Not all #control in real #life requires an immediate response of the dynamical #system to what's happening in its environment.
>Constraining the behavior of a system in a functional way, i.e., control, can be exerted here and now—by the specific parameters of environments. Such is the case of tropisms: a plant turns in the direction of a light. However, in cases in which control is displaced in time, the functional ‘‘freezing’’ of some degrees of freedom has to be written somehow and somewhere (i.e., some form of memory must occur), and—if one wants to have a physical description of this memory process—according to Pattee, one has to employ an alternative sort of description in the form of time-independent constraints. This description is "symbolic’’ in the sense of consisting of timeless structures, having external significance, that—themselves—form a system, being non-arbitrarily linked together by certain rules. According to Pattee, the two kinds of description (symbolic code and physical laws) are incommensurate. Neither is reducible to the other.
J. Rączaszek-Leonardi building on #HH_Pattee's work on Reconciling #symbolic and #dynamic aspects of #language
Another very interesting passage showing a deep understanding and appreciation of Pattee's work:
>This is how the two processes that necessitate symbolic description connect in Pattee’s theory: **the biological function of #measurement is to #control**. Living organisms are able to form many kinds of such measurement–control networks. The outcome of the measurement process may feed directly into the control network (as in tropisms). But, according to Pattee, for control to be displaced in space and time (e.g., delayed with respect to measurement), a symbolic coding must exist. **The two processes of measurement and control fulfill the difficult ‘‘cementing’’ role between the #symbolic and the #dynamic, the discrete and the continuous, the static and the time-dependent**. Even though the measurement process may be a dynamical one, its function, according to Pattee, cannot usefully be described by the same dynamics it is measuring. It is only in this sense that dynamics and symbols (the informational record of a measurement) are irreconcilable’’ or complementary
