Dear colleagues,
The remarkable plurality of definitions of information we have seen these
days--in a formal way, almost of all of them-- together with their highly
problematic congruence, motivate me to continue some reflections on the
non-formal aspects of information...
The engagement of any "thinker" or "observer" into anyone of our scientific
disciplines, implies that he or she will get engaged into a social
"cognitive network" that puts very interesting constraints and
idealizations regarding what classes of information should be entered and
how should they be processed by the individual's cognitive capabilities of
the thinker (would we claim in our daily lifes the privileged status of the
scientific observer: universality, objectivity, God's view point, etc.?) I
have already argued that by following these disciplinary guidelines the
most interesting "ecumenical" aspects of information, particularly those
related to "meaning", disappear.
However, when we look at the observer or thinker in the spare time, just
when he/she is not acting in that peculiar "scientific" way, we only see
the ordinary citizen involved in the typical magmatic occurrences of daily
life, needless to name them, and which are automatically discarded by any
serious discipline (or again, dramatically cut so as to fit into a concrete
disciplinary mold)... The nontrivial point I would like to make around such
trivialities, is that by exploring into that "light" territory of our daily
lives we can have the opportunity to converge on the enlarged sense of
"what is information" ---I am tempted to say that irrespective of cultural
differences, epochs, countries, etc.
Imagine a neuron taking part of a distributed "neural network" in a living
brain. That neuron could boast that its spike production--its management of
electrical currents-- constitutes a sophisticate formal construction that
is elegantly integrated in the collective information processing of the
brain. Those electrical discharges define what is information processing.
Yes, and no... as immediately a chorus of glial cells (microglia,
astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, and other smaller classes) far outnumbering
neurons at least by one or two orders of magnitude, would argue about the
many ways in which they contribute to the overall organization of the
brain, of neurons themselves, and the overall information processing too.
If rather than looking only to spikes we had looked at the whole
biomolecular life-cycle of the neuron, those global "informational"
contributions would have spoken by themselves.
In short, cell-cycles are the necessary reference for making sense on the
cellular construction of meaning. And human life-cycles would be the
necessary reference for a generalized approach to information,
"meaningfully" treated.
Helas, but how to do it? Could it be crystallized into a new "formality"
having the best of both worlds then?
best
Pedro
_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
fis@listas.unizar.es
http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Received on Thu Sep 22 15:22:09 2005
