complexity as epistemic depth

Dear FISers:

Stephen Springette's statement about the need for a "new approach" to
information science (a few days back) has lured me out of my lurking
mode and encouraged me to wade into the discussion. I would like to
indicate the direction which I believe this "new approach" should take
in order (among other things) to remedy what Jesper Hoffmeyer, Stanley
Salthe and others have pointed out as the shortcomings of McShea's
approach to biological complexity -- namely, that it ignores the
informational or semiotic dimension of organisms. I think that my
approach may also connect up with Stephen's ideas on "universal
associationism," but I had better let him be the judge of that.

Call the mainstream position the "cybernetic-selectionist" (CS) view.
The problem with the CS view is that both cybernetics and selectionism
beg the question of teleology. Cybernetics begs the question because it
uses "information" as a primitive concept, but "information" (in its
semantic aspect, at least) is itself a teleological notion. Natual
selection begs the question as well, since "selection" through
biological functions, and the comparative advantage of some functions
relative to others. Thus, neither cybernetics nor natural selection
EXPLAINS the source of functional organization in organisms, which is
the key to everything we are discussing here.

So what other approach is thee to understanding teleology in a
naturalistic way? There would seem to be two possibilities: nonlinear
dynamics and quantum mechanics. The relative merits of each have mostly
been discussed in relation to the brain (see Alwyn Scott and Stuart
Hameroff's debate entitled "A Sonoran Afternoon" in Tucson II), but I
believe we must start with the cell and work our way up. For my money,
the nonlinear dynamics approach of Gene Yates ("homeodynamics") is the
most promising way of understanding the massive coherence and
coordination of functional organization (although I admit that
homeodynamics must still connect up with condensed-matter physics at
some point, perhaps along the lines of Frohlich, del Giudice, et al.
("quantum bioelectrodynamics")).

How does homoedynamics relate to information and cognition? I have
proposed a tetradic model of fundamental cognition in contrast to the
triadic semiotic model. I won't go into the details here, but in a
nutshell, you model final causation using nonlinear attractors, define
the SUCCESS of goal-directed action as the maintenance of the DYNAMICAL
STABILITY of the attractor, and posit a subsystem (which I call the
"epistemon") capable of undergoing LOW-ENERGY interactions with the
surround in such a way that: (a) the low-energy inputs correlate with
the normal environmental conditions supporting successful functional
action, and (b) the inputs act as a trigger for the function action. In
this way, the low-energy inputs in effect PREDICT the success of the
functional action. This, I submit, is the essence of INFORMATION... the
prediction of successful functional action.

What is the point of all this? In addition to confronting the problem
of teleology head-on, this approach gives us a way of understanding the
epistemic foundation uniting all living things. Thus, it can form the
basis of a comprehensive "dynamical-emergentist" (DE) worldview as a
successor to the CS worldview.

What about complexity? On this view, what is important is the
informational aspect of organisms, as outlined above. If you call each
kind of low-energy interaction an "epistemic interaction", then the
total number of the different kind of epistemic interactions an organism
is capable of would give a rough measure of its complexity (what I call
its "epistemid depth"). The beauty of this approach is that it gives us
a way to measure organism with brains and those without them on the same
scale (if you assume something like Walter J. Freeman's model of brain
activity in which concepts are correlated with attractors in EEG date).

Another advantage of this approach is that it is easier to cocneptualize
the parallel between phylogenetic adaptation and ontogenetic learning in
terms of bifurcations within a landscape of attractors. Biological
complexification seems to proceed by a process of recombination and
accretion of functions, whether of enzymes at the cellular level, or of
ideas at the level of human civilization.

Best wishes to all,

James
Received on Wed Nov 25 10:35:54 1998