while waiting

From: Pedro C. Marijuan <[email protected]>
Date: Mon 26 Apr 1999 - 13:00:57 CEST

Dear FISers,

while waiting for Bela's and Soeren's posting of the FIS-ISSS abstracts,
here there are some trivial comments inspired on the different uses of the
term INFO during our discussions in past months.

I would say that "info" has been used in three different ways: as
CONSTITUTIVE (eg, the physico-chemical-thermodynamic material organization
we can see and analyze), as FORMATIVE (implying an encoding or blueprint
that provides the key to produce or fabricate the whole item), and as
COMMUNICATIONAL (exchanging signals and sharing a collection of strategies,
rules, or grammars in between communicating agents, either cellular,
organismic or human individuals).

For instance, if we consider a cell, maybe the membrane, metabolic net, and
other apparatuses become the constitutive info (the whole fenotype), the
sequence of the DNA is the formative info (the genotype), and the retinue
of intercellular messengers becomes the communicational info. Unfortunately
this distinction is not clean at all, and there are quite a few overlaps
and relationships. Particularly, Igor and Abir (in their intriguing points
that we could discuss in future sessions) were making a fundamental
connection in between the Constitutive and Formative aspects...

best

Pedro

---------------------------------------------------------------
Pedro C. Marijuan. TEL 34 976 761927, FAX --761861 and -- 762111
Dept. Ingen. Electronica y Comunicaciones, CPS Universidad de Zaragoza,
Maria de Luna 3, Zaragoza 50015, SPAIN
email: marijuan@posta.unizar.es
---------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Mon Apr 26 13:42:58 1999

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