the measured object will turn out also to be an object to be described externally. External measurement now necessitates external description in order to put its intended objectivity into a definite descriptive form.

Nevertheless, if internal description of external measurement is attempted as admitting that there may be allowed many descriptive perspectives internally while maintaining a unique external measurement of the whole, a certain pathological situation would come up. A schizoid separation of the authorship would inevitably follow between the externalist and the internalist stance. The internalist authorship cannot set its descriptive perspective without recourse to the arbitrary internalist stance it assumes, while the externalist counterpart grounds itself upon the invariant stance that guarantees the object to be externalized. Internal description of external measurement would simply be a misnomer at best or a methodology to be avoided earnestly. These considerations come to leave external description of internal measurement as an only likely choice for coping with emergent phenomena to be experienced and to be described.

Objective description that has to be observed in any case is external in keeping itself from referring to its author. In spite of the present externality of description, measurement remains internal as our sense perception is. Of course, rigorous sciences based upon the stipulation asking the object of sense perception to stand alone externally as perceived necessitate external description, but the latter does not necessitate external measurement. External description is simply a linguistic pre-condition for aiming at objectivity of intended description.

In fact, the agency of measurement is not monopolized by our sense organs. Any material bodies interacting among themselves can serve as the agents performing measurement (Matsuno, 1985, 1989). In view of the fact that measurement is a most prevailing form of interaction distinguishing between before and after the events and that nothing propagates faster than light, measurement is synonymous with the presence of matter. Measurement is thus internalized within interacting material bodies of any kind endophysically (Rossler, 1987). The problem that now comes up is how to externally describe the contribution of internal measurement.

One of the necessary conditions for external description is the observation of the principle of the excluded middle. Since external description is synonymous with the consequence of description attempted externally, the principle of the excluded middle guarantees the global consistency of description in the product. On the other hand, internal measurement in the making is local both in space and in time. In order to approach the global consistency of external description from internal measurement, a certain condition has to be imposed internally upon the progression of internal measurement. That is that internal measurement proceeds so as to fulfill the principle of the excluded middle in the effect. Internal measurement for the sake of the principle of the excluded middle is a consequence of the global consistency of external description. Put differently, if the global consistency of description in the product fails, internal measurement for the sake of the principle would also fail. The present reflection now raises a serious question on the likelihood of objective description to be externalized. The principle of the excluded middle is a consequence of descriptive objectivity, and not vice versa.

In order to justify the occurrence of external description, something that could remain invariant and objective globally has to be sought in the product of internal measurement. Although each internal measurement is local, the globality of the product makes itself be an object to be measured externally (Gunji, 1995). As far as the consequence of internal measurement is concerned, external measurement can safely intervene there without causing any conflicts with the former. If there is found an invariant quantity within the consequence of internal measurement, that quantity can also be identified by external measurement. Energy to be conserved just happens to be such a quantity, thanks to Robert Mayer. Observation of the conservation of energy by external measurement also confirms the progression of internal measurement for the sake of the conservation in the effect. The present interplay between external and internal measurement as facing the conservation of energy is to provide a means for legitimizing the objectivity of external description of internal measurement. This is owing to the presence of an invariant quantity being independent of descriptive artifacts. What makes external description of internal measurement meet the principle of the excluded middle happens to be the conservation of energy.

Fulfilling the conservation of energy through internal measurement is a local process. The local activity for the sake of the conservation of energy on a global scale lets each interacting material body be an energy consumer acting toward its outside from the inside as wanting or yawning for energy resources in order to compensate the preceding energy consumption in whatever way (Matsuno, 1992). The occurrence of energy consumers is thus unique exclusively to external description of internal measurement (Matsuno, 1995), and can be totally dismissed in the framework of external description of external measurement. There is no room of agential capacity in the object that is supposedly measured externally.

The significance of energy consumer for emergent phenomena is multifarious. Evolutionary emergence of the phenomenon called life at about 3.9 billion years ago on the earth happened to be an instance of raising a very primitive form of energy consumer. In addition, energy consumers exert a specific form of cohesive force toward their energy resources (Matsuno, 1992; Paton, 1992). Compared to various mechanical forces imposed externally in the form of fixed boundary conditions, cohesive forces unique to energy consumers act from its inside toward the outside. Above all, energy consumers carry with themselves the capacity of variable duration as constantly wanting energy resources while being exploited by others at the same time (Marijuan, 1991). External description of internal measurement that can come up with energy consumers installs in itself the capacity of variable duration as a necessary condition for emergent phenomena.

Emergent phenomena are methodologically a subtle issue. If one employs external description of external measurement which has been proved in the endeavor for practicing objective and rigorous sciences, a great difficulty would come up with regard to the notion of variable duration. If it is asked, for instance, how natural selection could have originated, external description of external measurement practiced under the name of neo-Darwinism cannot cope with the question (Salthe, 1993). This is because the descriptive scheme is already based upon the notion of variable duration identified as natural selection. Questioning the origin of natural selection is methodologically discouraged or even prohibited there.

On the other hand, if one notes that external description of external measurement is not the only means for attaining descriptive objectivity of our experiences, external description of internal measurement will serve as an alternative that should deserve due attention. As a matter of fact, these two methodologies are by no means antagonistic with each other. External description of internal measurement duly transforms into external description of external measurement in the product because the consequence of internal measurement is externalized in the record and can globally be measured externally. Emergent phenomena we experience urge us to recognize that external description of internal measurement is a legitimate methodology for facing emergent novelty as much as external description of external measurement for invariant consistency.

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