Re: abduction

Dear FIS colleagues,

As a personal summary of the ongoing discussions, my feeling is that
abduction becomes the second milestone of our conference. When one has to
navigate out from a labyrinth, having some convenient milestones or
referents about the path to follow represents quite a lot. The first
milestone of 'molecular recognition' helped us to situate several crucial
paths coming from the quantum, mechanical statistical, chemistry, molecular
biology, etc. (their combined info charting looks very difficult but
feasible: it may be one of the future specific tasks to be addressed by a
strengthened fis enterprise).

About abduction, if one interprets Bateson's elegant essay in 'Mind and
Nature' (see this brief text in http://www.elfis.net/elfol3/abdgb.html)
under the light of our previous milestone of molecular recognition, the
outcome is almost immediate: 'biological recognition' is what we are
talking about. That is, the capacity of the living to 'recognize' (extract,
detect) a pattern out from a complex background, coherently done within the
advancement of its own living activities. Then, if biological abduction
revolves around 'recognition', why the need for a new term? In my opinion
it is very wise distinguishing the direct coupling following natural law in
the molecular case (physical interaction) versus the nested architecture of
functionalities which underly the second. Conflating both under the same
conceptual umbrella would be a strategic mistake. Let us remember the
consequences of the Shannonian conflation of
entropy-information-communication concepts.... we are still complaining
about that.

It does not mean that everything becomes clarified around abduction once we
put it in place --conversely, the criss-crossing of conceptualizations is
far more dense here than around the first milestone. But adding this new
referent may probe very useful for charting our future navigations.

Quite probably I won't be able to post in the list until early September
(trips). Have a nice vacation time!

Pedro

PS: In the first part of the conf., Karl's "partitional info" (my rough
coining) appeared as a very promising notion, at least to some of us. We
will come back to this specific discussion in one of the next sessions (eg,
Mark I & II, Morris, Karl). And of course, we will enter proper into the
social, neuro and communication realms. Let us thank John Collier for his
great chairing of the current bioinfo session...

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Pedro C. Mariju�n
Fundaci�n CIRCE
CPS, Univ. Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain
TEL. (34) 976 762036-761863, FAX (34) 976 732078
email: marijuan@posta.unizar.es
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Received on Wed Jul 24 13:16:21 2002