Re: Marijuan and Darvas Comments

"james a barham (by way of marijuan@posta.unizar.es)" wrote:

> (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.

If we suggest that information must be restricted to living things (cf.
letter above), then we come to the following contradiction.

(1) Life emerged due both to material and information processes.

(2) There is no information where there is no life.

(1) and (2) imply:

(3) Life cannot emerge!

                                                 Dr. Mark Burgin
Received on Fri May 17 22:23:08 2002