Re: Next stage, and Q1

At 01:51 PM 24/06/02, Pedro wrote:
>Dear John,
>
>I find very intriguing your paragraphs in response to Q1:
>
> > Now, if self-organization is taken seriously, rather than merely as some
> >vaguish metaphor, there must be something that is dissipated to create and
> >maintain information. Furthermore, not just any dissipation will do; it
> >will have to be dissipation of something of the right sort to permit the
> >relevant sort of information to form.. So, rather than give an answer, I
> >ask the following questions:
> >
> > What is dissipated in the production of information within the cell? Is it
> >just energy, or is there a selection and disposal of information as well?
> >How much is the information budget of the cell hierarchical? Are the lowest
> >levels primarily energetic, and does this continue in the same mode to
> >higher levels, or are their specifically informational (control) levels in
> >the cell in which new information requires the dissipation of information
> >at lower levels?
>
>My whole point about these questions is that you are inquiring about a
>unitary info--but what if biological info appears in several 'flavors'?
>Imagine that we are inquiring about a unitary 'force' in nature: probably
>we could not advance too far in our analysis unless we further distinguish
>the very different several forces at action (the 4 ones). Well, 'energy'
>came to the rescue providing the unitary entity, and appearing today for
>many people as the necessary referent to conceptualize info. So the
>cul-de-sac, in my opinion, as the different infos would be far closer to
>the 'forces' category problem than to the 'energy' one.

Well, we do talk about magnetic and gravitational energy. Conversion
between them is non-trivial. I suppose that a lot depends on whether
or not there is a general notion of information that is a common currency
notion like energy. Even with forces, there can be a resultant that is
a vector sum of different kinds acting on a given body. Is there anything
similar in the case of information? I suspect that there is, but I wouldn't
want
my question above to turn on this. As I was writing it I realized that a) the
answer, if any depends on the type of information we are talking about,
and b) the specific type of dissipation might vary according to the type
of biological information involved, and even according to where it might lie
in some hierarchy of self-organization. Your point is quite apt. Even if there
is a common currency of information at some level of abstraction, the
specifics of each kind of information, or what is called information by
some, need to be articulated individually.

>For me the living cell is the theater of at least three different info
>varieties or forms (or processes?), structural, generative, and
>communicational, interlinked in a variety of ways; and probably it should
>be four ones, as the above 'structural' implies lumping together the
>mission of membranes, proteins, enzymes, metabolites... plus the crucial
>antithetic work performed by constructive ribosomes / degradative
>proteasomes. It looks an unsatisfying scheme, for myself too, but at least
>provides room for making some further discussion of a family of related
>concepts: representation, symmetry, function, life cycle, teleology... It
>also highlights the unilaterality of those who think that enzymes only
>interact by low-energy non-covalent bonds with their surrounds (Barham),
>looking only at one type of communicational processes. But what about the
>multitude of enzymes and proteins who suffer modification by
>phosphorilation, dephosphorilation, methylation, acetylation,
>proteolisis... aren't these interactions covalent?, and aren´t they quite
>crucial in gene expression (histone-code), cycle control, and even the
>signaling system itself? So my message is about not lumping together the
>info dynamics (emphasis added on the 's') of the living cell under one
>single category, otherwise we will always been talking about incoherent
>properties, and we will never produce an interesting chart of the whole
>bioinfo territory.

In other work with Jack Maze, a botanist, I have looked at how
energy dissipation is involved in the formation of biological structure.
I think it is generally true that in biology what we are inclined
to call structure of the first sort you mention is either programmed
or else arises through energy dissipation.

The second sort of structure you mention (and I agree with the
distinction) is more like the next case, I think, and may not fit the
energy into structure model, though energy dissipation lies under
all dissipative processes.

On the other hand, there is an aspect of information communication
that is very hard to deny in biology, involving hereditary transmission,
especially via the genes. In this case the informational aspects are
largely decoupled form the energetic aspects, and although the energy
budget must balance properly, it is the form and relations of form that
are most important. In this case I think that information, or form
dissipation is the most significant explanatorily. In general, I think
this applies to the biological subsystems that are most readily
called codes (see, e.g., Marcello Barbieri, The Organic Codes:
The Birth of Semantic Biology, peQuod, 2001). These best fit
the model of a physical information system that I used in my own
paper for FIS 2002.

I find the cases that involve signalling and control that don't fit the
code model (arbitrary, systematic rule-governed) to be the most
vexing. They sit somewhere between. I think these will be the hardest
cases.

The generative case, as I suggested above, seems to me to break
down into the transmitted-programmed and the self-organizational
spontaneous. Then the first of these can be either a code based
type, or the more problematic sort of signalling.

Anyway, It wasn't my intention to suggest that there was any
obvious unitary form of biological information, and I am glad
that you raised this. Even if there were, as I said, we would still
need to explain the differentiae for the types of cases that you
describe, and they may have little of real interest in common.

> > In the brain, I think it is obvious that the formation of new information
> >requires the rejection of dissonant information. Higher level concepts
> >aren't merely the sum of a lot of lower level instances, but act as filters
> >that sort and reject information. The question I ask is, can this be
> >usefully reduced purely to the processing of energy, or is there a special
> >sort of dissipation related to the formation of concepts? Alternatively, is
> >concept formation not really a case of self-organization, but merely a very
> >fancy sort of reorganization that produces no new constraints?
>
>I much agree with the special dissipation idea, perhaps placing the
>emphasis towards what I called 'abduction'.

This seems right to me. I had not thought of it before. Edelman, and
my former psychology teacher, Stephen Chorover, back in the late
60's, have both suggested a sort of neural selection (Chorover proposed
that learning occurs through loss of neural connections alone,
which seems today to be empirically false). I have never found this
idea especially enlightening, but the abduction idea is much richer.

>The capacity to selectively
>destroy masses of info that we throw into irrelevence. Take the case of
>laughter: as we argue in the final version of the fis 2002 paper (have a
>look, it is brand-new) laughter makes much sense in the
>info-hyper-saturated environment of human groups --as a genuine 'info
>destroyer'. It throws into irrelevance items that had undeservedly taken
>the attentional resources--and it leaves a pleasant background of generic
>bonding among the co-laughing people. Again we are pretty unsatisfied with
>the analysis we have done (although it includes intriguing formal chaotic
>traces), but we believe that it serves to highlight laughter as a
>'protophenomenon' of human socioinfo, strategically converging groupal,
>emotional, cognitive & neurodynamic strands.
>
> > The same questions can be asked at the firm level, but here we may also
> >have dissipation at the social level of communications and perhaps other
> >resources. What are the relevant resources? ....
> > Mark Burch and I extended our treatment of rhythmic entrainment, in both
> >the reorganization and self-organization cases to the social level: "Order
> >From Rhythmic Entrainment and the Origin of Levels Through Dissipation"
>
>I agree that 'Rhythmic Entrainment' looks a very important organizing item.
>Let us think for instance on the inevitable economic cycles. But how could
>we connect your idea with the very info structures on which firms and
>markets are founded? I mean, inventions such as money, prices, accounting
>systems, markets, stocks...? Could other FISers produce their suggestions
>about the 'info granularities' that emerge along the time dimension of
>economic systems?

I leave this one to others. My interests have been more in political process.
Anyone who knows me knows that money is not a major interest of mine.

John

----------
Dr John Collier john.collier@kla.univie.ac.at
Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research
Adolf Lorenz Gasse 2 +432-242-32390-19
A-3422 Altenberg Austria Fax: 242-32390-4
http://www.kli.ac.at/research.html?personal/collier
Received on Mon Jun 24 21:10:24 2002