Re: Data and meaning (2)

From: Pedro C. Mariju�n <[email protected]>
Date: Fri 04 Oct 2002 - 15:13:38 CEST

Sorry, my Eudora has unexpectedly sent the previous unfinished message
(either I have mistyped, or it did not like the contents). I continue:

.. Then, David Bohm on 'paper-ing' may be misleading in spite of its
elegance, because, yes, we can see all physical existentialities within an
evolving and changing framework, but then the genuinely informational ones
would do their changing and evolving differently: they couple inner
productive processes of synthesis & degradation of their structures to the
arrival of external signals (and as a byproduct they also elaborate
meanings) --cells would do it, and organisms, and nervous systems with
their intrinsic coupling of learning/forgetfullness, and natural ecosystems
too, and economic systems with their unending processes of adaptation and
creative destruction a la Schumpeter... I wonder whether something neatly
informational, similar to Michael's theory of adaptability for organisms in
ecosystems, would help us to make some advancement about the economic
dynamics in our 'information' societies.

Jerry's comments on my mention of the 'doctrine of limitation' need a very
long response. I can only say, very briefly, that the term --rather
unassuming one-- belongs to one of Ortega y Gasset disciples (Julian
Marias--his book about history of philosophy was translated into English
and I believe circulated well--I think I got the English term from this
source). The point I finally try to raise is that our contemporary system
of knowledge has literally hundreds of scientific and technological
disciplines. Obviously it reflects both our cognitive possibilities and
limitations. The former are well studied, not so the latter. But actually,
any interesting problem we face (remember the sonolumiscence case I
mentioned weeks ago) may bring us a dozen or two of related disciplines.
Ted can tell something about that too, on the 'interdisciplinary costs' of
big technological projects, in companies like Boeing, NASA, etc. The
biggest cost is related to the painful process of 'decomposing' the big
global problem into very small ones addressed towards a population of
thousands of 'limited' specialized scientists and engineers.

What I mean is very paradoxical. Challenged with the most serious problems
that go far beyond the cognitive limits of any specialized knowledge, our
scientific system has almost no 'doctrine' on how to combine and overlap
the scores of scientific disciplines involved. Only pragmatics (& pork
barrel practices). Sustainable development is itself the best paradigmatic
problem. It implies a series of intertwined problems of amazingly vast
dimension: ecological, climate sciences, cultural, political, economic,
engineering, thermodynamic, chemical, biological... Finally, the
discussions we are having on a non-mechanistic conceptualization of info,
may have some intriguing connection with that very social-cognitive problem
--How sciences working as a collective nervous system may throw
'anticipatory light' to overcome the impending menaces upon our planetary
survival? In other words, we need to develop 'the art of socially playing
with the Rubik cube of knowledge'. Our knowledge system has devoted
countless scientific-philosophical energies to discussions on reductionism
and the like, an almost nothing to 'integrationism', 'perspectivism',
'limitation', etc. A mature info perspective (or science) could help, and
should help, to readdress the cognitive imbalance.

best

Pedro
Received on Fri Oct 4 15:13:52 2002

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