Abstract
In this paper, following the technical approach to biological time, rhythms and retention/protention in Longo and Montévil (Perspectives on organisms: Biological time, symmetries and singularities. Springer, Berlin, 2014), we develop a philosophical frame for the proposed dimensions and mathematical structure of biological time, as a working example of “theory building”. We first introduce what “theory building” means to our perspective, in order to make explicit our theoretical tools and discuss the general epistemological issue. Then, through a conceptual articulation between physics and biology, we introduce protention (anticipation) and retention (memory), as proper biological observables. This theoretical articulation, which we consider at the core of moving from physical to biological theorizing, allows us to use some of the properties of these observables as principles around which it is possible to outline a proper geometrical schema for biological time. We then philosophically motivate the analysis of “time” as an operator that acts in biological dynamics in a constitutive way. In other words, space and time become specials concepts of order, actively involved in the theoretical organization of biology, in contrast to existing theories in physics where they appear as parameters. In this approach, we first consider the usual dimension of an irreversible physical time. We then add to it a dimension specific to the internal rhythms of organisms. We motivate this dimensional extension by the relative autonomy of biological rhythms with respect to physical time. This second dimension of time is “compactified” in a simple but rigorous mathematical sense. In short, as soon as there are life phenomena, their rhythms scan biological time. We will consider such a statement as a starting point for an original notion of biological inertia.
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- 1.
The process of relativisation of the Kantian a priori comes from the neo-Kantian School of Marburg and especially from Cassirer. With non-Euclidean geometries, a priori forms of intuition of space and time (which, for Kant, had the form of Euclidean geometry) could no longer constitute a scientific foundation for localisation. Moreover, after the formulation of the theory of relativity (restrained and general, both basing themselves on non-Euclidean spaces), the very concept of an object and its relationship to space was no longer immediate in intuition. More specifically, in classical mechanics, the dependency of the notion of “object” upon a complex of universal laws was founded on the laws of geometry. In relativity theory, instead, the localisation of an object takes place through operations that enable a transition from one reference system to another. It is the invariants of such transformations that may be deemed “objects”. We refer here to Cassirer (2004), for broad overviews of the possible modulations of the a priori we refer to Kauark-Leite (2012), Lassègue (2015).
- 2.
The notion of group can be put into correspondence with the logical relationship of equivalence, and the notion of semi-group has the same form of ordered relation, (Bailly and Longo 2011, p. 163).
- 3.
Note that H. Weyl, a major mathematician of relativity theory, while working on “Space, time and matter”, a fundamental book for that theory, stresses the limits of the physical description of time. He does so in Weyl (1918), in reference to the non-pointwise experience of phenomenal time, where the knowing, living subject plays a role.
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Longo, G., Perret, N. (2018). Rhythms, Retention and Protention: Philosophical Reflections on Geometrical Schemata for Biological Time. In: Danks, D., Ippoliti, E. (eds) Building Theories. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 41. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72787-5_12
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