reflection

Dear all,

I would suggest that self-organising physical and chemical systems are not just reactive, but also reflective in the sense of a "widerspiegelung": they not only react in some way, also some influence/stimuli/perturbation results in the emergence of order and structural changes, a stimuli is reflected within the structure as an emerging new quality. this reflection is not a mechanical one, but a non-deterministic one that is constrained by systemic properties.
people like klaus fuchs-kittowski and herbert hörz have defined information in a very broad sense as reflection. i think that reflection is an aspect of information-production that can be found in all self-organising systems.
i would agree that in social systems one can speak of self-reflection and reflexion on the informational level, as well as of self-transcendence in the sense of jantsch that the system has the ability to go beyond its own boundaries and can creatively influence information-production in relationship to other systems. this will also result in communicative actions.
as for living systems i am not sure how the internal processing of signs should be called. there are already more durable, teleonomic patterns of behaviour, these systems are self-maintaining and one maybe can already distinguish a syntactic from a semantic level. self-maintainance of the informational patterns produced for a more durable time than in physical systems maybe an aspect to think of.
anyway, i would suggest to use the term reflection in a broader sense, so that all self-organising systems are considered reflective ones.

christian

  -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
  Von: Norbert Fenzl
  An: Multiple recipients of list FIS
  Gesendet: Mittwoch, 22. Mai 2002 19:12
  Betreff: Re: energy vs. work

  What really differents life from non life (even if I am not very clear about where is the precise line os separation) is in my opinion the WAY how the internal processing of signs to information is working. There I would say in a very simplified way that

  - on purely phys.chem level signs are processed in a reactive way

  - on organic level signs are processed in a reflective way

  - on societal (conscience) level signs are processed in a self-reflective way

  Of course in a next attempt I would like to discuss in more details what we understand by reactive, reflective and self-reflective. But very briefly: this are 3 qualitative steps of signs processing and of course generation of information
Received on Mon May 27 00:44:56 2002