Dear colleagues,
What is the meaning of "music"?
Some of you will remember the interesting exchanges we had a a few years
ago. It is illustrative that musicologists abhorred during many decades (&
centuries) of any evolutionary approaches to music. Fortunately it is not
the case nowadays, and a lot of good thinking is devoted to the
evolutionary roots and origins of music, particularly focusing in group
bonding among anthropoids.
The evolutionary approach to "meaning" could get interesting yields too,
properly starting with the cellular underpinnings, within molecular
bionetworks themselves. Let me try a brief preamble. Ab initio, perhaps it
is necessary distinguishing between perturbation, signaling and
communication. The open system of the cell may be perturbed by quite many
instances---but not meaningfully. We may talk about meaning only when the
perturbing event is a "signal" , so to speak "abduced" from the
environment (recognized as such by devoted receptors) following genomic
wisdom guideliness, and implying a closure of events regarding survival and
reproduction within the niche. Thereafter "communication" belongs to the
exchange of signals and responses between living partners involving well
established sequences and protocols (for instance, already in bacteria:
symbiotic events, colonies, differentiation, collective motion, predation,
etc.) also with overall adaptive closure.
In the second and third cases, we might pinpoint genuine realizations of
"meaning" in the cellular realm; paradigmatically involving dedicated
protein synthesis and degradation. Not far of what happens within the
synapses of the distinguished human users of language --block protein
synthesis either in cortex, hippocampus or cerebellum: no new meanings or
new abstractions can be stored in the memory of the individual. In almost
mysterious ways, our conceptual greatness continues to depend on the modest
protein synthesis performed by localized ribosomes.
Let me advocate that a radical change affecting several traditional
disciplines looms...
greetings
Pedro
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Received on Fri Feb 10 13:47:02 2006
