Marijuan and Darvas Comments

From: by way of [email protected] <[email protected]>
Date: Tue 14 May 2002 - 11:16:19 CEST

(from: jamesbarham@supernet.com)

Response to Comments by Marijuan and Darvas.

I agree with Pedro that information, in one important sense, must be
restricted to living things. But I also agree with Gyorgyi that the
basic way we must understand the emergence and life and information-use
is within a general framework of cosmic evolution, phase transitions,
and symmetry breaking. So how to reconcile these two viewpoints?

I think it is crucial to make a twofold distinction: (1) between
structure and information, on the one hand; and (2) between intrinsic
(or what I have called "autotelic") and extrinsic ("allotelic")
information, on the other.

To take the second distinction first, the way I see it, the term
information is deeply ambiguous. Most often, we use it to mean any kind
of reduction in degree of freedom that produces structure, and certainly
any structure or order whatsoever can be characterized in
information-theoretic terms. But we forget that, while the order or the
structure exists objectively, apart from our act of observation, to
characterize this order as "information" means (or ought to mean, if we
are careful about how we use words) that we as observers are attaching a
meaning to the pre-existing structure. That is, I don't think we ought
to simply identify "information" with structure, not only because it
offends common usage, but because it glosses over the heart of the
problem, which is to account for the semantic or normative aspect of
information use.

I think we can make all this clearer if we keep in mind the difference
between considering an organism (say, a living cell) from the outside,
via an act of observation, versus considering how it goes about its
business intrinsically, objectively, as it is in itself. That is, we
must always be careful to distinguish the epistemic and ontic planes
when thinking about life and information, and realize that our knowledge
of the cell is one thing, and the cell's own existence is something
else.

Now, we can examine any structure at all in the cell from the outside
and call that "information". But the way the cell uses "information" to
organize its own activities is another matter. I have articulated a
"dynamical" model of how we might conceptualize information in the
latter sense (as a low-energy trigger correlating functional behavior
with the appropriate circumstances), but be that as it may, however we
wish to understand information-use by organisms as it is in itself, it
is crucial to keep that idea separate from the way in which the
structure of a cell can constitute information for us as observers. In
short, we must distinguish information for one organism (us) ABOUT a
second organism (the cell) from information FOR the cell itself.

Now, relating this distinction back to Gyorgyi's point about symmetry
breaking (1) above: We can say that while all order in the universe has
evolved through a sequence of symmetry breakings, all of which
consitutes information for us as observers, only one of those symmetry
breakings---the transition to life---gave rise to a type of dynamics
that created information, by establishing a dynamical regime with
conative, normative, and semantic aspects. In short, information, as
opposed to mere structure, only came into the world with the ability of
organisms to USE structure AS information in the dynamical sense.

To sum up, while in the subjective, extrinsic, observer-dependent sense,
all structure can be considered information---for us, as observers---in
the objective, intrinsic, observer-independent sense, there simply was
no information at all before the origin of life, because there were no
systems yet able to enter into the right sort of dynamical interactions
that are in fact constitutive of information-use.
Received on Tue May 14 10:17:57 2002

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