Re: Data and meaning

Dear colleagues,

There have been a number of interesting ideas exchanged these days. I am
responding to a few from Cristophe, John, and Jerry.

  Cristophe:
>....The meaningfullness of an information comes from the origin of the
>information. If the information has been produced by a system that has no
>constraint to satisfy, then the information cannot be meaningful.
>The meaningful information is meanningful relatively to the
>constraint S of the MGS (we should speak about "meaningful (S)
>information", or "meaning (S)"). And a meaningful information
>transmitted to other systems will be able to participate to an
>action satisfying the constrain S only if the receiver system
>is submitted to the same constraint S.

Probably what you say makes a lot of sense from the point of view of
computer science and agent modelling. And I concur that your 'constraint'
approach is very elegant and intriguing as a computational strategy.
However, biologically the problem looks different. The meaning is built by
the living entity after the 'mysterious' abduction process has lead the
receiver to converge on that particular item distinguished as info.
Converging or not belongs exclusively to the receiver part; afterwards
meaning will be 'fabricated' in a fast/medium/long term; and quite probably
within a molecular-decay process that will also affect that 'meaning'. The
passing of time dramatically alters the meaning, content, salience,
relevance, etc. that we have initially felt or experienced, or elaborated.
In any case, your return to the 'constraint' notion is very welcome, as we
could not close 'meaningfully' the cellular discussion months ago. I am
still pondering about that.

John's reference to Michael Conrad is very opportune too. In my opinion, we
have never discussed the fabric of his 'adaptability theory' at all; and
after reading Kevin Kirby's paper in BioSystems Vol. 64, 2002, an excellent
popularization of Michael's pretty arcane theory, I really think that it
provides the overall arch on 'cellular adaptability' where we may insert
both the molecular recognition theme (en passant: Shu-Kun has a great,
great paper about it) and the abduction intermediate level
conceptualization. If for whatever reason this discussion cannot be
advanced in some of the next sessions, I would like to suggest an ad hoc
one with Kevin and Shu Kun (and maybe other parties) as our special invitees.

About that quotation of Wordsworth on the ear and the eye: we 'see' but
also keep our inner circadian clocks on day-night time through eye
non-vision receptors, also we both emit and receive a lot of social info
(eg, romantic) on the very motions of the eye, blind people too, and our
eyes have evolved to show a big contrast sclerotic/iris unknown in other
primates... As for the ear, it additionally computes our sense of
equilibrium too. In short, cramming into just one reductionist word the
function of our bodily (or molecular!) elements is not wise. But I should
not contradict the admirable poet...

David Bohm on 'paper-ing' may be misleading.
Received on Fri Oct 4 14:00:14 2002