INFOPOIESIS

Dear colleagues,

just a brief answer to Tom and a couple of questions about autopiesis

  INFO & MEANING -- Tom�s response to my previous comments is eloquent and
very well-crafted. It makes me feel guilty of having been too formal and
restrictive, for in my previous private exchanges with him I really had
given a most ponderate view about the strong assets and qualities of the
book (first of all: it is very well written!). He is quite right that
embarking oneself into this type of synthesis, outside the protective
university environment, is a formidable venture...
  Anyhow, here I am again with the Energy&Info topic. The KT "minimum
thermodynamic prize for distinguishablity from an environment" (also
pointed out by Efim, Michael, and quite a few people related to
biocomputing and quantum computing) should be another way of restating the
relationship between joules and bits. I believe that when Tom obliterates
the logaritmic transformation of the number of microstates in Boltzmann
formula he should arrive at this same result: the minimum energy difference
between to different microstates. May I ask the considerate opinion of our
thermodynamicist colleagues (now, or in the physics coming conference)?

THE DIFFERENCE WHICH MAKES A DIFFERENCE--that�s exactly what Tom quantifies
(its limit!) and takes as the "grain" of the INFO magnitude. Can Soeren
agree about this thermodynamic "tag" to his Batesonian approach (the
"observer" becomes now the quantum computer scientist, or the
thermodynamicist working at ideal conditions). The further difference in
epistemological and ontological views is another story. I would say Tom
prefers "objectivism" (sci. truth) and "materialism" (particles) and Soeren
"constructivism" (social construc), and "theoretical-structuralism"
(theories and relationships instead of "particles"). Of course, both views
enrich our collective "multiperspectivistic" storage of knowledge.

INFOPOIESIS -- Perhaps from the info microstate we could jump up to the
vast array of self-constructive processes that autopiesis considers.
However, my point is that any "info society" is characterized by a strange
(info mediated) coupling between self PRODUCTION (OK, autopoiesis) and self
DESTRUCTION (no general name: but obviously patent in the astonishing
cellular world of proteases and proteasomes,in the necessary apoptotic
process of organismic cells, in the growth and disappearance of synaptic
sites, in the economicly necessary disappearance of 30 % of companies every
3 or 4 years... I would suggest "autonecrosis" as a provisional term). So
to speak, INFO entities rejuvenate themselves, and adapt to their changing
environment, by a sort of global INFOPOIESIS that couple both AP and AN
("autonecrosis"). Perhaps the signaling (info) mediated processes that
every enzyme iremediably follows from RIBOSOME to PROTEASOME (first, from
"soup" to cradle; later on, from the coffin to "soup" again) becomes the
clearest biological example.

And a final jump to "languages":
Most of the natural info that permeates such AP & AN (so, globally
"infopoietic") processes is not POSITIONAL but COMPOSITIONAL. Accordingly,
on the one side we would have our own languages, DNA coding, computer
languages, etc. which work by processing symbols in strict positional
succession, a la Shannon. And on the other side we would have cellular
languages built upon info exchanges by chemical compositions arriving in
bulk, both intracellular and intercellularly, and also numerous social and
ethological languages of odors, colors, gestures, emotions (perhaps
including our own musical and pictoric languages) that follow the other
compositional style of info. "Maverick" Karl Javorszky has produced a
"partitional calculus" that I am trying to apply to the language of cells
(and has much inspired these lines themselves)... Anyhow, summarizing about
languages, I would strongly disagree with strict semiotic views that only
discuss info & language in our own (terribly limited) speech apparatus.

I adore the current philo discussion, and hope not having introduced much
cacophony,

bests

Pedro

PS. Thanks to our new colleague Birger for his greetings a few days ago...

-----------------------------------------------------------
Pedro C. Mariju�n --FAX 34 976 761 861 --TEL 34 976 761 927
Dto. Ingenieria Electronica y Comunicaciones
CPS, Universidad de Zaragoza
Zaragoza 50015, SPAIN
Received on Fri Dec 12 14:49:04 1997