The Amoeba's Secret - English Version started

[Kim Jones-2]

The Amoeba’s Secret

 

by Bruno Marchal

 

May 19 2000

 

English version by K. Jones

To the memory of my parents

Contents

 

1.      Introduction

2.      The Amoeba’s Secret (1961→1971)

3.      Goedel’s Diagonal (1971→1973)

4.      Blacker than you thought [I] (1973→1977)

 

To be cont.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The mind returns to itself like a glove – Buddhist proverb

Mr Edgar Morin, president of the jury on Le Monde 1998’s University Research Prize, commended the laureates, I amongst them, seeing the happy fortune of our doctoral theses published chez Grasset, that we should have no hesitation in adopting a presentation bearing full witness to the human and personal aspect - all of which decided me to relate it’s entire history.

I should recognise the somewhat special character of the result, but also, and perhaps especially, because of the nature of the path undertaken. I brought up the question of the work’s basis for the first time in 1963, at a school in Brussels. I was eight years old: I do not know if I was particularly precocious or merely highly-strung. In effect the motivation for this work and, for the research toward it commencing in infancy, has always been linked to a fear of death.

There are other more fundamental reasons for my describing this unfolding path, an essential part of which is situated in my earliest infancy:

1.     The work is essentially multidisciplinary. It is situated at the intersection of numerous disciplines – theology, psychology, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, information technology – and, suddenly, it is difficult to know with what to begin. Bearing this in mind, the way of kids’ questions is particularly fit for the purpose.

2.     I questioned myself, but rapidly began wondering where the questions came from; a good part of the thesis rests on a process of self-observation. We will see how the thesis is naturally self-explanatory, how it explains its own genesis. An aspect made clearer if one follows, even if only briefly, the path of the kiddies’ questions. I myself profited thereby and ended up with a more polished version of the principal argument. There is no attempt at dumbing-down and the reader can skip any passages judged too technical.

3.     The opportunity to do justice and homage to the great authors and books that stake out my quest, amongst them: G. Ames & R. Wyler, James Watson, Linus Pauling, Michel-Yves Bernard, Lewis Carroll, E. Nagel & J.R. Newman, Jean Ladrière, S.C. Kleene, Bernard d’Espagnat.

4.     …and to recount a Belgian in the best, or universal story in the worst of cases, nothing at all of which is very funny. This story explains why I defended my thesis in 1998 in France. I shall recount these events without hatred or spirit of revenge.

I will tell you in several words even now, the principal result. To begin with, the work presents a proof, which is to say a deductive or, to use heavier terminology, a hypothetico-deductive argument. This signifies there is a hypothesis as much as a “thesis”, in the more technical sense of what is demonstrated from this hypothesis.

By way of proof, I expect that if the reader is not fully convinced of the result after study of the work, he should put up either a non-justified proposition or an error. Note that, concerning deductive work, conclusions never officially carry over to reality. Scientific proofs operate inside the frame of a postulated theory. Science is thus always modest on the subject of its applicability to or its approximation to the real.

The hypothesis is that of Mechanism: the idea that we could be digital machines, in a sense that will be rendered more clearly in due course. Grossly speaking, we would be machines in the precise sense that no parts of our bodies are privileged with respect to an eventual functional substitution: this says that we can survive a heart substitution by the transplant of an artificial heart, or of a kidney by an artificial kidney, etc., inasmuch as the substitution is carried out at a sufficiently fine level. Neither can there be any constraints imposed on the level of substitution chosen. It’s important to remember that I am not going to defend the hypothesis of Mechanism. I only want to pose this hypothesis at the outset. It constitutes the predefined frame of the work¹ [footnote 1]

 

[Footnote 1: Note that the idea of taking Mechanism or Computationalism as a hypothesis seems to be, rather curiously, original. Since Descartes (and even before, notably among the Hindu logicians), there is a staggering amount of literature surrounding the question of Mechanism and the mind, but it is always a question of arguments in favour of Mechanism or arguments against it. Many also think that Mechanism is by itself a solution to the mind-body problem. This, I hope is a strong suit of the current work, to show that Mechanism does not automatically resolve the mind-body problem. On the contrary, it necessitates a reformulation of the problem taking the form of a necessary justification of belief in the appearance of a material world, physical or substantial (to anticipate in one phrase the principal result of the work.)]

 

The discovery described here is that in this case, that with this hypothesis of Mechanism, physics becomes reducible to the psychology of machines. The “of” should be interpreted in both the transitive and intransitive senses: clearly it is a question of psychology concerning machines as much as psychology inferred or postulated correctly (by definition) by the machines themselves. We will be able, with a little information theory, to define this psychology in the wider sense of the machines’ “self-referentially correct” discourse. Such a psychology appears non-normative: we will see that it makes of us beings vastly less well known to ourselves than we had ever imagined. It constitutes a sort of “vaccine” against the numerous forms of reductionism of human psychology.

The reduction of physics to psychology happens also at the epistemological level: physics effectively becomes a branch of psychology – the science of observable machines – as it does at the ontological level: matter or the appearance of matter emerges from consciousness, from the mind or the mental or even as we will see, of “possible gambles” made by all digital machines.

It seems that what I have succeeded in demonstrating is that to truly take seriously the hypothesis that we are digitalisable machines, is to be forced to recognise a reversal of the naturalist or materialist idea, quite widespread among philosophers, physicians and the man in the street, that physics is the fundamental science to which all the other natural and human sciences - at least ontologically and thus in principle - should be reducible. I summarise this theorem by:

comp  ⇒  reversal

where comp designates “computationalism”, a name often given to “Digital Mechanism” and reversal designates the reversal of psychology with physics. What results is not a primitive matter with consciousness emerging from the organisation of the matter but the reverse: consciousness is now the more primitive and matter, or rather the appearance of material organisation, emerges from all the possible experiences of all the possible consciousnesses; and this in a sufficiently precise sense that derives physics (science of matter) from psychology (viewed as a very general science of conscious experience, or more positively, of stable discourses by the machines themselves: physics, but not geography^2, belonging necessarily to this self-referential discourse, which I will demonstrate.)

 

[Footnote 2: Physics becomes the study of what is a priori observable by every observer. The moon’s existence is not (in all truthfulness) a physical law. By now one might fear that the physical laws lead only to trivial truths, but we will see that the constraints of Mechanism detrivialise this introspective physics.]

 

 At this stage, anyone who for any good reason were to be persuaded of the veracity of contemporary materialism^3, can always surmise that the present work constitutes a rejection of Mechanism. This will nevertheless pose a problem since Mechanism is, implicitly or explicitly, the philosophy adopted by the majority of materialists.

 

[Footnote 3: Throughout this work, “materialism” will be taken in the weak sense of the philosophical doctrine that postulates the existence of a substantial universe (a fact of things obeying laws independent of us).]

 

Concerning my own position on this I remain silent. My philosophical opinions rest and will remain private. In the more technical part of the thesis I nevertheless show that one can already extract enough qualitative and quantitative givens from physics once this is shown to be derivable from machine psychology. We can then confront the results with the usual empirical and modern physical theories – notably quantum mechanics – to start to see an empirical confirmation of this psychology and thus confirmation of the reversal.

By illuminating problems in the interpretation of (quantum) physical facts, this thesis vehiculates a de facto judgment. The judgement that the reversal and Mechanism, its reasoning logic, are plausible.

A final observation concerns rationalism and interdisciplinarity.

This work pleads as “rationalist”. Like Karl Popper, I appreciate the match between rationalism and elitism. Rationalism is a form of hope concerning the reasoning powers of others. It is the hope that the other will have the courtesy to listen to you and accept your results or to indicate to you your errors, or to say to you at the very least that the subject is of no interest to him. Popper writes:

Faith⁴ in reason is not only a faith in our own reason but also – and even more – in that of others.

 

[Footnote 4: French translation of Popper quote suppressed.]

 

Thus a rationalist, even if he believes himself to be intellectually superior to others, will reject all claims to authority since he is aware that, if his intelligence is superior to that of others (which is hard for him to judge), it is only insofar as he is capable of learning from his own and other peoples’ mistakes, and that one can learn in this sense only if one takes others and their arguments seriously. Rationalism is therefore bound up with the idea that the other fellow has the right to be heard, and to defend his arguments. (Karl R. Popper⁵)

 

[Footnote 5: The Open Society and Its Enemies. London, Hutchinson, 1950]

 

I feel in particular, that reason is a universal and, universally profitable. Nothing else like science exists that is clearly separate to all other human endeavours. I merely believe that there are those possessed of a scientific attitude, which is no more than a form of modesty and honesty with themselves and with others. This attitude does not depend on any particular domain. I have a ready-made slogan:

Some gardeners are more scientific than astronomers

And, I might have said astrologers in place of gardeners⁶.

 

[Footnote 6: One can consult a fine book by Suzanne Blackmore In Search of the Light for an example of a scientific contribution to parapsychology, albeit somewhat negative.]

 

Today a kind of artificial chasm is maintained between the human sciences and the exact sciences. To combat the so-called elitist usage of mathematics, a minister of politics⁷ was struck by the notion of suppressing numerous hours devoted to maths in diverse sections of secondary teaching.

 

[Footnote 7: This idea was defended by Claude Allègre, explored in his book The Defeat of Plato (Fayard, Paris, 1995) and applied when he ascended to the post of Education minister.)]

 

In the same way, more and more hours of maths teaching are being taken away from the human sciences. This can only finish by discouraging teachers from teaching by demonstration – meaning explanations – of formulas in mathematics courses. One would presumably do the opposite, short of teaching other mathematics in the human sections.

The prohibition on the generalised use of deductive or interrogative reason, and on mathematics itself, contributes not only to rendering the human sciences less exact and the exact sciences less human, but also especially to rendering the human sciences less human and the exact sciences less exact, as should be clear from a reading of the present work.

Note that I do not claim that reason is everything, or that it is a kind of universal panacea. I only say that reason, properly considered, should stand as the first rung of courtesy, permitting evolution and progress in the research of knowledge. Short of making courageous “backflips” from time to time, as in revising one’s beliefs or abandoning a prejudice, this is how things should be.

Reason is not sufficient for progress in knowledge. There must also be inspiration, attention, imagination, bravery etc. While reason is not of itself sufficient, it is necessary to communicate results to others.

Again concerning interdisciplinarity,  I often like to cite Descartes. He wrote:

One must therefore be convinced that all the sciences are so linked together that it is easier to learn them all at the same time, than to isolate each from the other.

I hope that the present contribution will illustrate to what extent Descartes was inspired on this point. As with the collaborations on quantum mechanics of Einstein, Podolski and Rosen on the one hand, and of Bell on the other, this work should also illustrate the artificial character of the frontier between science and philosophy, or even between science and theology. We will return to this point.

Any traces of eventual frontiers existing between the sciences and the philosophies rest ultimately on philosophical postulates, avowed or not.

The advantage in my briefly recounting to you the pathways taken by my still-young thoughts, lies in the fact that children are naturally interdisciplinary: they have not yet submitted to that form of brainwashing known as “academic specialisation”. Children will always pose questions without fear of where they might be putting their feet.

Chapter 2

The Amoeba’s Secret

(1961 → 1971)

what am I doing here in these miasmas

tiny little Lilliputian

seized by terror, sometimes by asthma

before these tonnes of thingumajigs

Gaston Compère, “Geometrie de l’absence”

 

What follows evidently constitutes a partial view of the past. I am not telling my life-story,  merely those sparse events that illustrate the threading of the ideas and questions that together form the origin of the discovery.

Certain paediatricians claim that the first metaphysical crisis, or the first anxious moments concerning death, occur in children around age 4. Perhaps. I remember well the terror that invaded my mind day and night, and I demanded all manner of assurances from my parents that I would wake up the following morning.

With the well-intentioned care of silencing any woes in children, parents are apt to tell stories. As I was born in Germany, a nanny would regularly read to me in German many folk-tales, mainly those of the brothers Grimm, although I am not so certain that these offered me any appeasement concerning my worries.

It must have been at around the age of 5 or 6 when as I remember, doubtless by a sort of absent-mindedness or simply out of fatigue since I assailed him with questions remorselessly, that my father informed me that Saint Nicholas did not exist.

“And Father Christmas?”

“Him neither” my father replied, sadly noting my incredulous and king-hit countenance. Thus collapsed my first theory – or ontology, mythology, theology, belief, dream…call it what you will; at this age, any precision on my part had been premature.

“And the fairies?” I pleaded.

“Them neither”

“But, come on – the angels and all that…?”

Here I could see that I had come once again to pose my father an embarrassing question. After a long drawn-out sigh, he explained to me that really he believed in none of it – in angels or in God, but that my cousins and uncles and aunts believed it all. This astonished me all the more in that fairies were for me no more than female angels equipped with magic wands. I liked fairies and angels because they could fly (had I gone on to develop this tendency I might have become an aviator), but in the main because fairies and angels were immortals.

By now I had realised that adults could have differing beliefs. I found this profoundly shocking. If my cousins could believe in angels, was it not my right to also believe in them, as well as in fairies?

My father explained to me that it was surely my right after a certain fashion, to believe in whatever I wanted to believe, but that it was by no means evident that to do so would be in my best interest.

To believe in false propositions is to invite deception and disappointment. I found entirely pathetic the notion of believing in the false, and the whole thing gave me the shudders. From this moment on, I would try to adhere to the rule: avoid at any price belief in falsity.

The truth, evidently, can give rise to fear. In particular the idea that I was a mere mortal seemed to me to be at the very limits of the acceptable. But the idea of believing in falsity out of fear of the truth worried me all the more. I therefore made promise to myself to always search for the true, fearsome as this may well turn out to be. To know would seem even better.

To know is better: agreed. But is this even possible? Surely it cannot be easy.

To start with, I observed that during nightly dreams I was able to believe in just about any falsity. In addition, I suffered sleep problems, like many kids, something confirmed by electroencephalography. My dreams were abnormally realistic. This hyperrealism was fine in the case of lovely and pleasant dreams, but it became truly worrisome in the case of strange dreams and nightmares. Doubts arising from dreams, even concerning the possibility of knowing truth, will play a role in the story that occupies us here. There is nothing original in any of this; the metaphysical role of dreams appeared with the Hindu idealists, Plato, Descartes, Berkeley, as I would learn later on.

There followed the problem of a divergence of opinion between my father and my uncle. Before, everything was simple: a proposal was true if and only if my father asserted it¹.

 

[Footnote 1: I express myself here in adult language; at the time I would have been hard-pressed to formulate such a proposal in this way.]

 

Since he had evinced several seconds of doubt over the existence of angels and told me that my uncle himself believed in them, I truly wondered just whom I should believe over this.

 

I asked my uncle why he believed in angels. He replied, inasmuch as I can recall with any precision, that his belief was based in the fact that his parents believed in them, also his grandparents, etc. I found his reply frankly troubling. In effect, if his ancestor had been mistaken, this mistake would be propagated from generation to generation. I came to admire my father’s placing in doubt his own parents’ beliefs, and I decided to never believe in a proposition under simple pretext that it had been announced by a trusted person or family-member. I had hit upon what one now calls the principle of free will, a founding principle of the Free University of Brussels, the university where my father concluded his juristic studies after a learning spell with the Jesuits. I have no doubt that he may have influenced me.

I asked my father why he did not believe in angels and fairies (I could not have cared less about St Nicholas and Father Christmas because to my mind they were not even immortals). He responded by saying that having thoroughly searched everywhere, no one had encountered them anywhere. There followed a deluge of revelations: we live on a ball suspended in space, we have already orbited it etc. It seemed like no place existed for fairies and angels.

In order to not run the risk of believing falsity, my interest in imaginary beings slid over to a pronounced interest in animals, for whose existence nobody had even the slightest doubt. Returning to Belgium from Germany, my parents bought a small hobby-farm in the country to which we would go during vacations and on the weekend. I passed a lot of time observing swallows, butterflies, ants etc. When observing an animal, for example, a butterfly, I identified body and soul with this butterfly. If it flew, it was I who flew, if it gathered pollen, it was I who gathered pollen and it was I who became intoxicated by the multiple nectars of the flowers of the fields.

One day, I pointed to a white butterfly and exclaimed to my sister and brother “Look! This butterfly, I recognise it, it’s me; I have been this butterfly for several weeks now.” And they, with a delicacy well known amongst siblings, broke the news to me that this was not possible “because butterflies only live for one day.”

This came as quite a shock. It reminded me that if swallows and butterflies flew, like angels, they were none the less mortal for it, like me. They did seem though, to live a much shorter life than I, which I found disturbing.

At this time, whenever I identified with an animal, the identification took place in real time: I did not yet imagine from the butterfly’s point of view that one day could appear very long. Thus, if a butterfly truly lived but one day, due to my identification with it, I also lived but one day and no longer. And this was no laughing matter. I became maniacally obsessed with the maximum life spans of animals. Every time I heard of a new animal I would ask about its longevity. I was rather disappointed to discover that, on the whole, large animals lived longer than the small ones with which I had been identifying almost exclusively since I myself was of small stature at this time.

It was then that I made an authentic and revolutionary discovery. I had a canine companion in whom I confided my metaphysical concerns, my partner in the quest for truth. One fine day, I tried to show him a tiny red spider (in fact a tiny garden acarina), without managing to attract his attention. I concluded that the acarina was too tiny for my dog to see and suddenly, I found myself identifying with my dog. It thus came into my mind that the fairies and angels were perhaps just that little bit too miniscule for us to be able to perceive them.

As quickly as I could, I presented my theory to my father. I was particularly serene, not only in view of a proof of the existence of fairies, but also of the proof that my father could not be sure of their non-existence. I played devil’s advocate not because I wanted to contradict my father at any price, but rather to show that my cousins and uncle were perhaps not entirely in the wrong.

“Even if you searched everywhere on Earth for angels and didn’t find any, that proves nothing” I said. “Perhaps angels and fairies are simply too small for us to see them?” I explained to him the experience with my dog. My father, who had an answer to hand for everything, enlightened me that the search had included the direction of the tiny as well. He spoke to me of the microscope and – and in fact it was this that surprised me the most - he explained that the effective discovery of a multitude of tiny animals invisible to the naked eye had thereby been made. He then took a piece of paper and drew a sketch of an amoeba. I fell headlong in love with this tiny and adorable creature, multiform and so easy to draw.

And so to the fundamental question of the moment: how long might an amoeba expect to live?

Considering my belief that the smaller an animal was, the less time it could live, I hardly had any illusions. It must be that my tiny amoeba could not possibly live very long at all.

On this question of the lifetime of an amoeba, my father, with infinite wisdom, contented himself to explain that having eaten their fill of even tinier (!) creatures during a day, rather than merely dying like any ordinary beast such as a butterfly, it divided itself instead into two. Instead of dying and disappearing, an amoeba would divide itself and give birth to two amoebas. This was practically the reverse of death itself.

“So they’re immortal, then?”

This time, my father made no response.

I requested, of my elder brother and sister notably, that they bring back from school as many documents as they could find on amoebas, which they very kindly did. I thus started to write (more exactly, to scribble in just about every sense) a book: The Invisible World. My idea was that if invisible worlds existed – and the existence of the amoeba proved the existence of such worlds – one could no longer enjoy any form of certainty over whatever the case might be. In the final analysis, my uncle may well have been right on the subject of angels. The amoeba was surely a tangible piece of evidence that at least certain animals could be immortal. I killed time by annoying my parents with the demand for a microscope of my own. When the microscope inevitably arrived, I looked for amoebas. I discovered euglenas and especially paramecia, and when they divided themselves into two, I divided into two also. The question now was to know whether the paramecium had survived its division.

What exactly was going on?

I arrived at my first public seminar on amoebas. Even though I may be driven by self-imposed questions, I have always had an immense enthusiasm for giving oral exposés, even delivering classes and seminars on subjects at a considerable distance from those that preoccupy me directly. Thus, I had already given several verbal exposés, notably on minerals, but, in 1963, at the age of 8, people were urging me to deliver a seminar on microbes.

Entitled Amoeba, Euglena and Paramecium, I have managed to rediscover my succinct resumé in an old notebook:

My friends, let me tell you, in this room, we are not 24 in number, but several million².

 

[Footnote 2: I already liked paradoxical propositions; true but slightly astonishing statements, so to speak. “We” to my mind, evidently designated the students of the class with the teacher and the microbes in the class. The “million” would have had to be a much higher number in reality, if one had wanted to be more exact.]

 

Does the elephant see the tiny red spider? Could living beings exist who are so tiny that to us they would be invisible? Could there be an invisible world and a tunnel through which to explore it? As incredible as this may sound: yes. The microscope is the tunnel and the microbes are the discovery. Amoeba, euglena, paramecia, vorticellae, stentor, bacteria, ovum and spermatozoa, the protozoa among us! Nutrition, digestion, excretion, diverse sensibilities (the euglena’s eye), and …. reproduction.

Question: How long can an amoeba live? One day or forever? If it lives two days it lives every day… forever. (Public secondary school Robert Catteau, in the presence of Prof. Verschaeve)

 

I would become more and more obsessed by this question of the immortality of the amoeba. For the following two full years, I would pass half my free time on walks gathering every possible kind of water (sewerage, liquid manure, pond water, estuarine, puddles of every sort) and the other half observing these waters under the microscope. As usual, I always identified completely with the microorganisms I was observing and attempted to somehow sense whatever was going on at the moment of their division. I scaffolded an unimaginable number of theories illustrating the immortal character of unicellular creatures without arriving at a stage of conviction over any of them. The consistent effort to go from fairies to amoebas had been kick-started by my fear of believing in non-existent things and I did not at any price want to believe that amoebas were immortal if they in fact were not.

Yet, certitude had come through: IF an amoeba lives two days THEN it lives every day³

 

[Footnote 3: In fact the common amoeba divides on average every 50 hours approximately, but for the sake of simplicity I will continue to speak as though its divisions occur every 24 hours.]

 

It remained to demonstrate that for an amoeba to be immortal, it only needed to survive one division.

An example of a theory heading in this direction was what I called “The Principle of the Inspector”:

 

NO CORPSE means NO MURDER

 

According to the inspector, when the amoeba divides, it leaves behind no corpse, so no “body” dies in the act of dividing, therefore an amoeba survives its division. But this reasoning is invalid. When a hydra eats an amoeba, it gets digested and neither is any corpse left behind. The difficulty lies in believing that it survives the process of digestion. The “Principle of the Inspector” collapsed.

My basic theory or argument in favour of the immortality of the amoeba or paramecium had been directly linked to the experiment of swapping places with a concrete paramecium and keenly observing it through a microscope. Evidently I had come up against a problem of scale. It seems that I go from one to two but how is this possible? Which is the original paramecium between the two new ones? Both or only one of them? Which one?

In particular, if I become one of the two paramecia, how could I convince the other, given that it could just as easily make the claim of being me?

Completely gobsmacked by this, given over to a sort of semi-ecstatic vertigo I realised something just as extraordinary and incommunicable.

My feeling had been that the amoeba survived its division (and thus every division, meaning that it was immortal) but as it had become two, each of the two resulting amoebas were unable to convince the other that it had survived, where “it” referred to the original amoeba. From whence arose the incommunicability.

If an amoeba could not bring any of its copies to accept its survival or its immortality, how much more difficult might it be to convince a human being?

How difficult might it be for me to convince another human of the immortality of an amoeba even if immortality were an accepted notion? The more I reflected on this, the more it seemed to me that this immortality, if immortality it was, must be condemned to remain forever secret. This explained to my satisfaction the prudent silence of my father.

A spectacular confirmation would arrive when I was given The Marvels of Life, the very fine book by Ames & Wyler with a preface by Jean Rostand and superb illustrations by Charles Harper – it was also the first book I ever took to bed and slept with!

This book contained an entire chapter consecrated to the amoeba. Distraught by the toll of new information it contained, I initially believed that it would not get down to the question of the immortality of protozoa, but one day, I fell upon the photo of a paramecium for which the legend was “Is the paramecium immortal?” I quickly felt relieved because I could see that one could at least pose this question. Soon thereafter I felt astonished: “here, finally is a book that addresses an enormous number of questions and is content to pose the question”. This astonishment was given legs by the confirmation that the immortality of the paramecium, if immortality exists, could be no more than a necessary interrogation: a wager on uncommunicable success.

Ames and Wyler were just as prudent as my dad. I wondered if I was going to succeed at being just as prudent as them. What rotten luck all the same: I discover a fundamental truth and it seems forbidden to communicate it. I would have to wait until 1971 to get out of this impasse and to weigh up the communicable as per the uncommunicable parts of the amoeba’s secret.

It is noteworthy that up until this time, I had never asked what an amoeba was made of, or what I myself was made of. It seemed to me that the question did not truly depend on whatever things were made of. I did not imagine myself as made of something(s). The problem of immortality seemed to me to be more a question of biology, or of psychology, or of theology - not a question of physics. The matter did not rest there either in that I demanded to know how an amoeba managed to divide itself into two. Moreover, the argument in favour of the amoeba’s immortality on one hand and especially the incommunicability of this immortality by the amoeba on the other hand, depended crucially on the fact that after the division, the two resulting amoebas were rigorously identical, since only in this case did the two amoebas seem to contradict one another in claiming to have survived, one, each!

The reading of Ames & Wyler, accompanied by books of Jean Rostand passed to me by my father as well as some excellent manuals of Jean-Pierre Vanden Eeckhoudt – teacher at the Robert Catteau Public School – would drive me from astonishment to astonishment. There, I learnt the magic words that described the principal phases of cellular division: prophase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase; as well as their significance in chromosomal terms. I learnt especially that I am myself constituted from a colony of social amoebas! Our pluricellular organic quality posed me problems: how could I as a society of amoebas still identify with an individual amoeba? Unless an amoeba itself were in turn a colony of sub-microbes, and so on and so forth? I was thus led naturally to an interest in chemistry and to atomic physics.

On the subject of matter, I would pose myself a question that would prevent me from truly taking seriously the idea of the atom, to say nothing of the very notion of matter itself. Initially, I imagined atoms to be ultra-smooth and ultra-hard spheres; next I learnt that atoms were in fact constituted of electrons spinning around a nucleus of protons and neutrons that I imagined were in their turn, like ultra-smooth and ultra-hard spheres. It seemed that you could always divide matter and that research to find the ultimate particle was all in vain. At the same time however, if one were to find an ultimate particle, it seemed to me, what could it possibly be other than a smooth and ultra-hard sphere once again, and what could such a sphere be made of?

The very idea of matter seemed to me to be void of any explanatory capacity? To me, the notion of matter seemed to bring out more questions than it did answers and seemed to threaten perhaps, the unity of the amoeba.

It was in the volume by Joël de Rosnay that I learnt of the existence of DNA⁴, the gigantic molecule of deoxyribonucleic acid which is a long chain in the form of a double helix “like the inside of a certain castle of the Loire”, comprising the repetition of molecules taken from the group { Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine, Guanine} resulting in a very long “word” in the genre of AATGGCTATGGACCTCAG….and it was in this book that I would learn how this word, seen as a suite of triplets AAT GGC TAT GGA CCT CAG…. is translated into RNA, another nucleic acid, itself translated into a “word”: proteins, comprising tiny molecules, amino acids, chosen from the alphabet of 20 “amino acids”. I would learn how these proteins and their enzymes coped with the rest: from the synthesis of tiny molecules (amino acids, nucleotides, sugars), even right up to the constitution of the cell.

All the same, this gave oxygen to more questions. How did we know all this? What, indeed is a molecule?

In fact my “Joël de Rosnay” and the review Science & Life,  was a springboard for the book destined to become my basic bible for the following years (1968 and thereafter) : the French edition, edited by François Gros and prefaced by François Jacob of James D. Watson’s The Molecular Biology of the Gene. In this book, I would gain a glimpse of the incredible molecular dance that goes on, not only with the amoeba, but with an even tinier creature: the bacterium Escherichia Coli.

My “Watson” was so biblical that in my vocabulary, the very word “Watson” had become synonymous with THE Bible. In retrospect, my “Ames & Wyler” had been my first Watson, but at the age at which I read it, I believe that I did not pose questions in the genre of knowing who might have written a book.

(to be cont.)

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http://web.mac.com/kmjcommp/Plenitude_Music

Phone:

(612) 9389 4239  or  0431 723 001 

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[Bruno Marchal]

Hi Kim,

I didn't expect you to send the translation of the Amoeba's Secret (AS) on the list.  But it is OK, and you did a rather very good job.

For the other: "The Amoeba's Secret" is the book which has been ordered to me when I won the LE MONDE prize of the best thesis in 1998. For obscure reasons (which I don't want to talk about) it has not been published, it is the only prize LE MONDE which has not been published. They were supposed to publish the thesis, but judging it to technical they asked me to describe the story of the thesis, despite they new it is a bit sad. But it t contains a good explanation of both UDA and its arithmetical translation AUDA (the interviex of the introspective universal machine) and where those ideas come from. That could help if only because it is far shorter than "Conscience et Mécanisme". You can see it as an enlarged joining post. In that book I am using the term "psychology" of machine instead of "theology", which despite its connotation is far more well suited, especially concerning the secret feature of the "amoeba's" discourse, and which basically concerns the corona G* minus G of the discourse of the self-referentially correct machine. The machine is mute on that, or assert those proposition in an interrogative way. It is the magic of comp: it gives you a logic of what is "true" (ASSUMING comp) but unprovable (ASSUMING comp and some amount of self-consistency).

Best,

Bruno

On 28 Feb 2009, at 13:27, Kim Jones wrote:

The Amoeba’s Secret

 

by Bruno Marchal

 

May 19 2000

 

English version by K. Jones

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

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[russell standish-2]

On Sun, Mar 01, 2009 at 05:55:12PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote:

> Hi Kim,
>
> I didn't expect you to send the translation of the Amoeba's Secret  
> (AS) on the list.  But it is OK, and you did a rather very good job.
>
> For the other: "The Amoeba's Secret" is the book which has been  
> ordered to me when I won the LE MONDE prize of the best thesis in  
> 1998. For obscure reasons (which I don't want to talk about) it has  
> not been published, it is the only prize LE MONDE which has not been  
> published.

Thanks for sharing these old wounds with us. FWIW, I have read so far the
story up to the end of your undergrad days, and I think it is very
well written, and as I commented to Kim J - the chapter "Amoeba's
secret" would make an excellent basis for a short film. So far, Le
Monde's decision not to publish is completely inexplicable (I can
understand that the thesis itself being too technical might be a
reason for not publishing that).

Was there any discussion of removing some of the personal elements
from the sorry affair that happened when your thesis was submitted to
ULB? Even with politics operating behind the scene (which you have
hinted), I can't imagine that nothing of the work is publishable.


--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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UNSW SYDNEY 2052                 hpcoder@...
Australia                                http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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[Bruno Marchal]

On 02 Mar 2009, at 02:21, russell standish wrote:

>
> On Sun, Mar 01, 2009 at 05:55:12PM +0100, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> Hi Kim,
>>
>> I didn't expect you to send the translation of the Amoeba's Secret
>> (AS) on the list.  But it is OK, and you did a rather very good job.
>>
>> For the other: "The Amoeba's Secret" is the book which has been
>> ordered to me when I won the LE MONDE prize of the best thesis in
>> 1998. For obscure reasons (which I don't want to talk about) it has
>> not been published, it is the only prize LE MONDE which has not been
>> published.
>
> Thanks for sharing these old wounds with us. FWIW, I have read so  
> far the
> story up to the end of your undergrad days, and I think it is very
> well written, and as I commented to Kim J - the chapter "Amoeba's
> secret" would make an excellent basis for a short film. So far, Le
> Monde's decision not to publish is completely inexplicable (I can
> understand that the thesis itself being too technical might be a
> reason for not publishing that).
>
> Was there any discussion of removing some of the personal elements
> from the sorry affair that happened when your thesis was submitted to
> ULB?

I send the manuscript electronically after each chapter, and said it  
was very nice, up to the end.
Until Grasset interrupts the contract with LE MONDE. I have been told  
the book, nor the thesis can enter in their collection.
I did not get any explanation. I have been interviewed by journalists  
on my work, only the journalist of switzerland succeed in publishing  
his paper.





> Even with politics operating behind the scene (which you have
> hinted), I can't imagine that nothing of the work is publishable.


I already discussed proposition of publishing "Conscience et  
Mécanisme" with three publishers, before my thesis was judged not  
receivable (meaning no private defense, nor public defense, I have  
*never* met those who criticize, not even my work, but a product of  
their imagination). Then silence, even after the defense in Lille, and  
even more after the paradoxical price in Paris.

I cannot explain. Or I can explain except that here reality is far  
beyond fiction as usual, but also more sad, and rather delicate if  
only because that story is not finished.
My life is more unbelievable than any thing I assert in my works. It  
took me 22 years to understand what happened in 1977, and since then.

I feel responsible to let them build they own trap, and then  get  
myself a bit worried seeing them to protect themselves from Brussels  
to Paris!

It is not because I have done an "original work" (say) in Brussels,  
that I got problems there. It is because I got problems in Brussels  
that I have done an original work. In 1977, they give me no chance,  
not even getting out of Belgium.
In 1994, my work was criticize vaguely as "not original", "too much  
simple",  and then "delirious". And now already "not from him" in some  
place. Which again shows the problems is not related with my findings,  
except it belongs to the kind of things you can easily use to treat  
you as a fool (Gödel's theorem, Quantum mechanics, consciousness: few  
understand so it is easy to say "not serious").

The little scandal has grown up all the time and is too big, now. It  
is the kind of manipulation which makes everyone feel responsible,  
from corporatist reflex to corporatist reflex, when actually there is  
only one, very clever, but very bad,  guy.
Now that "little scandal" has become big enough to throw light on  
other really bigger scandals. There are "cadavres dans les placards",  
as we say in French (corpses hidden in boxes). Mean of pressures.

I still believe in academies, but like in School "serial killer" can  
exist. When you see the time made by religious institution to protect  
their member of their hierarchy from their much grave behavior, I  
estimate it could take a long time if ever to understand and recognize  
what happened.
And I have no problem with serious academicians and scientists which  
understand enough to understand it is "serious", even if probably  
wrong, which I have myself never ceased to believe plausible (which  
explains why I am eager to discuss the validity of the UDA steps, with  
people interested). I did defend the work as PhD thesis. I was asked  
many questions, I answered them and everyone got the idea. Some people  
takes time, but most get enough to trust the interest of the work.  
Still today, few get both UDA and AUDA.

UDA is almost easy, but not so easy. AUDA is very *simple*, once you  
understand enough standard logic (which I have discovered is  
excessively rare). The whole thing is strongly interdisciplinary, and  
between disciplines, rumors circulate more quickly than "scientific  
bridge",  which often makes people feeling being aggressed on their  
territories. Even more so when the work approaches question  
traditionally qualified as "philosophical".

My initial power comes from the fact that in 1977, I did abandoned,  
for bad reasons (but it will take many years to understand that), the  
idea of doing academic research, and so I did come back to the very  
fundamental questioning I have always been living. I didn't and don't  
complain (my weakness probably).
And it is the Academy, 20 years later, which will push me back again,  
and again. I have never submitted publications by myself. All have  
been asked by people, having heard I said something new, sometimes  
insisting gently. Nowadays, since those events, even ordered paper (or  
jobs) get jeopardized quickly. Last year I was asked to write a paper  
for a book in homage to the late logician Jean Ladrière, (who offered  
to me its formidable book on Gödel theorems: Les limitations internes  
des formalismes"), and then ... nothing again. I am used to it.

Thanks for your interest,

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/




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[m.a.-2]

Some parts of this message have been removed. Learn more about Nabble's security policy.

Bruno,

           I've often wondered why neither Dr. Deutsch nor Alan Forrester has commented on your theory of UDA and AUDA. I certainly would be interested in their views. A theory that has execised some of the best minds on this list for months on end certainly deserves serious consideration. Best,

                                                                                                                                                                                                martin a.

 

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Bruno Marchal" <marchal@...>

To: <everything-list@...>

Sent: Monday, March 02, 2009 2:49 PM

Subject: Re: The Amoeba's Secret - English Version started

> Even with politics operating behind the scene (which you have
> hinted), I can't imagine that nothing of the work is publishable.


I already discussed proposition of publishing "Conscience et 
Mécanisme" with three publishers, before my thesis was judged not 
receivable (meaning no private defense, nor public defense, I have 
*never* met those who criticize, not even my work, but a product of 
their imagination). Then silence, even after the defense in Lille, and 
even more after the paradoxical price in Paris.

I cannot explain. Or I can explain except that here reality is far 
beyond fiction as usual, but also more sad, and rather delicate if 
only because that story is not finished.
My life is more unbelievable than any thing I assert in my works. It 
took me 22 years to understand what happened in 1977, and since then.

I feel responsible to let them build they own trap, and then  get 
myself a bit worried seeing them to protect themselves from Brussels 
to Paris!

It is not because I have done an "original work" (say) in Brussels, 
that I got problems there. It is because I got problems in Brussels 
that I have done an original work. In 1977, they give me no chance, 
not even getting out of Belgium.
In 1994, my work was criticize vaguely as "not original", "too much 
simple",  and then "delirious". And now already "not from him" in some 
place. Which again shows the problems is not related with my findings, 
except it belongs to the kind of things you can easily use to treat 
you as a fool (Gödel's theorem, Quantum mechanics, consciousness: few 
understand so it is easy to say "not serious").

The little scandal has grown up all the time and is too big, now. It 
is the kind of manipulation which makes everyone feel responsible, 
from corporatist reflex to corporatist reflex, when actually there is 
only one, very clever, but very bad,  guy.
Now that "little scandal" has become big enough to throw light on 
other really bigger scandals. There are "cadavres dans les placards", 
as we say in French (corpses hidden in boxes). Mean of pressures.

I still believe in academies, but like in School "serial killer" can 
exist. When you see the time made by religious institution to protect 
their member of their hierarchy from their much grave behavior, I 
estimate it could take a long time if ever to understand and recognize 
what happened.
And I have no problem with serious academicians and scientists which 
understand enough to understand it is "serious", even if probably 
wrong, which I have myself never ceased to believe plausible (which 
explains why I am eager to discuss the validity of the UDA steps, with 
people interested). I did defend the work as PhD thesis. I was asked 
many questions, I answered them and everyone got the idea. Some people 
takes time, but most get enough to trust the interest of the work. 
Still today, few get both UDA and AUDA.

UDA is almost easy, but not so easy. AUDA is very *simple*, once you 
understand enough standard logic (which I have discovered is 
excessively rare). The whole thing is strongly interdisciplinary, and 
between disciplines, rumors circulate more quickly than "scientific 
bridge",  which often makes people feeling being aggressed on their 
territories. Even more so when the work approaches question 
traditionally qualified as "philosophical".

My initial power comes from the fact that in 1977, I did abandoned, 
for bad reasons (but it will take many years to understand that), the 
idea of doing academic research, and so I did come back to the very 
fundamental questioning I have always been living. I didn't and don't 
complain (my weakness probably).
And it is the Academy, 20 years later, which will push me back again, 
and again. I have never submitted publications by myself. All have 
been asked by people, having heard I said something new, sometimes 
insisting gently. Nowadays, since those events, even ordered paper (or 
jobs) get jeopardized quickly. Last year I was asked to write a paper 
for a book in homage to the late logician Jean Ladrière, (who offered 
to me its formidable book on Gödel theorems: Les limitations internes 
des formalismes"), and then ... nothing again. I am used to it.

Thanks for your interest,

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/




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[Colin Hales-2]

Some parts of this message have been removed. Learn more about Nabble's security policy.

Hi Bruno,
I feel your angst. The received view is a blunt and frightened beast, guarded by the ignorant and uncreative in wily protection of turf and co-conspirator. I recently did a powerpoint presentation called "rejection 101". It sounds like you have been through exactly what I have been through - except on a geological timescale that would tire a god. Although I am starting to make progress... I regard that progress to be achieved in spite of them, not because of their vision or knowledge. The science I thought I was going to find was full of those who frolic in ideas.... sadly I was mistaken. Now, when I think I have made progress - I know that progress to be mediated by the less than adequate  - and promulgated by momentum rather than incisive scrutiny- and it doesn't feel good.

see file 2008_Thu_23_Oct.pdf in the googlegroups everythinglist file store.

So Amoebas speak english now, eh? Excellent. :-)

cheers,
Colin


m.a. wrote:

Bruno,

           I've often wondered why neither Dr. Deutsch nor Alan Forrester has commented on your theory of UDA and AUDA. I certainly would be interested in their views. A theory that has execised some of the best minds on this list for months on end certainly deserves serious consideration. Best,

                                                                                                                                                                                                martin a.

 

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Bruno Marchal" <marchal@...>

To: <everything-list@...>

Sent: Monday, March 02, 2009 2:49 PM

Subject: Re: The Amoeba's Secret - English Version started

> Even with politics operating behind the scene (which you have
> hinted), I can't imagine that nothing of the work is publishable.


I already discussed proposition of publishing "Conscience et 
Mécanisme" with three publishers, before my thesis was judged not 
receivable (meaning no private defense, nor public defense, I have 
*never* met those who criticize, not even my work, but a product of 
their imagination). Then silence, even after the defense in Lille, and 
even more after the paradoxical price in Paris.

I cannot explain. Or I can explain except that here reality is far 
beyond fiction as usual, but also more sad, and rather delicate if 
only because that story is not finished.
My life is more unbelievable than any thing I assert in my works. It 
took me 22 years to understand what happened in 1977, and since then.

I feel responsible to let them build they own trap, and then  get 
myself a bit worried seeing them to protect themselves from Brussels 
to Paris!

It is not because I have done an "original work" (say) in Brussels, 
that I got problems there. It is because I got problems in Brussels 
that I have done an original work. In 1977, they give me no chance, 
not even getting out of Belgium.
In 1994, my work was criticize vaguely as "not original", "too much 
simple",  and then "delirious". And now already "not from him" in some 
place. Which again shows the problems is not related with my findings, 
except it belongs to the kind of things you can easily use to treat 
you as a fool (Gödel's theorem, Quantum mechanics, consciousness: few 
understand so it is easy to say "not serious").

The little scandal has grown up all the time and is too big, now. It 
is the kind of manipulation which makes everyone feel responsible, 
from corporatist reflex to corporatist reflex, when actually there is 
only one, very clever, but very bad,  guy.
Now that "little scandal" has become big enough to throw light on 
other really bigger scandals. There are "cadavres dans les placards", 
as we say in French (corpses hidden in boxes). Mean of pressures.

I still believe in academies, but like in School "serial killer" can 
exist. When you see the time made by religious institution to protect 
their member of their hierarchy from their much grave behavior, I 
estimate it could take a long time if ever to understand and recognize 
what happened.
And I have no problem with serious academicians and scientists which 
understand enough to understand it is "serious", even if probably 
wrong, which I have myself never ceased to believe plausible (which 
explains why I am eager to discuss the validity of the UDA steps, with 
people interested). I did defend the work as PhD thesis. I was asked 
many questions, I answered them and everyone got the idea. Some people 
takes time, but most get enough to trust the interest of the work. 
Still today, few get both UDA and AUDA.

UDA is almost easy, but not so easy. AUDA is very *simple*, once you 
understand enough standard logic (which I have discovered is 
excessively rare). The whole thing is strongly interdisciplinary, and 
between disciplines, rumors circulate more quickly than "scientific 
bridge",  which often makes people feeling being aggressed on their 
territories. Even more so when the work approaches question 
traditionally qualified as "philosophical".

My initial power comes from the fact that in 1977, I did abandoned, 
for bad reasons (but it will take many years to understand that), the 
idea of doing academic research, and so I did come back to the very 
fundamental questioning I have always been living. I didn't and don't 
complain (my weakness probably).
And it is the Academy, 20 years later, which will push me back again, 
and again. I have never submitted publications by myself. All have 
been asked by people, having heard I said something new, sometimes 
insisting gently. Nowadays, since those events, even ordered paper (or 
jobs) get jeopardized quickly. Last year I was asked to write a paper 
for a book in homage to the late logician Jean Ladrière, (who offered 
to me its formidable book on Gödel theorems: Les limitations internes 
des formalismes"), and then ... nothing again. I am used to it.

Thanks for your interest,

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

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[Colin Hales-2]

Some parts of this message have been removed. Learn more about Nabble's security policy.

The file..... sorry .... use Rejection 101.pdf
enjoy!
colin


Colin Hales wrote:

Hi Bruno,
I feel your angst. The received view is a blunt and frightened beast, guarded by the ignorant and uncreative in wily protection of turf and co-conspirator. I recently did a powerpoint presentation called "rejection 101". It sounds like you have been through exactly what I have been through - except on a geological timescale that would tire a god. Although I am starting to make progress... I regard that progress to be achieved in spite of them, not because of their vision or knowledge. The science I thought I was going to find was full of those who frolic in ideas.... sadly I was mistaken. Now, when I think I have made progress - I know that progress to be mediated by the less than adequate  - and promulgated by momentum rather than incisive scrutiny- and it doesn't feel good.

see file 2008_Thu_23_Oct.pdf in the googlegroups everythinglist file store.

So Amoebas speak english now, eh? Excellent. :-)

cheers,
Colin


m.a. wrote:

Bruno,

           I've often wondered why neither Dr. Deutsch nor Alan Forrester has commented on your theory of UDA and AUDA. I certainly would be interested in their views. A theory that has execised some of the best minds on this list for months on end certainly deserves serious consideration. Best,

                                                                                                                                                                                                martin a.

 

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Bruno Marchal" <marchal@...>

To: <everything-list@...>

Sent: Monday, March 02, 2009 2:49 PM

Subject: Re: The Amoeba's Secret - English Version started

> Even with politics operating behind the scene (which you have
> hinted), I can't imagine that nothing of the work is publishable.


I already discussed proposition of publishing "Conscience et 
Mécanisme" with three publishers, before my thesis was judged not 
receivable (meaning no private defense, nor public defense, I have 
*never* met those who criticize, not even my work, but a product of 
their imagination). Then silence, even after the defense in Lille, and 
even more after the paradoxical price in Paris.

I cannot explain. Or I can explain except that here reality is far 
beyond fiction as usual, but also more sad, and rather delicate if 
only because that story is not finished.
My life is more unbelievable than any thing I assert in my works. It 
took me 22 years to understand what happened in 1977, and since then.

I feel responsible to let them build they own trap, and then  get 
myself a bit worried seeing them to protect themselves from Brussels 
to Paris!

It is not because I have done an "original work" (say) in Brussels, 
that I got problems there. It is because I got problems in Brussels 
that I have done an original work. In 1977, they give me no chance, 
not even getting out of Belgium.
In 1994, my work was criticize vaguely as "not original", "too much 
simple",  and then "delirious". And now already "not from him" in some 
place. Which again shows the problems is not related with my findings, 
except it belongs to the kind of things you can easily use to treat 
you as a fool (Gödel's theorem, Quantum mechanics, consciousness: few 
understand so it is easy to say "not serious").

The little scandal has grown up all the time and is too big, now. It 
is the kind of manipulation which makes everyone feel responsible, 
from corporatist reflex to corporatist reflex, when actually there is 
only one, very clever, but very bad,  guy.
Now that "little scandal" has become big enough to throw light on 
other really bigger scandals. There are "cadavres dans les placards", 
as we say in French (corpses hidden in boxes). Mean of pressures.

I still believe in academies, but like in School "serial killer" can 
exist. When you see the time made by religious institution to protect 
their member of their hierarchy from their much grave behavior, I 
estimate it could take a long time if ever to understand and recognize 
what happened.
And I have no problem with serious academicians and scientists which 
understand enough to understand it is "serious", even if probably 
wrong, which I have myself never ceased to believe plausible (which 
explains why I am eager to discuss the validity of the UDA steps, with 
people interested). I did defend the work as PhD thesis. I was asked 
many questions, I answered them and everyone got the idea. Some people 
takes time, but most get enough to trust the interest of the work. 
Still today, few get both UDA and AUDA.

UDA is almost easy, but not so easy. AUDA is very *simple*, once you 
understand enough standard logic (which I have discovered is 
excessively rare). The whole thing is strongly interdisciplinary, and 
between disciplines, rumors circulate more quickly than "scientific 
bridge",  which often makes people feeling being aggressed on their 
territories. Even more so when the work approaches question 
traditionally qualified as "philosophical".

My initial power comes from the fact that in 1977, I did abandoned, 
for bad reasons (but it will take many years to understand that), the 
idea of doing academic research, and so I did come back to the very 
fundamental questioning I have always been living. I didn't and don't 
complain (my weakness probably).
And it is the Academy, 20 years later, which will push me back again, 
and again. I have never submitted publications by myself. All have 
been asked by people, having heard I said something new, sometimes 
insisting gently. Nowadays, since those events, even ordered paper (or 
jobs) get jeopardized quickly. Last year I was asked to write a paper 
for a book in homage to the late logician Jean Ladrière, (who offered 
to me its formidable book on Gödel theorems: Les limitations internes 
des formalismes"), and then ... nothing again. I am used to it.

Thanks for your interest,

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
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To post to this group, send email to everything-list@...
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[Bruno Marchal]

Hi m.a., hi Colin,

On 06 Mar 2009, at 05:07, m.a. wrote:

Bruno,

           I've often wondered why neither Dr. Deutsch nor Alan Forrester has commented on your theory of UDA and AUDA. I certainly would be interested in their views. A theory that has execised some of the best minds on this list for months on end certainly deserves serious consideration. Best,

                                                                                                                                                                                                martin a.

 

 

It is a delicate question. You could perhaps ask them. 

I can provide general clues. 

- Quantum mechanics is not known by logicians. So it is easy to make someone interested in modern physics looking crazy for a logician: just say ``look it seems the guy is open to the notion of parallel universe".

- Gödel's theorem is not known by physicists. So it easy to make someone interested in self-reference looking crazy for a physicist: look even the big Penrose said craps on Gödel's theorem, no need to imagine what can say a total unknown and solitary researcher.

- Neither physicists nor logicians really knows about the mind-body problem. So it is easy to make someone interested in consciousness looking crazy: just say: this guy is interested on consciousness (with a grin).

Why does some people want me so much looking crazy? Well if I tell you, I would myself find you insane to believe me. So I will not even try.

If you known Belgium recent story, you can imagine, and reality is beyond what you can imagine.

Let us just say, like Colin Hales says in his rejection_101 document that it is hard to do inter-disciplinary work in a world of extreme specialization. That's at least true for all of us.

But I don't want you to give the impression that I feel being rejected. I am just ignored. And I have always been accepted by serious and humble scientists, but none listen to them, like if it existed Academy and Academy.  And I have even been praised, more than often, but with no follow-up. Never. There are good but unspeakable local and less local reasons. 

Now, even when all scientists in a some field agree, plausible evidences take time to be accepted. Look at the health politics in most countries. It is not just total non sense, it is criminal and economical non sense. Yet nothing changes. I believe more in cold fusion than in the danger of cannabis or salvia divinorum, you know, or even tobacco, when used properly. At least cold fusion and water memory does not arm.  But the overall resistance to harm reduction technics toward even just legal drugs can make you depressed and despaired about the willingness of human collectivity to be a bit more rational, and a bit more healthy.

I do appreciate David Deutsch and Alan Forrester. And I would certainly be pleased to have their opinions. But new things take time, especially when circumstances don't help. Give them enough time.

Bruno

 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Bruno Marchal" <marchal@...>

To: <everything-list@...>

Sent: Monday, March 02, 2009 2:49 PM

Subject: Re: The Amoeba's Secret - English Version started

> Even with politics operating behind the scene (which you have
> hinted), I can't imagine that nothing of the work is publishable.


I already discussed proposition of publishing "Conscience et  
Mécanisme" with three publishers, before my thesis was judged not  
receivable (meaning no private defense, nor public defense, I have  
*never* met those who criticize, not even my work, but a product of  
their imagination). Then silence, even after the defense in Lille, and  
even more after the paradoxical price in Paris.

I cannot explain. Or I can explain except that here reality is far  
beyond fiction as usual, but also more sad, and rather delicate if  
only because that story is not finished.
My life is more unbelievable than any thing I assert in my works. It  
took me 22 years to understand what happened in 1977, and since then.

I feel responsible to let them build they own trap, and then  get  
myself a bit worried seeing them to protect themselves from Brussels  
to Paris!

It is not because I have done an "original work" (say) in Brussels,  
that I got problems there. It is because I got problems in Brussels  
that I have done an original work. In 1977, they give me no chance,  
not even getting out of Belgium.
In 1994, my work was criticize vaguely as "not original", "too much  
simple",  and then "delirious". And now already "not from him" in some  
place. Which again shows the problems is not related with my findings,  
except it belongs to the kind of things you can easily use to treat  
you as a fool (Gödel's theorem, Quantum mechanics, consciousness: few  
understand so it is easy to say "not serious").

The little scandal has grown up all the time and is too big, now. It  
is the kind of manipulation which makes everyone feel responsible,  
from corporatist reflex to corporatist reflex, when actually there is  
only one, very clever, but very bad,  guy.
Now that "little scandal" has become big enough to throw light on  
other really bigger scandals. There are "cadavres dans les placards",  
as we say in French (corpses hidden in boxes). Mean of pressures.

I still believe in academies, but like in School "serial killer" can  
exist. When you see the time made by religious institution to protect  
their member of their hierarchy from their much grave behavior, I  
estimate it could take a long time if ever to understand and recognize  
what happened.
And I have no problem with serious academicians and scientists which  
understand enough to understand it is "serious", even if probably  
wrong, which I have myself never ceased to believe plausible (which  
explains why I am eager to discuss the validity of the UDA steps, with  
people interested). I did defend the work as PhD thesis. I was asked  
many questions, I answered them and everyone got the idea. Some people  
takes time, but most get enough to trust the interest of the work.  
Still today, few get both UDA and AUDA.

UDA is almost easy, but not so easy. AUDA is very *simple*, once you  
understand enough standard logic (which I have discovered is  
excessively rare). The whole thing is strongly interdisciplinary, and  
between disciplines, rumors circulate more quickly than "scientific  
bridge",  which often makes people feeling being aggressed on their  
territories. Even more so when the work approaches question  
traditionally qualified as "philosophical".

My initial power comes from the fact that in 1977, I did abandoned,  
for bad reasons (but it will take many years to understand that), the  
idea of doing academic research, and so I did come back to the very  
fundamental questioning I have always been living. I didn't and don't  
complain (my weakness probably).
And it is the Academy, 20 years later, which will push me back again,  
and again. I have never submitted publications by myself. All have  
been asked by people, having heard I said something new, sometimes  
insisting gently. Nowadays, since those events, even ordered paper (or  
jobs) get jeopardized quickly. Last year I was asked to write a paper  
for a book in homage to the late logician Jean Ladrière, (who offered  
to me its formidable book on Gödel theorems: Les limitations internes  
des formalismes"), and then ... nothing again. I am used to it.

Thanks for your interest,

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

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[Günther Greindl]

Hi Colin,

the problem is that while the _ideal_ of science is rationality, it is
not yet fully institutionalized (can it ever be?) and people still
harbor a lot of irrationality personally (scientists often have the
strangest beliefs outside their speciality
(http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/01/outside_the_lab.html)).

That's why people like those at overcomingbias.com are important - I
hope a lot will change in the coming years.

See for instance this post:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/05/science-doesnt.html

or this:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/05/when-science-ca.html

QUOTE
The drive of Science is to obtain a mountain of evidence so huge that
not even fallible human scientists can misread it.  But even that
sometimes goes wrong, when people become confused about which theory
predicts what, or bake extremely-hard-to-test components into an early
version of their theory.  And sometimes you just can't get clear
experimental evidence at all.

Either way, you have to try to do the thing that Science doesn't trust
anyone to do - think rationally, and figure out the answer before you
get clubbed over the head with it.
END QUOTE

Or this one:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/05/science-or-baye.html

Never forget, it's only been a few thousand years since the stone age.
Don't expect too much yet ;-)

Cheers,
Günther

Colin Hales wrote:

>   The file..... sorry .... use *Rejection 101.pdf*
> enjoy!
> colin
>
>
> Colin Hales wrote:
>> Hi Bruno,
>> I feel your angst. The received view is a blunt and frightened beast,
>> guarded by the ignorant and uncreative in wily protection of turf and
>> co-conspirator. I recently did a powerpoint presentation called
>> "rejection 101". It sounds like you have been through exactly what I
>> have been through - except on a geological timescale that would tire a
>> god. Although I am starting to make progress... I regard that progress
>> to be achieved in spite of them, not because of their vision or
>> knowledge. The science I thought I was going to find was full of those
>> who frolic in ideas.... sadly I was mistaken. Now, when I think I have
>> made progress - I know that progress to be mediated by the less than
>> adequate  - and promulgated by momentum rather than incisive scrutiny-
>> and it doesn't feel good.
>>
>> see file *2008_Thu_23_Oct.pdf * in the googlegroups everythinglist
>> file store.
>>
>> So Amoebas speak english now, eh? Excellent. :-)
>>
>> cheers,
>> Colin
>>
>>
>> m.a. wrote:
>>> * Bruno, *
>>> *            I've often wondered why neither Dr. Deutsch nor Alan
>>> Forrester has commented on your theory of UDA and AUDA. I certainly
>>> would be interested in their views. A theory that has execised some
>>> of the best minds on this list for months on end certainly deserves
>>> serious consideration. Best, *
>>>                                                                    
>>>                                                                    
>>>                                                         *martin a.*
>>> **
>>> **
>>> **
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "Bruno Marchal" < marchal@... <mailto:marchal@...> >
>>> To: < everything-list@...
>>> <mailto:everything-list@...> >
>>> Sent: Monday, March 02, 2009 2:49 PM
>>> Subject: Re: The Amoeba's Secret - English Version started
>>>
>>>
>>> > Even with politics operating behind the scene (which you have
>>> > hinted), I can't imagine that nothing of the work is publishable.
>>>
>>>
>>> I already discussed proposition of publishing "Conscience et
>>> Mécanisme" with three publishers, before my thesis was judged not
>>> receivable (meaning no private defense, nor public defense, I have
>>> *never* met those who criticize, not even my work, but a product of
>>> their imagination). Then silence, even after the defense in Lille, and
>>> even more after the paradoxical price in Paris.
>>>
>>> I cannot explain. Or I can explain except that here reality is far
>>> beyond fiction as usual, but also more sad, and rather delicate if
>>> only because that story is not finished.
>>> My life is more unbelievable than any thing I assert in my works. It
>>> took me 22 years to understand what happened in 1977, and since then.
>>>
>>> I feel responsible to let them build they own trap, and then  get
>>> myself a bit worried seeing them to protect themselves from Brussels
>>> to Paris!
>>>
>>> It is not because I have done an "original work" (say) in Brussels,
>>> that I got problems there. It is because I got problems in Brussels
>>> that I have done an original work. In 1977, they give me no chance,
>>> not even getting out of Belgium.
>>> In 1994, my work was criticize vaguely as "not original", "too much
>>> simple",  and then "delirious". And now already "not from him" in some
>>> place. Which again shows the problems is not related with my findings,
>>> except it belongs to the kind of things you can easily use to treat
>>> you as a fool (Gödel's theorem, Quantum mechanics, consciousness: few
>>> understand so it is easy to say "not serious").
>>>
>>> The little scandal has grown up all the time and is too big, now. It
>>> is the kind of manipulation which makes everyone feel responsible,
>>> from corporatist reflex to corporatist reflex, when actually there is
>>> only one, very clever, but very bad,  guy.
>>> Now that "little scandal" has become big enough to throw light on
>>> other really bigger scandals. There are "cadavres dans les placards",
>>> as we say in French (corpses hidden in boxes). Mean of pressures.
>>>
>>> I still believe in academies, but like in School "serial killer" can
>>> exist. When you see the time made by religious institution to protect
>>> their member of their hierarchy from their much grave behavior, I
>>> estimate it could take a long time if ever to understand and recognize
>>> what happened.
>>> And I have no problem with serious academicians and scientists which
>>> understand enough to understand it is "serious", even if probably
>>> wrong, which I have myself never ceased to believe plausible (which
>>> explains why I am eager to discuss the validity of the UDA steps, with
>>> people interested). I did defend the work as PhD thesis. I was asked
>>> many questions, I answered them and everyone got the idea. Some people
>>> takes time, but most get enough to trust the interest of the work.
>>> Still today, few get both UDA and AUDA.
>>>
>>> UDA is almost easy, but not so easy. AUDA is very *simple*, once you
>>> understand enough standard logic (which I have discovered is
>>> excessively rare). The whole thing is strongly interdisciplinary, and
>>> between disciplines, rumors circulate more quickly than "scientific
>>> bridge",  which often makes people feeling being aggressed on their
>>> territories. Even more so when the work approaches question
>>> traditionally qualified as "philosophical".
>>>
>>> My initial power comes from the fact that in 1977, I did abandoned,
>>> for bad reasons (but it will take many years to understand that), the
>>> idea of doing academic research, and so I did come back to the very
>>> fundamental questioning I have always been living. I didn't and don't
>>> complain (my weakness probably).
>>> And it is the Academy, 20 years later, which will push me back again,
>>> and again. I have never submitted publications by myself. All have
>>> been asked by people, having heard I said something new, sometimes
>>> insisting gently. Nowadays, since those events, even ordered paper (or
>>> jobs) get jeopardized quickly. Last year I was asked to write a paper
>>> for a book in homage to the late logician Jean Ladrière, (who offered
>>> to me its formidable book on Gödel theorems: Les limitations internes
>>> des formalismes"), and then ... nothing again. I am used to it.
>>>
>>> Thanks for your interest,
>>>
>>> Bruno
>>>
>>> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ <http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/%7Emarchal/>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>

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[Kim Jones-2]

On 06/03/2009, at 11:24 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

- Neither physicists nor logicians really knows about the mind-body problem. So it is easy to make someone interested in consciousness looking crazy: just say: this guy is interested on consciousness (with a grin).

Why does some people want me so much looking crazy? Well if I tell you, I would myself find you insane to believe me. So I will not even try.

If you known Belgium recent story, you can imagine, and reality is beyond what you can imagine.

Bruno

last night I dreamt that my cat had divided itself into two cats. Both cats were clones and happily running about and interacting. I could see both and was discussing with some friends the puzzle of why only some people, like me could see the constant clonage of things living. During the dream I had the amazing perception that this was happening to all living objects and it was as logical and certain as anything perceived during the day with eyes wide open.

Also amazing - the "belief" that this is happening to macro (living) objects persisted in my brain for about a half an hour after I woke up. Clearly, translating into English your "amoebas" is having a profound effect on my unconscious mind.

This also highlights for me the mysterious nature of "belief". As you mention, early on in the thesis, we can believe no matter what falsity while we are asleep and dreaming. The occasional powerful dream like this one that penetrates the awake conscious mind shakes the very foundations of what we consider to be "reality". 

What then, is the value of paying attention to the dreaming mind in this odyssey of "The Fabric of Consciousness" we are all hypnotized by at this time?

PS - expect to post to this thread an instalment of the continuation of the translation by tonight - am being extremely careful to get it dead right to avoid any ambiguities.

regards,

Kim Jones

People often confuse belief in a reality with belief in a 

physical reality - Bruno Marchal

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Email:

kmjcommp@...

kimjones@...

Web:

http://web.mac.com/kmjcommp/Plenitude_Music

Phone:

(612) 9389 4239  or  0431 723 001 

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[Kim Jones-2]

2nd instalment - the plot thickens! (scroll down if you have read the first instalment)

The Amoeba’s Secret

 

 

 

Bruno Marchal

 

 

May 19 2000

 

English version by K. Jones

To the memory of my parents

Contents

 

1.     Introduction

2.     The Amoeba’s Secret (1961→1971)

3.     Goedel’s Diagonal (1971→1973)

4.     Blacker than you thought [I] (1973→1977)

 

To be cont.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The mind returns to itself like a glove – Buddhist proverb

Mr Edgar Morin, president of the jury on Le Monde 1998’s University Research Prize, commended the laureates, I amongst them, seeing the happy fortune of our doctoral theses published chez Grasset, that we should have no hesitation in adopting a presentation bearing full witness to the human and personal aspect - all of which decided me to relate it’s entire history.

I should recognise the somewhat special character of the result, but also, and perhaps especially, because of the nature of the path undertaken. I brought up the question of the work’s basis for the first time in 1963, at a school in Brussels. I was eight years old: I do not know if I was particularly precocious or merely highly-strung. In effect the motivation for this work and, for the research toward it commencing in infancy, has always been linked to a fear of death.

There are other more fundamental reasons for my describing this unfolding path, an essential part of which is situated in my earliest infancy:

1.     The work is essentially multidisciplinary. It is situated at the intersection of numerous disciplines – theology, psychology, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, information technology – and, suddenly, it is difficult to know with what to begin. Bearing this in mind, the way of kids’ questions is particularly fit for the purpose.

2.     I questioned myself, but rapidly began wondering where the questions came from; a good part of the thesis rests on a process of self-observation. We will see how the thesis is naturally self-explanatory, how it explains its own genesis. An aspect made clearer if one follows, even if only briefly, the path of the kiddies’ questions. I myself profited thereby and ended up with a more polished version of the principal argument. There is no attempt at dumbing-down and the reader can skip any passages judged too technical.

3.     The opportunity to do justice and homage to the great authors and books that stake out my quest, amongst them: G. Ames & R. Wyler, James Watson, Linus Pauling, Michel-Yves Bernard, Lewis Carroll, E. Nagel & J.R. Newman, Jean Ladrière, S.C. Kleene, Bernard d’Espagnat.

4.     …and to recount a Belgian in the best, or universal story in the worst of cases, nothing at all of which is very funny. This story explains why I defended my thesis in 1998 in France. I shall recount these events without hatred or spirit of revenge.

I will tell you in several words even now, the principal result. To begin with, the work presents a proof, which is to say a deductive or, to use heavier terminology, a hypothetico-deductive argument. This signifies there is a hypothesis as much as a “thesis”, in the more technical sense of what is demonstrated from this hypothesis.

By way of proof, I expect that if the reader is not fully convinced of the result after study of the work, he should put up either a non-justified proposition or an error. Note that, concerning deductive work, conclusions never officially carry over to reality. Scientific proofs operate inside the frame of a postulated theory. Science is thus always modest on the subject of its applicability to or its approximation to the real.

The hypothesis is that of Mechanism: the idea that we could be digital machines, in a sense that will be rendered more clearly in due course. Grossly speaking, we would be machines in the precise sense that no parts of our bodies are privileged with respect to an eventual functional substitution: this says that we can survive a heart substitution by the transplant of an artificial heart, or of a kidney by an artificial kidney, etc., inasmuch as the substitution is carried out at a sufficiently fine level. Neither can there be any constraints imposed on the level of substitution chosen. It’s important to remember that I am not going to defend the hypothesis of Mechanism. I only want to pose this hypothesis at the outset. It constitutes the predefined frame of the work¹ [footnote 1]

 

[Footnote 1: Note that the idea of taking Mechanism or Computationalism as a hypothesis seems to be, rather curiously, original. Since Descartes (and even before, notably among the Hindu logicians), there is a staggering amount of literature surrounding the question of Mechanism and the mind, but it is always a question of arguments in favour of Mechanism or arguments against it. Many also think that Mechanism is by itself a solution to the mind-body problem. This, I hope is a strong suit of the current work, to show that Mechanism does not automatically resolve the mind-body problem. On the contrary, it necessitates a reformulation of the problem taking the form of a necessary justification of belief in the appearance of a material world, physical or substantial (to anticipate in one phrase the principal result of the work.)]

 

The discovery described here is that in this case, that with this hypothesis of Mechanism, physics becomes reducible to the psychology of machines. The “of” should be interpreted in both the transitive and intransitive senses: clearly it is a question of psychology concerning machines as much as psychology inferred or postulated correctly (by definition) by the machines themselves. We will be able, with a little information theory, to define this psychology in the wider sense of the machines’ “self-referentially correct” discourse. Such a psychology appears non-normative: we will see that it makes of us beings vastly less well known to ourselves than we had ever imagined. It constitutes a sort of “vaccine” against the numerous forms of reductionism of human psychology.

The reduction of physics to psychology happens also at the epistemological level: physics effectively becomes a branch of psychology – the science of observable machines – as it does at the ontological level: matter or the appearance of matter emerges from consciousness, from the mind or the mental or even as we will see, of “possible gambles” made by all digital machines.

It seems that what I have succeeded in demonstrating is that to truly take seriously the hypothesis that we are digitalisable machines, is to be forced to recognise a reversal of the naturalist or materialist idea, quite widespread among philosophers, physicians and the man in the street, that physics is the fundamental science to which all the other natural and human sciences - at least ontologically and thus in principle - should be reducible. I summarise this theorem by:

comp  ⇒  reversal

where comp designates “computationalism”, a name often given to “Digital Mechanism” and reversal designates the reversal of psychology with physics. What results is not a primitive matter with consciousness emerging from the organisation of the matter but the reverse: consciousness is now the more primitive and matter, or rather the appearance of material organisation, emerges from all the possible experiences of all the possible consciousnesses; and this in a sufficiently precise sense that derives physics (science of matter) from psychology (viewed as a very general science of conscious experience, or more positively, of stable discourses by the machines themselves: physics, but not geography^2, belonging necessarily to this self-referential discourse, which I will demonstrate.)

 

[Footnote 2: Physics becomes the study of what is a priori observable by every observer. The moon’s existence is not (in all truthfulness) a physical law. By now one might fear that the physical laws lead only to trivial truths, but we will see that the constraints of Mechanism detrivialise this introspective physics.]

 

 At this stage, anyone who for any good reason were to be persuaded of the veracity of contemporary materialism^3, can always surmise that the present work constitutes a rejection of Mechanism. This will nevertheless pose a problem since Mechanism is, implicitly or explicitly, the philosophy adopted by the majority of materialists.

 

[Footnote 3: Throughout this work, “materialism” will be taken in the weak sense of the philosophical doctrine that postulates the existence of a substantial universe (a fact of things obeying laws independent of us).]

 

Concerning my own position on this I remain silent. My philosophical opinions rest and will remain private. In the more technical part of the thesis I nevertheless show that one can already extract enough qualitative and quantitative givens from physics once this is shown to be derivable from machine psychology. We can then confront the results with the usual empirical and modern physical theories – notably quantum mechanics – to start to see an empirical confirmation of this psychology and thus confirmation of the reversal.

By illuminating problems in the interpretation of (quantum) physical facts, this thesis vehiculates a de facto judgement: the judgement that the reversal and Mechanism, its reasoning logic, are plausible.

A final observation concerns rationalism and interdisciplinarity.

This work pleads as “rationalist”. Like Karl Popper, I appreciate the match between rationalism and elitism. Rationalism is a form of hope concerning the reasoning powers of others. It is the hope that the other will have the courtesy to listen to you and accept your results or to indicate to you your errors, or to say to you at the very least that the subject is of no interest to him. Popper writes:

Faith⁴ in reason is not only a faith in our own reason but also – and even more – in that of others.

 

[Footnote 4: French translation of Popper quote suppressed.]

 

Thus a rationalist, even if he believes himself to be intellectually superior to others, will reject all claims to authority since he is aware that, if his intelligence is superior to that of others (which is hard for him to judge), it is only insofar as he is capable of learning from his own and other peoples’ mistakes, and that one can learn in this sense only if one takes others and their arguments seriously. Rationalism is therefore bound up with the idea that the other fellow has the right to be heard, and to defend his arguments. (Karl R. Popper⁵)

 

[Footnote 5: The Open Society and Its Enemies. London, Hutchinson, 1950]

 

I feel in particular, that reason is a universal and, universally profitable. Nothing else like science exists that is clearly separate to all other human endeavours. I merely believe that there are those possessed of a scientific attitude, which is no more than a form of modesty and honesty with themselves and with others. This attitude does not depend on any particular domain. I have a ready-made slogan:

Some gardeners are more scientific than astronomers

And, I might have said astrologers in place of gardeners⁶.

 

[Footnote 6: One can consult a fine book by Suzanne Blackmore In Search of the Light for an example of a scientific contribution to parapsychology, albeit somewhat negative.]

 

Today a kind of artificial chasm is maintained between the human sciences and the exact sciences. To combat the so-called elitist usage of mathematics, a minister of politics⁷ was struck by the notion of suppressing numerous hours devoted to maths in diverse sections of secondary teaching.

 

[Footnote 7: This idea was defended by Claude Allègre, explored in his book The Defeat of Plato (Fayard, Paris, 1995) and applied when he ascended to the post of Education minister.)]

 

In the same way, more and more hours of maths teaching are being taken away from the human sciences. This can only finish by discouraging teachers from teaching by demonstration – meaning explanations – of formulas in mathematics courses. One would presumably do the opposite, short of teaching other mathematics in the human sections.

The prohibition on the generalised use of deductive or interrogative reason, and on mathematics itself, contributes not only to rendering the human sciences less exact and the exact sciences less human, but also especially to rendering the human sciences less human and the exact sciences less exact, as should be clear from a reading of the present work.

Note that I do not claim that reason is everything, or that it is a kind of universal panacea. I only say that reason, properly considered, should stand as the first rung of courtesy, permitting evolution and progress in the research of knowledge. Short of making courageous “backflips” from time to time, as in revising one’s beliefs or abandoning a prejudice, this is how things should be.

Reason is not sufficient for progress in knowledge. There must also be inspiration, attention, imagination, bravery etc. While reason is not of itself sufficient, it is necessary to communicate results to others.

Again concerning interdisciplinarity,  I often like to cite Descartes. He wrote:

One must therefore be convinced that all the sciences are so linked together that it is easier to learn them all at the same time, than to isolate each from the other.

I hope that the present contribution will illustrate to what extent Descartes was inspired on this point. As with the collaborations on quantum mechanics of Einstein, Podolski and Rosen on the one hand, and of Bell on the other, this work should also illustrate the artificial character of the frontier between science and philosophy, or even between science and theology. We will return to this point.

Any traces of eventual frontiers existing between the sciences and the philosophies rest ultimately on philosophical postulates, avowed or not.

The advantage in my briefly recounting to you the pathways taken by my still-young thoughts, lies in the fact that children are naturally interdisciplinary: they have not yet submitted to that form of brainwashing known as “academic specialisation”. Children will always pose questions without fear of where they might be putting their feet.

Chapter 2

The Amoeba’s Secret

(1961 → 1971)

what am I doing here in these miasmas

tiny little Lilliputian

seized by terror, sometimes by asthma

before these tonnes of thingumajigs

Gaston Compère, “Geometrie de l’absence”

 

What follows evidently constitutes a partial view of the past. I am not telling my life-story, merely those sparse events that illustrate the threading of the ideas and questions that together form the origin of the discovery.

Certain paediatricians claim that the first metaphysical crisis, or the first anxious moments concerning death, occur in children around age 4. Perhaps. I remember well the terror that invaded my mind day and night, and I demanded all manner of assurances from my parents that I would wake up the following morning.

With the well-intentioned care of silencing any woes in children, parents are apt to tell stories. As I was born in Germany, a nanny would regularly read to me in German many folk-tales, mainly those of the brothers Grimm, although I am not so certain that these offered me any appeasement concerning my worries.

It must have been at around the age of 5 or 6 when as I remember, doubtless by a sort of absent-mindedness or simply out of fatigue since I assailed him with questions remorselessly, that my father informed me that Saint Nicholas did not exist.

“And Father Christmas?”

“Him neither” my father replied, sadly noting my incredulous and king-hit countenance. Thus collapsed my first theory – or ontology, mythology, theology, belief, dream…call it what you will; at this age, any precision on my part had been premature.

“And the fairies?” I pleaded.

“Them neither”

“But, come on – the angels and all that…?”

Here I could see that I had come once again to pose my father an embarrassing question. After a long drawn-out sigh, he explained to me that really he believed in none of it – in angels or in God, but that my cousins and uncles and aunts believed it all. This astonished me all the more in that fairies were for me no more than female angels equipped with magic wands. I liked fairies and angels because they could fly (had I gone on to develop this tendency I might have become an aviator), but in the main because fairies and angels were immortals.

By now I had realised that adults could have differing beliefs. I found this profoundly shocking. If my cousins could believe in angels, was it not my right to also believe in them, as well as in fairies?

My father explained to me that it was surely my right after a certain fashion, to believe in whatever I wanted to believe, but that it was by no means evident that to do so would be in my best interest.

To believe in false propositions is to invite deception and disappointment. I found entirely pathetic the notion of believing in the false, and the whole thing gave me the shudders. From this moment on, I would try to adhere to the rule: avoid at any price belief in falsity.

The truth, evidently, can give rise to fear. In particular the idea that I was a mere mortal seemed to me to be at the very limits of the acceptable. But the idea of believing in falsity out of fear of the truth worried me all the more. I therefore made promise to myself to always search for the true, fearsome as this may well turn out to be. To know would seem even better.

To know is better: agreed. But is this even possible? Surely it cannot be easy.

To start with, I observed that during nightly dreams I was able to believe in just about any falsity. In addition, I suffered sleep problems, like many kids, something confirmed by electroencephalography. My dreams were abnormally realistic. This hyperrealism was fine in the case of lovely and pleasant dreams, but it became truly worrisome in the case of strange dreams and nightmares. Doubts arising from dreams, even concerning the possibility of knowing truth, will play a role in the story that occupies us here. There is nothing original in any of this; the metaphysical role of dreams appeared with the Hindu idealists, Plato, Descartes, Berkeley, as I would learn later on.

There followed the problem of a divergence of opinion between my father and my uncle. Before, everything was simple: a proposal was true if and only if my father asserted it¹.

 

[Footnote 1: I express myself here in adult language; at the time I would have been hard-pressed to formulate such a proposal in this way.]

 

Since he had evinced several seconds of doubt over the existence of angels and told me that my uncle himself believed in them, I truly wondered just whom I should believe over this.

I asked my uncle why he believed in angels. He replied, inasmuch as I can recall with any precision, that his belief was based in the fact that his parents believed in them, also his grandparents, etc. I found his reply frankly troubling. In effect, if his ancestor had been mistaken, this mistake would be propagated from generation to generation. I came to admire my father’s placing in doubt his own parents’ beliefs, and I decided to never believe in a proposition under simple pretext that it had been announced by a trusted person or family-member. I had hit upon what one now calls the principle of Independent will, a founding principle of the Independent University of Brussels, the university where my father concluded his juristic studies after a learning spell with the Jesuits. I have no doubt that he may have influenced me.

I asked my father why he did not believe in angels and fairies (I could not have cared less about St Nicholas and Father Christmas because to my mind they were not even immortals). He responded by saying that having thoroughly searched everywhere, no one had encountered them anywhere. There followed a deluge of revelations: we live on a ball suspended in space, we have already orbited it etc. It seemed like no place existed for fairies and angels.

In order to not run the risk of believing falsity, my interest in imaginary beings slid over to a pronounced interest in animals, for whose existence nobody had even the slightest doubt. Returning to Belgium from Germany, my parents bought a small hobby-farm in the country to which we would go during vacations and on the weekend. I passed a lot of time observing swallows, butterflies, ants etc. When observing an animal, for example, a butterfly, I identified body and soul with this butterfly. If it flew, it was I who flew, if it gathered pollen, it was I who gathered pollen and it was I who became intoxicated by the multiple nectars of the flowers of the fields.

One day, I pointed to a white butterfly and exclaimed to my sister and brother “Look! This butterfly, I recognise it, it’s me; I have been this butterfly for several weeks now.” And they, with a delicacy well known amongst siblings, broke the news to me that this was not possible “because butterflies only live for one day.”

This came as quite a shock. It reminded me that if swallows and butterflies flew, like angels, they were none the less mortal for it, like me. They did seem though, to live a much shorter life than I, which I found disturbing.

At this time, whenever I identified with an animal, the identification took place in real time: I did not yet imagine from the butterfly’s point of view that one day could appear very long. Thus, if a butterfly truly lived but one day, due to my identification with it, I also lived but one day and no longer. And this was no laughing matter. I became maniacally obsessed with the maximum life spans of animals. Every time I heard of a new animal I would ask about its longevity. I was rather disappointed to discover that, on the whole, large animals lived longer than the small ones with which I had been identifying almost exclusively since I myself was of small stature at this time.

It was then that I made an authentic and revolutionary discovery. I had a canine companion in whom I confided my metaphysical concerns, my partner in the quest for truth. One fine day, I tried to show him a tiny red spider (in fact a tiny garden acarina), without managing to attract his attention. I concluded that the acarina was too tiny for my dog to see and suddenly, I found myself identifying with my dog. It thus came into my mind that the fairies and angels were perhaps just that little bit too miniscule for us to be able to perceive them.

As quickly as I could, I presented my theory to my father. I was particularly serene, not only in view of a proof of the existence of fairies, but also of the proof that my father could not be sure of their non-existence. I played devil’s advocate not because I wanted to contradict my father at any price, but rather to show that my cousins and uncle were perhaps not entirely in the wrong.

“Even if you searched everywhere on Earth for angels and didn’t find any, that proves nothing” I said. “Perhaps angels and fairies are simply too small for us to see them?” I explained to him the experience with my dog. My father, who had an answer to hand for everything, enlightened me that the search had included the direction of the tiny as well. He spoke to me of the microscope and – and in fact it was this that surprised me the most - he explained that the effective discovery of a multitude of tiny animals invisible to the naked eye had thereby been made. He then took a piece of paper and drew a sketch of an amoeba. I fell headlong in love with this tiny and adorable creature, multiform and so easy to draw.

And so to the fundamental question of the moment: how long might an amoeba expect to live?

Considering my belief that the smaller an animal was, the less time it could live, I hardly had any illusions. It must be that my tiny amoeba could not possibly live very long at all.

On this question of the lifetime of an amoeba, my father, with infinite wisdom, contented himself to explain that having eaten their fill of even tinier (!) creatures during a day, rather than merely dying like any ordinary beast such as a butterfly, it divided itself instead into two. Instead of dying and disappearing, an amoeba would divide itself and give birth to two amoebas. This was practically the reverse of death itself.

“So they’re immortal, then?”

This time, my father made no response.

I requested, of my elder brother and sister notably, that they bring back from school as many documents as they could find on amoebas, which they very kindly did. I thus started to write (more exactly, to scribble in just about every sense) a book: The Invisible World. My idea was that if invisible worlds existed – and the existence of the amoeba proved the existence of such worlds – one could no longer enjoy any form of certainty over whatever the case might be. In the final analysis, my uncle may well have been right on the subject of angels. The amoeba was surely a tangible piece of evidence that at least certain animals could be immortal. I killed time by annoying my parents with the demand for a microscope of my own. When the microscope inevitably arrived, I looked for amoebas. I discovered euglenas and especially paramecia, and when they divided themselves into two, I divided into two also. The question now was to know whether the paramecium had survived its division.

What exactly was going on?

I arrived at my first public seminar on amoebas. Even though I may be driven by self-imposed questions, I have always had an immense enthusiasm for giving oral exposés, even delivering classes and seminars on subjects at a considerable distance from those that preoccupy me directly. Thus, I had already given several verbal exposés, notably on minerals, but, in 1963, at the age of 8, people were urging me to deliver a seminar on microbes.

Entitled Amoeba, Euglena and Paramecium, I have managed to rediscover my succinct resumé in an old notebook:

My friends let me tell you, in this room, we are not 24 in number, but several million².

 

[Footnote 2: I already liked paradoxical propositions; true but slightly astonishing statements, so to speak. “We” to my mind, evidently designated the students of the class with the teacher and the microbes in the class. The “million” would have had to be a much higher number in reality, if one had wanted to be more exact.]

 

Does the elephant see the tiny red spider? Could living beings exist who are so tiny that to us they would be invisible? Could there be an invisible world and a tunnel through which to explore it? As incredible as this may sound: yes. The microscope is the tunnel and the microbes are the discovery. Amoeba, euglena, paramecia, vorticellae, stentor, bacteria, ovum and spermatozoa, the protozoa among us! Nutrition, digestion, excretion, diverse sensibilities (the euglena’s eye), and …. reproduction.

Question: How long can an amoeba live? One day or forever? If it lives two days it lives every day… forever. (Robert Catteau public secondary school, in the presence of Prof. Verschaeve)

 

I would become more and more obsessed by this question of the immortality of the amoeba. For the following two full years, I would pass half my free time on walks gathering every possible kind of water (sewerage, liquid manure, pond water, estuarine, puddles of every sort) and the other half observing these waters under the microscope. As usual, I always identified completely with the microorganisms I was observing and attempted to somehow sense whatever was going on at the moment of their division. I scaffolded an unimaginable number of theories illustrating the immortal character of unicellular creatures without arriving at a stage of conviction over any of them. The consistent effort to go from fairies to amoebas had been kick-started by my fear of believing in non-existent things and I did not at any price want to believe that amoebas were immortal if they in fact were not.

Yet, certitude had come through: IF an amoeba lives two days THEN it lives every day³

 

[Footnote 3: In fact the common amoeba divides on average every 50 hours approximately, but for the sake of simplicity I will continue to speak as though its divisions occur every 24 hours.]

 

It remained to demonstrate that for an amoeba to be immortal, it only needed to survive one division.

An example of a theory heading in this direction was what I called “The Principle of the Inspector”:

 

NO CORPSE means NO MURDER

 

According to the inspector, when the amoeba divides, it leaves behind no corpse, so no “body” dies in the act of division, therefore an amoeba survives its division. But this reasoning is invalid. When a hydra eats an amoeba, it gets digested and neither is any corpse left behind. The difficulty lies in believing that it survives the process of digestion. The “Principle of the Inspector” collapsed.

My basic theory or argument in favour of the immortality of the amoeba or paramecium had been directly linked to the experiment of swapping places with a concrete paramecium and keenly observing it through a microscope. Evidently I had come up against a problem of scale. It seems that I go from one to two but how is this possible? Which is the original paramecium between the two new ones? Both or only one of them? Which one?

In particular, if I become one of the two paramecia, how could I convince the other, given that it could just as easily make the claim of being me?

Completely gobsmacked by this, given over to a sort of semi-ecstatic vertigo I realised something just as extraordinary and incommunicable.

My feeling had been that the amoeba survived its division (and thus every division, meaning that it was immortal) but as it had become two, each of the two resulting amoebas were unable to convince the other that it had survived, where “it” referred to the original amoeba. From whence arose the incommunicability.

If an amoeba could not bring any of its copies to accept its survival or its immortality, how much more difficult might it be to convince a human being?

How difficult might it be for me to convince another human of the immortality of an amoeba even if immortality were an accepted notion? The more I reflected on this, the more it seemed to me that this immortality, if immortality it was, must be condemned to remain forever secret. This explained to my satisfaction the prudent silence of my father.

A spectacular confirmation would arrive when I was given The Marvels of Life, the very fine book by Ames & Wyler with a preface by Jean Rostand and superb illustrations by Charles Harper – it was also the first book I ever took to bed and slept with!

This book contained an entire chapter consecrated to the amoeba. Distraught by the toll of new information it contained, I initially believed that it would not get down to the question of the immortality of protozoa, but one day, I fell upon the photo of a paramecium for which the legend was “Is the paramecium immortal?” I quickly felt relieved because I could see that one could at least pose this question. Soon thereafter I felt astonished: “here, finally is a book that addresses an enormous number of questions and is content to pose the question”. This astonishment was given legs by the confirmation that the immortality of the paramecium, if immortality exists, could be no more than a necessary interrogation: a wager on uncommunicable success.

Ames and Wyler were just as prudent as my dad. I wondered if I was going to succeed at being just as prudent as them. What rotten luck all the same: I discover a fundamental truth and it seems forbidden to communicate it. I would have to wait until 1971 to get out of this impasse and to weigh up the communicable as per the uncommunicable parts of the amoeba’s secret.

It is noteworthy that up until this time, I had never asked what an amoeba was made of, or what I myself was made of. It seemed to me that the question did not truly depend on whatever things were made of. I did not imagine myself as made of something(s). The problem of immortality seemed to me to be more a question of biology, or of psychology, or of theology - not a question of physics. The matter did not rest there either in that I demanded to know how an amoeba managed to divide itself into two. Moreover, the argument in favour of the amoeba’s immortality on one hand and especially the incommunicability of this immortality by the amoeba on the other hand, depended crucially on the fact that after the division, the two resulting amoebas were rigorously identical, since only in this case did the two amoebas seem to contradict one another in claiming to have survived, one, each!

The reading of Ames & Wyler, accompanied by books of Jean Rostand passed to me by my father as well as some excellent manuals of Jean-Pierre Vanden Eeckhoudt – teacher at the Robert Catteau Public School – would drive me from astonishment to astonishment. There, I learnt the magic words that described the principal phases of cellular division: prophase, metaphase, anaphase, telophase; as well as their significance in chromosomal terms. I learnt especially that I am myself constituted from a colony of social amoebas! Our pluricellular organic quality posed me problems: how could I as a society of amoebas still identify with an individual amoeba? Unless an amoeba itself were in turn a colony of sub-microbes, and so on and so forth? I was thus led naturally to an interest in chemistry and to atomic physics.

On the subject of matter, I would pose myself a question that would prevent me from truly taking seriously the idea of the atom, to say nothing of the very notion of matter itself. Initially, I imagined atoms to be ultra-smooth and ultra-hard spheres; next I learnt that atoms were in fact constituted of electrons spinning around a nucleus of protons and neutrons that I imagined were in their turn, like ultra-smooth and ultra-hard spheres. It seemed that you could always divide matter and that research to find the ultimate particle was all in vain. At the same time however, if one were to find an ultimate particle, it seemed to me, what could it possibly be other than a smooth and ultra-hard sphere once again, and what could such a sphere be made of?

The very idea of matter seemed to me to be void of any explanatory capacity? To me, the notion of matter seemed to bring out more questions than it did answers and seemed to threaten perhaps, the unity of the amoeba.

It was in the volume by Joël de Rosnay that I learnt of the existence of DNA⁴, the gigantic molecule of deoxyribonucleic acid which is a long chain in the form of a double helix “like the inside of a certain castle of the Loire”, comprising the repetition of molecules taken from the group {Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine, Guanine} resulting in a very long “word” in the genre of AATGGCTATGGACCTCAG….and it was in this book that I would learn how this word, seen as a suite of triplets AAT GGC TAT GGA CCT CAG…. is translated into RNA, another nucleic acid, itself translated into a “word”: proteins, comprising tiny molecules, amino acids, chosen from the alphabet of 20 “amino acids”. I would learn how these proteins and their enzymes coped with the rest: from the synthesis of tiny molecules (amino acids, nucleotides, sugars), even right up to the constitution of the cell.

 

[Footnote 4: Of course Ames & Wyler also speak of this, but I had no real understanding of what was in question. More and more, my Ames & Wyler opened automatically to the little chapter consecrated to the amoeba!]

 

 All the same, this gave oxygen to more questions. How did we know all this? What, indeed is a molecule?

In fact my “Joël de Rosnay” and the review Science & Life, was a springboard for the book destined to become my basic bible for the following years (1968 and thereafter): the French edition, edited by François Gros and prefaced by François Jacob of James D. Watson’s The Molecular Biology of the Gene. In this book, I would gain a glimpse of the incredible molecular dance that goes on, not only with the amoeba, but also with an even tinier creature: the bacterium Escherichia Coli.

My “Watson” was so biblical that in my vocabulary, the very word “Watson” had become synonymous with THE Bible. In retrospect, my “Ames & Wyler” had been my first Watson, but at the age at which I read it, I believe that I did not pose questions in the genre of knowing who might have written a book.

Even though The Molecular Biology of the Gene enjoyed pride of place as the Watson, another Watson rapidly outflanked it: General Chemistry by Linus Pauling, and this augmented a bitter conflict in my mind, destined also to endure through the years to come.

On the one hand, my Watson gave me the impression of a wonderful molecular dance perfectly encoded by RNA and decoded by the cell. This allowed me to see the essential machinery, wherein each molecule’s identity made no contribution to the identity of the whole organism. All of this being accounted for, it now made sense to say that the amoeba, repeating in a fashion much more complicated, though in principle similar to the molecular dance of bacteria, reproduced itself mechanically. I was able to observe, through molecular genetics, an implementation⁵ of a solution to the problem of knowing how an amoeba could manufacture another amoeba identical to itself.

 

[Footnote 5: a representation in terms of data; also known as an “implantation”]

 

Concerning the lifetime of an amoeba, this proceeded in the direction of an amoeba’s survival of its duplication (a high-fidelity reproduction). Thus, given the “basic theory” investigated in 1963⁶, an amoeba is immortal.

 

[Footnote 6: An amoeba lives one day or every day. Otherwise put: if an amoeba lives for two days it lives forever. Or again: if an amoeba survives one of its cellular divisions, it survives every one of its cellular divisions.]

 

This is truly independent of the fact that the amoeba cannot communicate this, and just as independent of the fact that “I” cannot communicate it either.

My Linus Pauling was a kind of concrete proof that I was somehow forbidden to relate the truth about the amoeba’s immortality. Watson said, “Cells obey the laws of chemistry”. To be sure of the truly “machine-like” - discretely causal if you will (I had yet no concept of the digital or the numerical) - character of self-reproduction, it was imperative that I assure myself of the discrete and machine-like profile of the activity of molecules themselves.

Now, if Linus Pauling abounded along the lines of the discrete aspect, with quantification by nature’s chemical properties, including atoms and distinct energy levels – all seemed to rest on mathematics, perhaps even on the real numbers; on the continuous, the differential equations. How about that! What was I dealing with?

The conflict between Linus Pauling and Watson was for me a truly palpable war of ideas, which took on major proportions at the onset of the student vacation. As always, and to my lasting joy, we headed off to the countryside, and the question loomed: do I take Watson or do I take Pauling? I knew full well that if I took both I would pass the entire vacation vacillating between them. As it was during the school year, I would dissipate my time by continually flicking pages in the one and in the other without deciding on anything and remaining stuck in an abyss of perplexities.

This progressed to the point of reading other authors’ works, the “non-Watson” literary genre, in a range comprising the diaries of Tintin and Spirou on which I was fixated, whodunnits, Freud, Young, Ionesco, Borgès. There was even a certain Alice in Wonderland with which I became bored to death and though I gave up on it halfway, I would nevertheless return to it later on.

During this whole time, I had kept my taste for oral exposés. In Biology class at high school, I constructed an exposé on “the lactose operon” (results due to Jacob and Monod in bacterial genetics). Though I had not finished my talk, the teacher let me continue the following hour and again the following hour etc. In the end, he allowed me to have my say during several weeks. One day, the teacher summarised my exposé. This had evolved into a small introduction to molecular biology and during this, he committed a negligible error. Always careful vis-à-vis the truth, I discreetly informed one of my classmates but one of them (the traitor) pushed me up against the speaker’s platform saying “Sir! Marchal wants to tell you something.” I was thoroughly annoyed by this and with infinite politesse let the teacher know about the error in his summary. He remained silent for a while, deciding ultimately to put all the students straight on his mistake. He was never the type to hold out on me and we developed a relationship based on mutual respect. In fact I have an enormous respect for those who can recognise and correct their errors. Recall how much I admired my own father for changing his opinion. With Camus, I opine that perhaps the only eternally persisting thing is stubbornness.

I fretted also over the choice of university studies even though this still seemed a long way off. I was nevertheless extremely impatient to get to uni if only to be in a position to pose all those questions that both excited and oppressed me. Would I do biology or chemistry? I asked myself this question practically every day.

By then, I would have the luck to be able to frequent the Molecular Biology Laboratory of ULB at Rhodes-St-Gènese, thanks to the kindness of Jean Rommelaere, whose mother was a friend of my own mother. There, I would meet Jean Brachet who was director of radiobiological services and I especially got the opportunity to meet and chat with René Thomas who directed the bacterial and viral genetics service – Escherichia Coli and the lambda phagias. What an opportune encounter! René Thomas was the biologist who discovered the formal logic in Lewis Carroll’s book The Game of Logic. This was a wonderful book the French edition of which contained magnificent illustrations by Max Ernst, including a drawing of a marvellous planarian worm. Most interesting in René Thomas’ work was his showing how logic circuits could be simulated in bacteria by means of genetic monitoring of the genome of the bacteria; thereby corroborating my intuitive reading of Jacob and Monod’s article to whit life was a matter of encoded dialogues. We promised each other to meet up again; I still had 2 or 3 years of high school to go. This encounter unleashed my impatience to get to university.

I continued however, to pursue my interest in chemistry and in the question of the amoeba’s constitution. From Linus Pauling I would move on to my next Watson. A real tiny masterpiece came my way: none other than Michel-Yves Bernard’s book Introduction to Quantum Mechanics and Statistical Physics. It was a rare introduction to quantum mechanics written for secondary school students.

Finally, I fell back on the question “what is matter?” Organisms are societies of cells, cells are societies of molecules, molecules appear to be societies of elementary particles, but the relation between the particles seems to necessitate a science of the continuous. But – what IS the continuous? What, in addition, would the relevant advanced mathematics bring to the issue?

To summarise, biology and molecular genetics presented strong clues that we are machines. Our biological identity seemed to me to be defined by the encoded information and essentially independent of the material involved, this being continually replaced. In this case, the amoeba faithfully reproduces itself and must be immortal since its identity resides in its form and activity and not in its substance. Hidden behind this, chemistry and mathematics throw a shadow of doubt on this mechanist conception. Even in Newton’s “mechanics”, objects - often identified as “material points” - seem to act at a distance by means of scalar fields in space and described by a mathematics causing the intervention of the mysterious continuum. With quantum mechanics, this aspect of things seems pushed to extremes: even an isolated particle or an atom are described by functions that only cancel out at infinity. It wasn’t at all evident to me how, under such conditions, the amoeba could make identical self-reproductions, or even how it might otherwise self-replicate. With quantum mechanics and the continuous, it seemed that a filament might always subsist between the two apparent amoebas and that in reality, there existed but one amoeba making a good impression of seeming self-division.

In 1971, on the eve of a scholastic voyage to London, the spiritual conflict between biology and chemistry hit its apogee.

Above and beyond the immortality of the amoeba on one hand, it seemed that the explanatory power of molecular genetics resided entirely in digitalism. This permits the use of encodings and an explanation in quasi-psychological terms: of memory and its transformation and interpretation. With hindsight, the article of Jacob and Monod on the Lactose operon - rehashed by Taylor⁷ – represents my first discovery of the formal explanation of “IF...THEN...ELSE” of logicians and computer scientists.

On the other hand, this quasi-psychological explanation of the functioning of the cell seemed vastly incomplete without a clarification of the nature of matter.

 

[Footnote 7: Taylor J.H., Selected Papers on Molecular Genetics, Academic Press, New York & London 1965]

 

It sufficed not simply to say that there are things obeying laws; one must also explain what these things are, where they come from, why they obey laws and where the laws themselves come from.

“Cells obey the laws of chemistry,” said Watson. We shall see.  Might it even be that chemistry obeys the laws of cells, as though chemistry were the product of an amoeba’s dreaming...

 

Chapter 3

Gödel’s Diagonal

(1971 → 1973)

 

If DA gives AA; and DB, BB; and DC, CC; what gives DD?

 

In 1970 I enrolled in “Poetry”. This is the penultimate year of secondary school. The final year is called “Rhetoric”. My impatience to get to uni was such that I put myself down for the central jury examinations with the idea of leaping over my last two years of high school. Ultimately I did not pursue this enterprise, a largely paradoxical affair. In effect, not only was I in a constant state of hesitation between biology and chemistry, but my doubts had also enlarged to the point where I could now see myself opting for philosophical studies.

As an independent student, I would attend different classes at university by cutting a few hours of classes at school. In particular I attended the exciting chemistry classes of Lucia de Brouckère from whom I gained the opportunity to briefly go over my hesitancy, but also to chat with in a spirit of free enquiry. Lucia de Brouckère was a towering figure of secularity and freedom of thought in Brussels. I continued to go to the Molecular Biology Laboratory at Rhodes-St-Gènese, although now I only bothered with its library.

Irritated by my hesitancy as I said earlier, I ended up reading all sorts of books, most found at random during a walk through a bookshop. It was through a reading of Gilles Deleuze’s book Logic of Sense that my mind was finally opened to Lewis Carroll and especially his book Sylvie and Bruno that I read several times in quick succession. I again took up Alice in Wonderland and also The Game of Logic. I still - even today - manage to maintain the claim that English humour is built on the taking seriously of classical logic; this never works – which explains the inherent laughter-value. As a result, I started to take an active interest in logic and in paradoxes of ensemble theory. Besides, I knew that chemistry brought advanced mathematics into the picture, and I had to admit that I took great pleasure in maths classes at school.

During my scholar’s voyage to London the year before, and in Amsterdam, I recall buying only (Anglo Saxon) books on genetics and chemistry including William Hayes’ fine book on bacterial genetics and their viruses¹, as well as the Taylor² that contained the article by Jacob and Monod. I penned an enthusiastic letter to Bill Hayes who responded with fervent sympathy. That year, now in “Poetry”, I was going to London³. The conflict between chemistry and biology was at its maximum and in Foyles’ Bookshop, I fled this internal quarrel by giving myself over almost entirely to the range of Lewis Carrolls as much as to the mathematics and logic sections of the store.

 

[Footnote 1: The Genetics of Bacteria and Their Viruses, Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford and Edinburgh, 1964, 2^nd 1970.]

[Footnote 2: Taylor J.H., Selected Papers on Molecular Genetics, Academic Press, New York & London 1965]

[Footnote 3: I so appreciated London and Oxford for their scientific booksellers - and Lewis Carroll - that from that date on, I would go to England every year, notably to Oxford for what I called my “Carolien Pilgrimage”.]

 

It was there that I came across the little red book Gödel’s Proof by Nagel and Newman. I had no idea who Gödel was and with what his proof was concerned, but in browsing this book I took it that the work presented a proof on the subject of the existence or the inexistence of a proof. I was intrigued. I next understood that this state of affairs had been achieved by means of an encoding. The resemblance to biological encodings literally leapt off the page to my eyes.

Without necessarily believing in it too much, I progressively realised that this piece of work proposed a general means with which to construct formal expressions⁴ capable of referring to themselves. I was surprised to discover that these expressions were perfectly well defined by the signs and symbols that represented them, in much the same way as the amoeba seemed to be by the molecules and atoms of which it was constituted.

 

[Footnote 4: collection of signs lending themselves to interpretation at the core of a formal theory, like logical statements, or capable of interpretation by a machine, like a software program. At this time, none of this was anything like a clear notion for me.]

 

I had a good idea of how the amoeba or Escherichia Coli self-divided, which is to say, I had a quasi-visual model of reproduction at the molecular scale. I thus had to hand a sort of proof that the amoeba could clone itself; but as it turned out, this model (as I have already mentioned) rested on the manner by which the molecules interacted. Because of this, I could not be sure that the amoeba had even replicated – either by itself or with an exact clone resulting. The amoeba’s genome or its genetic encoding had been seemingly replicated identically, but this capacity for identical replication rested to all extents and appearances on the laws of chemistry, which in turn seemed founded on the continuous.

I wondered whether it truly was the amoeba – this tiny and discrete unit with which I identified since my earliest childhood – that divided itself, or indeed whether it was the very universe – which I conceived of as a gigantic and unknowable continuum – that divided the amoeba.

With Nagel & Newman in hand, I started to understand that it was possible to envisage self-reproducing entities having a priori no links with chemistry or with the continuous, or even apparently with the universe of physicists or chemists. I discovered a new sort of abstract amoeba that may well be infinitely easier to interrogate than the tiny, concrete beastie inhabiting the waters of the neighbourhood.

Practically speaking, “Gödel’s Proof” seemed to turn the key in the hesitancy-lockup between chemistry and biology. This was a veritable triumph for biology, all the more so in that its transformation into an abstract biology of formal beings - concerning whose nature I yet lacked complete clarity - might be in order.

(The dilemma of knowing whether or not, in this case, I could still identify with the amoeba had yet to fully surface. At this stage however, I was so happy to have discovered a totally new kind of amoeba that I relegated this question to the future.)

There were other things about Nagel & Newman! Not so much in Gödel’s proof – where apparently self- reproductive or self-referential entities appeared – but in the result, in theorem, specifically, in his second incompleteness theorem, published in 1931. In effect, and in rather crude terms, it seemed that there actually existed, say, “whatsit-names” (Fr: machins) with the capacity to communicate true propositions (me – in love with the true! ⁵), capable in addition of communicating apparently true propositions concerning themselves, but (it would seem) directly because of this, incapable of communicating or of demonstrating⁶ certain truths about themselves.

 

[Footnote 5: Or the idea of the true. Rest assured that I make no claim to having a privileged relationship with the truth. I very much like to propose poetic definitions of the “truth”. For example: the truth is a queen who wins every war minus an army. Or even: the truth is a goddess that no god could ever completely undress. Truth is something you will never read in any newspaper, not even something you might divine for yourself by comparing two independent newspaper articles, or that you might divine even better by comparing three etc. Truth is the source of doubt: the more you know, the more you don’t know; so said Socrates and Jean Gabin.

Truth is nothing more than the hope of our conscience.]

[Footnote 6: I will always use the term “communicate” in the sense of honest or scientific affirmation. I identify or model, here and further on, this type of communication with a formal (or the formalism of a) proof.]

 

Just like the amoeba, these whatsit names seemed to be intrinsically incapable of affirming certain propositions, certain truths concerning themselves.

What truths? The consistent quality of the self. The fact that one will not communicate the false.

Here is an honest entity that, due to its honesty, is completely unable to assert that it is honest. Thus, among honest thingamajigs, those who assert that they are honest are by definition dishonest. Following this realisation, I developed an irresistible attraction for these whatever-they-are. I found them amusing and pertinent. This time, it was no longer a question of abstract biology, but frankly of abstract psychology, and this psychology concerned incommunicable truths, similar to the amoeba’s secret. The most wonderful of all, if I may dare to anticipate Nagel & Newman, is that these entities seem able to prove that if they are honest, then they are incapable of communicating the fact; just as my amoeba seen under the microscope in the act of self-division “told” me that it could not possibly make any claim to having survived. Each of its siblings asserted it implicitly by pointing a pseudopodium at the other amoeba! If one of them was another one of them, they could very well be others – both of them.

Gödel’s theorem and his proof showed me the existence of (self-) reproductive entities; of abstract amoebas as much as the existence of whatever-you-likes incapable of asserting certain self-referential truths such as the consistent nature of self. This was exactly what I had been looking for. The whatever-you-likes in question were formal theories like Peano arithmetic or the principia mathematica of Russell and Whitehead. No longer in any doubt, I resolved to become a mathematician and to specialise in mathematical logic.

Note that at this time, I was suffering from an immense handicap: I had not yet heard any talk of Church’s thesis or of the computer. The term “computer” (Fr: ordinateur or “calculating device”) evoked in me visions of the immense and rigid refrigerator lookalikes used by bankers. I had no idea that a century earlier, Babbage had dreamed of a device calculating the positions of heavenly bodies. I had no inkling of a “Turing machine”. I did not yet truly know what I was up to or what I was conjuring with in terms of informatics, much like Jourdain with prose. Grossly speaking, Church’s thesis says that:

All thing(amajig)s are machines

(Tous les machins sont des machines)

 

Or, better: anything formally calculable (and relatively communicable) can be calculated (and relatively asserted) by computers (relative to a formalised theory).

I still had no idea that machines were actually thingamibobs (the reverse of Church’s thesis) or that universal machines – computers – were at one and the same time close matches to formal theories and very likely candidates for self-reproducing entities. I only realised this much, much later. (In any case, information technology was not yet an entirely new branch of study at university, merely an option for mathematicians or engineers.)

(to be cont.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[Bruno Marchal]

Pre-Scriptum (for John Mikes). John, I will answer your post in the following days. Thanks for your patience.

On 07 Mar 2009, at 03:36, Kim Jones wrote:

On 06/03/2009, at 11:24 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

- Neither physicists nor logicians really knows about the mind-body problem. So it is easy to make someone interested in consciousness looking crazy: just say: this guy is interested on consciousness (with a grin).

Why does some people want me so much looking crazy? Well if I tell you, I would myself find you insane to believe me. So I will not even try.

If you known Belgium recent story, you can imagine, and reality is beyond what you can imagine.

Bruno

last night I dreamt that my cat had divided itself into two cats. Both cats were clones and happily running about and interacting. I could see both and was discussing with some friends the puzzle of why only some people, like me could see the constant clonage of things living. During the dream I had the amazing perception that this was happening to all living objects and it was as logical and certain as anything perceived during the day with eyes wide open.

Self-duplication, or its many tortuous delayed forms that nature seems to repeat all the time can give an intuition of all this. This is where the idea are germing. Good dreaming work !

Also amazing - the "belief" that this is happening to macro (living) objects persisted in my brain for about a half an hour after I woke up.

Hmmm... I would complain on your coffee manufacturer :)

Unless you enjoyed the feeling. 

Clearly, translating into English your "amoebas" is having a profound effect on my unconscious mind.

This also highlights for me the mysterious nature of "belief". As you mention, early on in the thesis, we can believe no matter what falsity while we are asleep and dreaming. The occasional powerful dream like this one that penetrates the awake conscious mind shakes the very foundations of what we consider to be "reality". 

What then, is the value of paying attention to the dreaming mind in this odyssey of "The Fabric of Consciousness" we are all hypnotized by at this time?

Dreaming, and reflexion on dreams, and dreamy reflexion on dreams are shortcut path in the metaphysical labyrinth, be it day dreaming, mother of mathematics, or night dreaming, mother of metaphysics.

Observation is quite important too, for guessing better and better the most stable invariants.

But assuming comp, dreams obeys laws, mathematical invariants. Physical realities are consensual realities among many dreaming observers. Physical realities being both deep on surface and linear at the bottom could explain why it looks so computational *around* us, when it is so not *computational* about us.

Who dreams? Guess what: only you can decide, and it could be that such a decision will make you immortal here or immortal there.

Dreaming or not dreaming, the best we can do is to try to be self-referentially correct with respect to the most probable histories. Look what happen when we aren't:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2BgjH_CtIA&feature=channel_page

PS - expect to post to this thread an instalment of the continuation of the translation by tonight - am being extremely careful to get it dead right to avoid any ambiguities.

I appreciate your seriousness. Take it easy, though, and sleep well :)

I will have to reread at ease in April, but it seems quite nice to me, of course at some level I can hardly judge. It is a bit confusing to read oneself, and, in a translation it can be even more weird.

Bruno

regards,

Kim Jones

People often confuse belief in a reality with belief in a 

physical reality - Bruno Marchal

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

Email:

kmjcommp@...

kimjones@...

Web:

http://web.mac.com/kmjcommp/Plenitude_Music

Phone:

(612) 9389 4239  or  0431 723 001 

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

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[m.a.-2]

Dear Bruno,
                        Cantor also had an ignorant, implacable nemesis who stalled his career, but he was totally justified in time. I hope you live to see your theories given their due.    

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    martin a.

                                                                   

 

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Bruno Marchal" <marchal@...>

To: <everything-list@...>

The little scandal has grown up all the time and is too big, now. It 
is the kind of manipulation which makes everyone feel responsible, 
from corporatist reflex to corporatist reflex, when actually there is 
only one, very clever, but very bad,  guy.

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[Bruno Marchal]

Thanks, m.a.

At least Cantor has been lucky to have respectful adversaries like Kronecker. I am still criticized in my back on work I have never done by people I have never met. The years 1977 and 2008 have been the worst, and I ask myself if I should make some move.

Also,  there has been three people who told me they have abandoned their PhD thesis, or change their subject when they have been asked for not referring to my work, or just my name. My work will be given its due, perhaps without my name: it is not so important. Or is it? 

My work in the seventies were just theoretical computer science, and were just slightly visionary, but even then, and especially at that time, the problems were not related to some work of mine: it is really the contrary. It is because I am ignored, for stupid bad and contingent facts which I have been unluckily witnessing,  that I have pushed a little bit more the obvious revolutionary aspect of the comp hyp. It is because I am ignored about simple mathematical facts (that any patient scientist can verify, and actually have verified), that I have decided to single out the theologiical aspect, I have tried diplomacy during 20 years without success, so that the strategy, changed by itself. Time is running, not for me but for everyone, locally and nowadays.There is no economical crisis, you know, only a deep ethical crisis. Soon or later this will be clear, if not already.

It is not a coincidence:  I am fighting for the listening of the first person internal to a theory, against person who practice the elimination of person, in the scientific inquiry. But they just confuse a genuine simplifying methodology, with a scientific statement (generally more neutral) And this is just not working, obviously in the human sciences.

On another level; It is easy to hate "my work", or to make people hating such work, because it is above all a remind that "science" has not yet solved the "mind-body problem". The opportunity of the computationalist hypothesis comes from the fact that it gives a mathematical formulation of the problem, or of many subproblems.

I am just asking a question, like, - look with comp I am duplicable there is something weird, no?. Because this *seemed* to be unclear, I have made it clearest through paradoxes, and then argument. and eventually the math and the computer science. It is a question like, do you see where matter comes from when machines, betting they are machine, asks themselves?

Don't worry for me, I am dead since a long time. This gives me infinite power and patience. 

In the worst case I could come back next millenium:)

In the very long run I am optimist, if the humans does not take the opportunity, the spiders will. In any case we will see. With comp, as far as we are divine; we are hypotheses ourselves. We are divine hypothesis.

And then, what makes me rather optimistic right now, for the future of comp, is the discovery of Salvia Divinorum. It looks like she can teach  "my work" in less than four minutes!  We can't stop the progress, isn't? Take this with some degree but I got many confirmations through reports by others. I will say more later asap, in response to Johnathan. Not that those people does suddenly discover that reality is different, but that reality *can* be different.

We are living an incredible and wonderful period, m.a., we are living the discoveries (and development) of the Universal Machine, the other Universal Machine,  and then that plant.  That plant helps, like remembering your dream can help. Philosophizing on video-game based movies and novels can help too. Simulacron III and Matrix can help.

The only thing which I have to explain for those who already get clearly UDA1-6, that is the main difficulty of UDA7-8, is the understanding of the difference between a computation, and a description of a computation, it is really the difference between a number and a relation between the numbers.

Thanks for your kind attention, and best wishes,

Bruno

PS I participate to a little colloquium now, and I will find time to comment other posts probably only monday. Have a good week-end.

On 20 Mar 2009, at 02:55, m.a. wrote:

Dear Bruno,
                        Cantor also had an ignorant, implacable nemesis who stalled his career, but he was totally justified in time. I hope you live to see your theories given their due.    

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    martin a.

                                                                   

 

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Bruno Marchal" <marchal@...>

To: <everything-list@...>

The little scandal has grown up all the time and is too big, now. It 
is the kind of manipulation which makes everyone feel responsible, 
from corporatist reflex to corporatist reflex, when actually there is 
only one, very clever, but very bad,  guy.

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

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[m.a.-2]

Some parts of this message have been removed. Learn more about Nabble's security policy.

Dear Bruno,

                    I just hope to see your theories considered objectively and respectfully. They deserve no less. Warmest wishes, 

                                                                                                                                                                                                            marty a.

 

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: marchal@...

To: everything-list@...

Sent: Friday, March 20, 2009 3:29 PM

Subject: Re: The Amoeba's Secret - English Version started

Thanks, m.a.

At least Cantor has been lucky to have respectful adversaries like Kronecker. I am still criticized in my back on work I have never done by people I have never met. The years 1977 and 2008 have been the worst, and I ask myself if I should make some move.

Also,  there has been three people who told me they have abandoned their PhD thesis, or change their subject when they have been asked for not referring to my work, or just my name. My work will be given its due, perhaps without my name: it is not so important. Or is it? 

My work in the seventies were just theoretical computer science, and were just slightly visionary, but even then, and especially at that time, the problems were not related to some work of mine: it is really the contrary. It is because I am ignored, for stupid bad and contingent facts which I have been unluckily witnessing,  that I have pushed a little bit more the obvious revolutionary aspect of the comp hyp. It is because I am ignored about simple mathematical facts (that any patient scientist can verify, and actually have verified), that I have decided to single out the theologiical aspect, I have tried diplomacy during 20 years without success, so that the strategy, changed by itself. Time is running, not for me but for everyone, locally and nowadays.There is no economical crisis, you know, only a deep ethical crisis. Soon or later this will be clear, if not already.

It is not a coincidence:  I am fighting for the listening of the first person internal to a theory, against person who practice the elimination of person, in the scientific inquiry. But they just confuse a genuine simplifying methodology, with a scientific statement (generally more neutral) And this is just not working, obviously in the human sciences.

On another level; It is easy to hate "my work", or to make people hating such work, because it is above all a remind that "science" has not yet solved the "mind-body problem". The opportunity of the computationalist hypothesis comes from the fact that it gives a mathematical formulation of the problem, or of many subproblems.

I am just asking a question, like, - look with comp I am duplicable there is something weird, no?. Because this *seemed* to be unclear, I have made it clearest through paradoxes, and then argument. and eventually the math and the computer science. It is a question like, do you see where matter comes from when machines, betting they are machine, asks themselves?

Don't worry for me, I am dead since a long time. This gives me infinite power and patience. 

In the worst case I could come back next millenium:)

In the very long run I am optimist, if the humans does not take the opportunity, the spiders will. In any case we will see. With comp, as far as we are divine; we are hypotheses ourselves. We are divine hypothesis.

And then, what makes me rather optimistic right now, for the future of comp, is the discovery of Salvia Divinorum. It looks like she can teach  "my work" in less than four minutes!  We can't stop the progress, isn't? Take this with some degree but I got many confirmations through reports by others. I will say more later asap, in response to Johnathan. Not that those people does suddenly discover that reality is different, but that reality *can* be different.

We are living an incredible and wonderful period, m.a., we are living the discoveries (and development) of the Universal Machine, the other Universal Machine,  and then that plant.  That plant helps, like remembering your dream can help. Philosophizing on video-game based movies and novels can help too. Simulacron III and Matrix can help.

The only thing which I have to explain for those who already get clearly UDA1-6, that is the main difficulty of UDA7-8, is the understanding of the difference between a computation, and a description of a computation, it is really the difference between a number and a relation between the numbers.

Thanks for your kind attention, and best wishes,

Bruno

PS I participate to a little colloquium now, and I will find time to comment other posts probably only monday. Have a good week-end.

On 20 Mar 2009, at 02:55, m.a. wrote:

Dear Bruno,
                        Cantor also had an ignorant, implacable nemesis who stalled his career, but he was totally justified in time. I hope you live to see your theories given their due.    

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    martin a.

                                                                   

 

 

 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Bruno Marchal" <marchal@...>

To: <everything-list@...>

The little scandal has grown up all the time and is too big, now. It 
is the kind of manipulation which makes everyone feel responsible, 
from corporatist reflex to corporatist reflex, when actually there is 
only one, very clever, but very bad,  guy.

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/

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[Kim Jones-2]

On 21/03/2009, at 10:57 AM, m.a. wrote:

> And then, what makes me rather optimistic right now, for the future  
> of comp, is the discovery of Salvia Divinorum. It looks like she can  
> teach  "my work" in less than four minutes!


Could you grow this plant indoors under lights, say in a cupboard in a  
small apartment?

How hard is it to find seeds?


K

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