First comment

Dear colleagues:

It is high time that I enter this discussion. Unfortunately, this
electronic conference is falling smack right into a difficult period for
me: it began last week when I was just back in Alaska from several weeks
in Argentina, and now I am at my regular tour at ICTP in Trieste as senior
adviser. Add to this the editors of a book screaming for galley proof
corrections, yesterday's general assembly of the Oesterreichische Akademie
der Wissenschaften, etc., etc., and I don't know how to make enough room
in my schedule!

Still, I manage to follow with great interest the ongoing discussion. It
touches on many points raised in the first four sections of my
contribution (On the Concept of Information and its Role in Nature). I
realize that my paper is far too long, but I would appreciate it very much
getting some reactions and criticism from the participants to at least the
first sections (1-4).

Concerning the ongoing discussion, let me turn specifically to the issue
of "Does information play any role in purely physical (non-life)
interactions?", or, equivalently, "Was there information before life?". I
try in my paper to justify negative answers to both questions. To that
effect, I refer to the statement by Gyuri Darvas:

"When interacting with an other object, a physical object will first
'evaluate' the information .... E.g., a charge recognises the Coulomb
field of an other charge and will interact with it......"

I simply cannot accept such language in physics, that uses brain function
metaphors. What part of the object (or the particle) does the evaluating
or the recognizing? How long does this process take? The same applies to
the statement "..a given mass, when it 'feels' a force, cannot make
distinction that the source of this effect was an other mass (gravitation)
or an inertia force"? Let me quote here a statement I make in my paper
(section 3): "Unfortunately, in physics we tend to use anthropomorphic
analogies and animistic language by saying such things as "the system
'selects' a path of least action", "the system 'seeks' a strange
attractor", or "the photon 'decided' to go through the left diffraction
slit". One needs a BRAIN to select, seek or decide!". I also say: "In a
statement like 'the process of cosmic evolution itself generates
information' (e.g., p. 131 in ref. 3 of my paper) we should realize that
this is information for us observers--it does not control any of the
natural processes involved unless they pertain to living matter. In a
biological system, indeed, information is an active participant in its own
organization, behavior and multiplication, and information exists and
operates in total independence of any outside observer".

Of course, we cannot forbid ourselves thinking in these terms--we do it
all the time. But appealing to the concept of information in a context
where it is not necessary (while perfectly possible given our cognitive
apparatus which happens to work with it) is like insisting in the use of a
clearly defined, but physically meaningless, quantity such as 1/3 mv**3.

Please note that in the paper I start my discussion by turning to the
process if "interaction" (between two given systems) as the departing
point, as the most basic concept. I feel that only in this way can one
avoid several semantic and subjective difficulties--as happened when Ernst
Mach introduced it in fundamental Newtonian dynamics.

Looking forward to further comments,

Cheers, Juan

Juan G. Roederer
c/o Director's Office
The Abdus Salam
International Centre for Theoretical Physics
Strada Costiera 11
34014 Trieste
Italy

Phone: +39 (040) 2240607
Received on Thu May 16 09:59:55 2002