Re: [Fis] A definition of Information (II)

Dear FIS colleagues,

Let me continue in my second ticket of this week with the problems of
meaning in the cellular realm.

Starting with Christophe --- when the term 'constraints' is addressed to
organismic cells, shouldn't such constraints be understood as 'covenants'
resulting from convergent workings of cell populations? Also, a global
constraint of the type 'being alive' appears as a symbolic open-ended
statement both from the side of the environmental occurrences and from the
response actions of the system, and seemingly it has to be introduced from
the outside of the model by an interpretant---then the whole approach
becomes non-autonomous in an important sense.)

Going to Stan's on entropy and the living, as stated last day, I disagree
about the urbi et orbi 'relevance' of entropy in all realms of life. The
emphasis has to be put, in my opinion, on the special 'informational'
nature of the living, always in the making, adaptively combining
production/degradation activities of its structures as a result of the
communication with the environment. The "Creative Destruction" a la
Schumpeter is ocurring inside cells (protein degradation), in multicellular
organisms (apoptosis) and brains (learning/forgetting), in economic
systems, in cultures... but not basically as a result of entropy ---rather
as the hallmark of informational ways of existence, of being in-formable,
keeping oneself in-formation, in self-production.

With a different language, the above informational nature was more or less
contained in my statement on Bateson about the three basic categories of
cellular information:

structural: The pattern,
generative: The pattern which makes another pattern,
communicational: The pattern which makes a distinction.

Meaning would appear finally as "the difference": the set of changes
introduced in the structural pattern out from the generative after the
communication episode. For instance, with respect to another companion cell
not having 'communicated': what proteins are set for degradation? what new
genes are expressed? what new enzymes and proteins have suffered covalent
modification? what metabolic paths have been tuned up or down? what second
messengers have been boosted? In short, one has to think in the cellular
version of a 'perturbation theory' to be applied to a simplified cell
after a very simple communication episode. But it does not look very
feasible... Maybe living cells have shielded most of their inner subsystems
under 'robust dynamic regimes' and resorted to specialized communication
paths that safely build ad hoc 'meanings' for the crucial aspects of their
communication (e.g., similar to our 'emotional drives'). In prokaryots, it
is the "two-component system", and in eukaryots it is the 'cellular
signaling system'... Perhaps it is in these specialized systemic directions
that one should speculate on meaning's coupling of fabrication &
degradation in the cellular realm.

Let me conclude emphasizing the need of a discussion in-depth upon the many
corners and pockets around the information-entropy interrelationship. The
fine exchanges we had last year between Igor and Shu-Kun, amonmg others,
should conduce in the coming months to a more comprehensive axiomatic of
'information physics"; a convergence with the developments of other parties
on 'information physics' looks feasible. Apologies that I cannot get ahead
on other very interesting points about meaning in recent messages
(Viktoras, Soeren, Steve, Rafael, Loet...).

best wishes

Pedro
Received on Fri Feb 27 13:51:59 2004