Dear FISers,
The very interesting messages recently posted deserve each one a careful
reading and discussion --utterly impossible amidst the usual turmoil. So I
will reduce myself to briefly deal with a couple of ideas in Kevin's which
are easier for my own background.
On the distinction between form and substance in the living, an extra
difficulty is that almost everything we may observe is in the making--and
in the dismantling. That concrete ribosome may be targeted for destruction,
or in the process of being translocated to some compartment, or in the
middle of some other controlling interaction --apart from its "regular"
function which involves dozens of specific molecular recognition
encounters. I do not mention that as an impediment, but as an extra realm
of multifarious interactions that TOGETHER contribute to notably enlarge
the "function". Evolutionarily we may put it under the exaptation
label, or perhaps also under some of the emergent properties of
biomolecular networks derived from their peculiar interconnectedness... (it
will be quite interesting starting that discussion next weeks!). In any
case, it seems that the peculiar embodiment of biomolecular
"functions" grants them a dense lot of "non formal properties" --and
tradeoff possibilities.
About Witgenstein, and the language "running empty", it also reminds me
streaks from a few philosophers who around that time attempted different
"organicist" schemes (Ortega y Gasset and his "rationalism-vitalism",
Whitehead, Merleau-Ponty, Needham, ...). Perhaps, as R. Dunbar has more
recently dealt with, language emerges as a form of social "grooming" in a
primate group scheme--curiously, after laughter and music. More than 70 %
of language of anyone is really "empty", and merely devoted to elementary
contacts between individual life-cycles devoid of any substance... Every
day the world is circled by a wave of human communications --by any means--
billions of them, and almost all of them saying the same. Could it be, as
McLuhan said, that merely "the medium is the message", or perhaps are we
substituting "fullness" and "density" for emptiness? As Karl would say,
"everything" appears as "empty", as distinctions cannot be made. Than, let
me try this: the "void" in the plenitude regarding the advancement of the
life cycle is the meaning of the information which appears as the empty
spot in the everything ---and formally, maybe one has arrived into the
province of symmetries, or into Koichiro's boundary crossing...
all the best
pedro
Received on Thu Sep 29 18:10:07 2005
