Pattee, H. H. (2001). BioSystems 60(1–3):5–21. doi:10.1016/S0303-2647(01)00104-6.
Read in full in NOTE-952, from the author-posted text on the Binghamton CASCI site (casci.binghamton.edu/publications/pattee/pattee.html). That copy has no page numbers, so locations are sections.
Why this is here
Filed as measurement-first prior art for CLAIM-341, on the expectation that for Pattee measurement, not action, separates a living system’s records from its dynamics. The reading does not bear that out. Measurement and control are converses across one cut: “measurement transforms physical states to symbols in memory, while memory-stored controls transform symbols to physical states” (§5). The cut “must first arise at the genotype-phenotype control interface”, and “control of construction came first” (§10, note 6). Measurement presupposes control: “in order to perform a measurement the subject must have control of the construction of the measuring device” (§10). That is closer to the action–perception shape the claim rejects.
What the claim can use is narrower. The first new distinction in a cell is made where the system reads its own memory, in protein folding (§10), and semantic closure, in which the reader of the symbols is built from them, has the shape of the claim’s diachronic loop. But Pattee’s control is construction of the system itself, and he does not separate operations on the self from action on an environment, so he neither supports nor refutes the claim’s exclusion of action. His objectivity condition, that “the act of measurement does not influence the form of the laws, and … the laws do not influence the act of measurement” (§6), is close to CLAIM-342’s anchor. Measurement is not a record internal to the system as opposed to a physical act: it is a physical constraint coupling to the dynamics, whose function no dynamical description keeps.