RE: Exoinformation?

Dear John and colleagues,

>Stephen Seely's recent article in
>Medical Hypotheses is heading in your direction:
>
><At an early stage of evolution the body of a higher animal divides itself
>into three <compartments, each specialising on a different task of life.
>The three parts correspond to the <entoderm, mesoderm and ectoderm
>appearing at an early part of ontogenetic development. The task <of the
>entoderm is metabolism, that of the mesoderm mainly the mechanical aspects
>of life, that <of the ectoderm gathering information from and reacting to
>the outside world.

You raise a very interesting point that we have not discussed here, on how
the organization of cellular communication in the body of an animal
conduces to three macro-categories of function. We should include it into
future speculations, in relation with the gap between cellular and
organismic realms --perhaps it is here where Christophe's notion of
'constraints' can be really useful. It is intriguing because the
ecto-meso-endo distinction also echoes the three categories I proposed for
the dynamics of cellular info (structural, generative, communicational)...

>Re Homo loquens --An exciting prospect. Is Homo loquens an advance on Homo
>sapiens?

I think that Homo loquens cannot get a much more advanced position in
nature than other Homo or even other Anthopoidea --until writing. The
coupling between loquens and the written stuff would remind a Turing
machine, its 'body' (or head) is powerless in itself, but capable of
universal computing when a 'tape' for writing and erasing binary digits is
added. The power of exoinformation, once it gets very well designed (eg,
alphabetic writing, arabic ciphers with zero) is that it boosts the mental
operations of people, multiplying the social possibilities of collective
action.

But perhaps the direct interplay between the endogenous info (oral
cultures, generic group interaction) and the exoinformation stuff is not
enough to advance further the analysis. More distinctions would be
necessary--entering a third player? I am inclined to enter 'knowledge' (or
perhaps 'closure'?) into the game but it looks on a different level than
the endo/exo distinction. The items we may consider as knowledge have sort
of two legs --going one into each side. Seemingly 'learning' is the leg or
the bridge towards the endo, whereas 'validation' goes towards the other
side... In 'the social life of information' (Brown & Duguid, 2000) there
are very interesting ideas on how the endo (informal group life) and the
exo (well-structured knowledge) continuously interact.

The general problem I see for advancing further distinctions and
relationships between endo/exo is the lack of a good metaphor. Once we get
too close in touch with the symbolic realm we are at a loss (everything has
already been said!). Why we do not try to explore something really
different? Although it may sound awkward, the metaphor of the 'mental
engine' could be useful to illuminate some aspects of the endo/exo
interplay as it occurs within our heads. Like in the Otto or Diesel engine
of our cars, circling at fantastic revolutions per minute, and in each
cycle performing an astonishingly complex transformation process between
forms of energy (pretty well captured in the essential by macroscopic
thermo formulations), our brains would run at fantastic speeds performing
cognitive (action/perception) cycles that would transform the forms of
information... Ideas of our great colleagues Michael Conrad and Tom
Stonier, respectively on entropy functionals and on info transformations,
could be invoked here, but also from Arbib, Edelman, Erdi... Maybe we can
think on approximate formulations that capture the essential of our
information (mental entropy) cycles.

Does it look interesting that we get ahead for a while with the 'roaring'
metaphor?

best wishes

Pedro

PS. Our colleague Mohan Karel from Nepal (in his abstract weeks ago) made a
proposal from quite an opposite point of view. Should we ponder rather a
non-mechanistic metaphor on endo-exo such as Yin-Yang? Could Terry's
fractalities or John's optimization trough self-organization be at an
intermediate territory between the two?
Received on Wed Nov 27 12:26:43 2002