Dear colleagues,
At the time being, none of the approaches and definitions of information
presented has managed to cross the informational divide between the animate
and the inanimate --though it has been ignored or sidestepped in different
ways. How to do that is in my opinion one of the most pressing questions we
have to confront.
Proclaiming a "queen" discipline (physics and molecular science for some
parties, or mathematical logics or computer science for others, or
semiotics, or biology itself in my own case) and getting ahead
overextending its provincial taxonomy of information will not solve at all
the global problem.
A prolegomena articulating a "new way of thinking" seems necessary --maybe
incorporating items such as the essential openness of human beings, their
social creation and maintenance of different knowledge modalities, the way
each individual's nervous systems links percepts and actions and store them
into mixed "cognits" that through languaging are transformed into
"concepts" (so attempting an integral sensorymotor approach to
meaning)... all the way down to the evolutionary origins of nervous
systems and the organizational properties of living cells --their
biomolecular networks-- as responsible for the appearance of the
aninamate/inanimate divide. And, yes, most of the views discussed on
"information physics" can be added herewith, and the communication theory
conceptualizations.
I think it was Faraday who produced a memorable lecture on the complexity
of a candle-flame. If we can find hundred of chemical reactions,
combustions, convections, flows, etc. involved in a daunting combination of
amazing resilience and quasi-adaptive properties---what is the comparative
secret in the organization of biomolecular networks to evolutionary beget
millions and millions of different "flames" of increasing complexity,
neural systems included?
It is the "flame of life" what demands the most radical
informational-interpretation, of course, the molecular elaboration of
meaning included (cellularly & neuronally).
best
Pedro
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Received on Tue Sep 13 18:21:55 2005
