A framework for parsing heritable information

Living systems transmit heritable information using the replicating gene sequences and the cycling regulators assembled around gene sequences. Here, I develop a framework for heredity and development that includes the cycling regulators parsed in terms of what an organism can sense about itself and its environment by defining entities, their sensors and the sensed properties. Entities include small molecules (ATP, ions, metabolites, etc.), macromolecules (individual proteins, RNAs, polysaccharides, etc.) and assemblies of molecules. While concentration may be the only relevant property measured by sensors for small molecules, multiple properties that include concentration, sequence, conformation and modification may all be measured for macromolecules and assemblies. Each configuration of these entities and sensors that is recreated in successive generations in a given environment thus specifies a potentially vast amount of information driving complex development in each generation. This entity–sensor–property framework explains how sensors limit the number of distinguishable states, how distinct molecular configurations can be functionally equivalent and how regulation of sensors prevents detection of some perturbations. Overall, this framework is a useful guide for understanding how life evolves and how the storage of information has itself evolved with complexity since before the origin of life.

Introduction

The aim of this book is to develop a positive account of the value of human beings. This involves thinking about the nature of value itself. Following Judith Jarvis Thomson, when we say of something that it is “of value” we mean that it has some property that makes it reason-giving. Theunissen takes the humanist position that the relevant property is being such as to contribute to the quality of the life of human beings (or individuals more generally), and she explores the implications for the value of human beings themselves. The author situates her proposal between absolutist and eliminativist positions—between views that see human beings as absolutely valuable, and views that deny that there is a meaningful sense in which human beings are bearers of value at all.

Justifying Moral Standing by Biosemiotic Particularism

In this essay we examine a fundamental question in biosemiotic ethics: why think that semiosis is a morally relevant property, or a property that supports the moral value of living beings or systems that possess it? We argue that biosemiotic particularism, the view that normative assessment should be based on the particular fulfillment of an organism’s or other biological entity’s specific semiosic capacity, offers a justifiable normative position for the biosemiotic ethicist. If what justifies offering moral standing to all living beings and systems is that these entities are semiosic, then there must be something ethically motivating about semiosis. We examine several arguments in answer to this question. These include arguments for semiotic agency, the claim that all living entities are agential as a result of their semiosic capacities; arguments for subjective or quasi-subjective experience, that all living beings have it and that it matters morally; and arguments for the moral relevance of meaning-making as sufficient for moral considerability. We also address the negative argument that semiosis is at least as defensible as sentience, an alternative candidate capacity for grounding moral relevance, and other cognition-related capacities. Finally, we push further to ask: even if semiosis is a morally relevant capacity of living organisms, is it the morally relevant property? That is, is semiosis the least common denominator for attribution of moral worth, to the effect that sentience-based approaches, among others, could build on biosemiotic ethics as a foundational meta-ethical theory?

Causal Relevance

A causally efficacious or relevant property is a property of a cause. However, not every property of a cause is causally relevant to its effect. Further conditions are needed to screen off causally irrelevant properties. Proposals for further conditions include: The causally relevant property must have explanatory power; there must be counterfactual dependence of the effect on the causally relevant property; there must be a lawful connection between the causally relevant property and its effect; the complete set of causally relevant properties must exclude any other properties from playing a causal role; the causally relevant property must be independent from its effect, in some sense; and finally, the causally relevant property is a member of a set of properties that is minimally sufficient for the effect. The most plausible accounts count dispositions as causally relevant.

Rigid and Flexible Quantification in Plural Predicate Logic

Noun phrases with overt determiners, such as some apples or a quantity of milk, differ from bare noun phrases like apples or milk in their contribution to aspectual composition. While this has been attributed to syntactic or algebraic properties of these noun phrases, such accounts have explanatory shortcomings. We suggest instead that the relevant property that distinguishes between the two classes of noun phrases derives from two modes of existential quantification, one of which holds the values of a variable fixed throughout a quantificational context while the other allows them to vary. Inspired by Dynamic Plural Logic and Dependence Logic, we propose Plural Predicate Logic as an extension of Predicate Logic to formalize this difference. We suggest that temporal for-adverbials are sensitive to aspect because of the way they manipulate quantificational contexts, and that analogous manipulations occur with spatial for-adverbials, habituals, and the quantifier all.