Professor Emeritus

Systems Science and Industrial Engineering

State University of New York at Binghamton (Binghamton, NY)

The physics of symbolic control in living systems. Biosemiotics

The amazing property of symbols is their ability to control the lawful behavior of matter, while the laws, on the other hand, do not exert control over the symbols or their coded references. It is just for this reason that evolution can construct endless varieties of species and the brain can learn and create endless varieties of models of the world.
That is why organisms and symbol systems in some sense locally appear to escape the global behavior of physical laws, yet without ever disobeying them. Fully understanding this power of symbols over matter at all evolutionary levels is what I call the symbol-matter problem.
The four most notorious symbol-matter levels are the genetic code in biology, pattern recognition and sensorimotor control in nervous systems, the measurement and control problem in physics, and the mind-body problem in philosophy.