Tom´s last book

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INFO and MEANING

About Tom´s last book, Information and Meaning, Springer 1997,
one can hardly disagree with the overall atempt: setting a conceptual
system bridging the gap in between our physical (chemical, biological,
etc.) knowledge and our own social environment. Information is the central
arch, but intelligence, meaning, consciousness, language, feedbacks,
resonance, etc. also play important roles (unfortunately, not always very
clearly established).

About the starting point on information and energy, I would suggest going
to the Madrid 1994 Proceedings (BioSystems, 38, p. 151) where Welch refers
to the thermodynamic costs of molecular computing-- the dissipated energy
for one bit as equals to K.T . Perhaps I am wrong, but this seems the same
value than Tom´s for the relationship between entropy and information. So,
there might be no great thermodynamic novelties there (without denying that
Tom´s re-estatement is more suggestive and thought provoking).

The new aspects of the book include fascinating comments about social
knowledge (eg, medieval Europe and China), origins of human language (info
proc. role of vowels and consonants in primates), and some hints about
consciousness putting together Edelman´s reentrant circuits with the
"semantic metabolism" analogy. Personally I find the metabolic analogy very
rich --well, maybe because myself am independently devoting some thought to
it in the BioSystems FIS sp. issue to appear. The tecno-utopian excursions
look far less interesting. Perhaps they are addressed to non-scientific
public.

Far more considerations should have been introduced, particularly about
consciousness: time, molecular dimension, cellular internal architectures,
evolution & brain organization, topology, etc. (sure that our coming
conference will show that!). Besides, very few references, if any, are made
to neuroscience models, schemes, theories, etc., that could be plausible
from the point of view of rigorous scientific reasoning (even Edelman is
only indirectly cited--he does not appear in the References list).
Frequently one can find trouble in the way Tom builds his thought based on
analogical reasoning. In this, it ressembles the way popular books are
written. That mixing of audiences may be a two edge sword. It can be very
dangerous for the sci. level of the book, but conversely it might bring a
large educated public to become interested in the info sci. topics.

In my opinion, Tom´s views become a rather premature synthetic attempt. But
let us wait and see! I will be very glad to "eat" these critical comments
(fortunately they have virtual suport).

bests

Pedro

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Pedro C. Marijuán --FAX 34 976 761 861 --TEL 34 976 761 927
Dto. Ingenieria Electronica y Comunicaciones
CPS, Universidad de Zaragoza
Zaragoza 50015, SPAIN
Received on Wed Dec 10 13:53:19 1997