Re: [Fis] CONCLUDING THE SESSION

Dear colleagues,

I am briefly responding to past messages. About the relationship of
thermodynamic entropy with information, indeed it is quite complex a
business (we must have a focused session on it--and candidates to organize
it will be needed). On the one side, I join John's comments on temperature
(a well established fact), and on the other my favorite track to
conceptualize informationally those 'stream flows' he mentions would be
Shu-Kun's approach. His Lewis function reminds me quite a lot the
relationship between Entropy and Information established by Tom Stonier
--but he does not destroy the logarithmic relationship, as Tom did (ruining
the whole approach, I think). In a message weeks ago, I referred to the
'bit' interpretation of thermodynamic entropy by quantum cosmologists such
as Smolin, Hawking, and Penrose --and this is exactly what I interpret in
Shu Kun approach: what entropy measures is our loss of 'bits' (elementary
distinctions) in the state space of the energy carriers...

About the other subject (autopoiesis), it was not alone in the market. In
late 70's and 80's, I remember a bunch of sonorous concepts whcih were
proposed to caracterize the dynamics of the living: autogenesis,
selftranscendence, selfreference, autocatakinesis, autopiesis... the
latter has been a little more catchy. Anyhow, in the initial papers of
Maturana and Varela, it was established in a molecularly based way. Now,
more than 30 years later, it may be time to critically reappraise (or
rejuvenate) the molecular basement of their doctrine. That was my proposal
days ago --yes, it can be discussed molecularly, as biomolecular agents
(enzyme & proteins) have many recognition 'addresses' through which the
high level functions percolate downwards, so putting together a variety of
bottom-up and top-down info streams...

best

Pedro

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Received on Fri Oct 17 12:05:56 2003