Svar: Re: Next stage, and Q1

Dear FIS'

Thank you for a nice conference so far. I am leaving for the World Sociological conference in Brisbane Australia (section on sociocybernetics) Monday and will not be back before the 24.Th. of July. I hope this conference will be on hold in some part of July, so I do not have to miss too much.

A nice summer to you all

Søren Brier, +45 3528 2689

http://www.flec.kvl.dk/personalprofile.asp?id=sbr&p=engelsk

Ed. of Cybernetics & Human Knowing

http://www.imprint-academic.com/C&HK

>>> marijuan@posta.unizar.es 06/27 1:18 >>>
Dear colleagues,

I am quite congenial with the exchanges of past days. The forces metaphor
on the different kinds of biological information, although weak in some
regards, may help us to establish the framework where we can constructively
place our agreements-disagreements. That's important, and actually that's
the feeling that transpires in these past messages. So I do not want to
enter into too many specifics (besides, John's new Qs are coming soon!).

Just let me add some brief comments about molecular recognition. Maybe this
is the frontier or the mile stone that separates two territories (or
better, interconnects them): physical info vs biological info. Unifying the
ideas about physical info looks reasonably feasible, although the task is
far from simple--I recommend the editorial of Shu-Kun for the Entropy
Journal: 'Diversity and Entropy', 1999,1.1-3). About biological info, well,
the complexity and difficulty of the task itself cannot be easily estimated
at the time being. Before the conversion problem, we really confront a
'complexion' one (that was nicely penned in the final lines of Gyuri's
message).

My own experience during these years trying to get beyond the already
mentioned three genera (struct, gen,. comm.), all of them stemming out from
the 'molecular recognition' frontier, is that the biggest problem relates
not to establishing the info taxonomy but to the accompanying cluster of
co-defining concepts. Turning the eye to the force metaphor, that cluster
was crucial in the success of classical formalizations (Newton's,
Maxwell's) and also in today's theories of quantum fields. As I mentioned
last day about bioinfo structural aspects, the sheer magnitudes surrounding
the structural diversity of the simplest cell's are breathtaking: millions
of molecules, thousands of different enzyme-protein classes, hundreds of
metabolites; not to mention the dynamic complexity of the emerging networks
and paths... It is in this context that I criticize the frequent
unilaterality of our approaches (James' emphasis on non-covalent enzymic
interactions, or John's on 'dissipation', or my own 'enzyme-centrism').

Anyhow, James, I believe your scheme has to confront an anomaly, but it is
not a 'killing' one. You will not have great trouble to accommodate the
fact that quite many controlling enzyme interactions are covalent: actually
they add new dynamic regimes of non-linear oscillation, very useful ones
that otherwise could not be achieved by weak interactions alone. However, I
doubt that we can handle so well the phenomenon of proteolisis (and I am
including myself into the reflection on this enzyme control problem--why
the living cell orchestrates so massively an organized destruction of its
very expensive active components? This is John' s dissipation but in a most
brutal and destructive context. For me, this unexplained structural bioinfo
phenomenon is quite crucial... As for the other more philosophical points I
prefer leaving the discussion for the aftermath of the coming Qs.
Notwithstanding, in a recent particular exchange with John H, he was making
a very suggestive point that helps to contemplate the scalation from
cellular info up to the largest contexts:

>2. I was intrigued with your cells/firms
>idea particularly if you add
>'states' to make it triadic
>(Pareto's steady state economy, finite
>state grammer, state-ments, the state etc) and
>include the socio-political dimension.
>
>>From a shell/kernel or form/relationship perspective
>cells/firms/states are the shell/outer forms
>expressing kernel relations - metabolism/organisation/constitution.
>
>What we need is a theory that can include both the vertical and horizontal
>forces of the informational.

best wishes

Pedro
     

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Pedro C. Marijuán
Fundación CIRCE
CPS, Univ. Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain
TEL. (34) 976 762036-761863, FAX (34) 976 732078
email: marijuan@posta.unizar.es
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Received on Thu Jun 27 19:03:26 2002