Re: social and/or general information?

Dear FISers,
Thanks for your stimulating posts introducing and commenting this
new session, Wolfgang and Pedro.
Regarding the end of Pedro's comment on Wolfgang post:
> But right now, within FIS, we may be suffereing pretty much the
> same gap than the infamous historical breach betwen natural and social
> camps... I am too wrong ?
I would tend to opt for another option, by focusing on information
processing thru evolution rather than on overall evolution.
Lets begin by putting this back in the context of evolution:
Evolution steps and transitions are rather clearly positioned:
Matter -> life (-4 Byears), life->human (-3Myears), human -> society
(-10Kyears ?).
Correct understanding of evolution needs (I feel) three specific types
of understanding:
1) Content of each step (matter, life, human, society).
2) Content of each transitions.
3) Nature of evolution process per se.
Today scientific reality is:
1) We do not know the nature of human (nor the nature of society ?).
2) We cannot explain the content of the transitions (besides perhaps
the last one).
3) We can only assume the existence of a "trend to increasing complexity"
(besides local explanations like cosmogenesis or darwinism).
So the natural/social camps breach is only one of our ignorances among
many within the overall process of evolution.
Now, regarding Information Processing (IP), it is clear that IP is an
important component for each step of evolution.
Moreover, we know that IP went also thru an evolution process: IP in
human is an evolution of IP in life. IP in society is an evolution
of IP in human. So we can say that evolution of IP is a component of
evolution per se.
And it seems obvious that the analysis of the evolution of IP will
be simpler that the analysis of overall evolution, because IP is only
a part of evolution.
Consequently, possible bridging of the breach betwen natural and
social camps should be easier in the field of IP than in the immense
field of evolution.
In other words, the historical breach betwen natural and social camps
may be easier to address and understand if we limit our analysis to
corresponding IP components.
And this underlines the interest of analysis of IP evolution, which
is part of FIS. Is this too FISoptimistic ?
Best
Christophe Menant
Received on Mon Nov 18 22:18:56 2002