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willguest a day ago

And we name them 'tree' because they have a certain shape and configuration. Then we created taxonomies and "discover" that tree isn't a single thing

We seem to cling too tightly to definition, as the expense of paying attention to the things as they are.

My point is resonant with the piece because it illustrates that conventional naming doesn't match taxonometric systematisation. I am happy to be wrong though, if it makes you feel better.

lproven 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Um.

I mean, I like your attitude to the debate, but I don't really get it.

"A is not B." "No, A is a B, but B is not the same as A."

"Ah, but, there is no such thing as an alphabet, really, it's all just vibrations in the air or marks on paper."

You can dismiss almost any argument in science by deconstructing it to symbols and then saying that symbols are not real, but I don't see this as a valid contribution to the debate, myself. Your mileage clearly varies.

There absolutely is such a thing as "a tree". Trees are a real thing. They are an identifiable type of land plant.

But "tree" is a growth habit. It's not a family of plants. This is an important distinction and it's not a hard one to grasp. I still find it odd that it surprises people.

Similarly, I have zero time for this "no such thing as a fish" bollocks. Yes there is such a thing as a fish. It's an obligately aquatic, legless, gilled vertebrate.

It is quite easy to define what "fish" means in unambiguous terms that exclude tadpoles, axolotls, terrestrial vertebrates such as humans and so on.

The argument seems to rest on their being (at least) two families of fish. Big deal. Fish are real, trees are real. They aren't families, but they are identifiable groups.

willguest 8 hours ago | parent [-]

I was not going for the semiotic-reductionist interpretation, but it's a fair assumption to think that that's what I meant by 'name ≠ thing named'.

My point was more to do with the construction of meaning and the general trend of clinging to knowledge at the expense of learning, hence the Taoist addage, since this is a phenomenon that is driven primarily by Western scientific thought.

To put it more verbosely - taxonomies, especially those driven by classification based on gene presence and regulation, will end up with lots of loose ends and contradictions, because this is not the fundamental mechanism by which new forms emerge. The metric is distorted and, by extension, so is our understanding of the morphogenetic space that it is attempting to describe. Calling it phylogeny is somewhat circular because it insists on genes being the regulating mechanism, whereas the article specifically draws attention to the limitation of this category-system, instead looking at the direct experience of a tree, which would more aptly be described as its morphology: "a big long-lived self-supporting plant with leaves and wood."

I do not see nature (of which we are a part) as entirely gene-regulated, though obviously they are involved. But what else is there? Following Michael Levin, I say 'agential material', meaning that life solves problems with full acknowledgement of an unpredictable context. In this interpretation, it is no surprise that a dandelion can become a tree, or vice versa; what matters is the needs that the plant expresses and the responses given by the environment it is exploring. This is cell-level cognition; heretical and beautiful.