tech. note & comments

Dear colleagues,

TECH. NOTE
Given that we are establishing a record of the whole discussion (thinking
in possible Publication References) it is better if messages are
self-contained and do not "drag" the previous ones at the bottom. It will
also allow a cleaner printing presently, without unwanted repetitions.

thanks --and enjoy the present anarchy.
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Some personal COMMENTS on current points:

- The discussion on the perennial problems of philosophy is fine, it allows
the emergence of deep views that actually are guiding more concrete and ad
hoc sci. endeavors of each one. I am skeptical, however, that the very
small advancements that the fis community has made during these years are
providing (YET) a basis to re-enter in such big philosophical topics in
order to say something relevant.

- Comparatively, there are significant novelties in some disciplines that
may allow, in a medium term, the construction of interdisciplinary
synthesis of some interest. Anyone aware of the biomolecular-neurocomp.
developments will have to concede that the news about signaling systems,
second messengers, protein degradation, apoptosis, trophic interactions,
cytoskeleton, streaming tissues, ontogenic development, synaptic sites,
neuronal maps... are conveying a sense of elegance and integration in the
biological way of "being in the world". That conevergence is actually
spurring quite a few synthetic attempts (every month a new product of the
Santa Fe "complexity factory" is in the market).

- The dissatisfaction with most of those present sci. synthesis, and also
their scarse consideration on subtle properties of info phenomena and the
poor connection with other fields of thought and scholarship, is a
permanent reminder that some other trend of thought will have to make the
job. Could the fis thought-collective make significant advances? That�s not
a small challenge to our puzzle-making habilities...

- Personally, an important new fact, an enormously intriguing new piece of
the info puzzle, is the intensity and extension of the "negative",
degradative phenomena that are inevitably accompanying the selfproducing
activities. Biologists had completely ignored this fact up to the last 5- 8
years, now it is trendy. This strange phenomenon, coupled with Per Bak
"Self-organized criticality" and the new insights on cellular signaling
systems excites thought about a new info concoction that may have an
interdisciplinary interest.

- The formalization of an enlarged (Wolfang would say "unified") info
theory, covering also the communication by means of evanescent
compositions, does not look an impossible thing. Perhaps this is the
"other" way to put symbols at work. The firmest hunch is that every
organismic cell has sculpted its own cellular "brain", cel. signaling
system, in order to make coherent operations upon such messages and be able
to speak the language (or "language" if philosophers get too offended) of
its own tissue. Anyhow, that is the piece of the puzzle I would like to
briefly discuss during the bio conference. Particularly given that Ray
Paton and IPCAT colleagues will be around with quite a few other pieces of
the bioinfo puzzle with interdisciplinary relevance.

- I cannot help but reiterating my present skepticism about the deepest
ontological considerations. When Cao and Aitchison (1997, Nature, 388, p.
340) discuss, in the context of theoretical physics, about STRUCTURAL
REALISM (I played by heart and partially failed with the term in my last
message--thanks, Soeren), they hold that "the structural relations between
entities (often expressed by mathematical structure) in a succesful theory
should be taken as real, rather than the entities themselves". Perhaps
that�s all far we can presently go on most of the paradoxes of "quantum"
existence, apart from being very suspitious in front of both particles
and/or waves...

- There is another realm of human activities that can contribute to sharpen
our present scientific views, not merely philosophy and religion. It is
art. Particularly literature, also painting. The intuition of life as
inexorably linked with its own self-destruction can be found purely and
elegantly expressed in Virginia Wolf and Marcel Proust (and of course, in
Cervantes and Goya!)

bests

Pedro

-----------------------------------------------------------
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 Tue Dec 16 13:32:51 1997