[Fis] The phenomenology of life

[Rafael Capurro]

Dear Pedro and all,

these are some thoughts on phenomenology of life:
http://www.capurro.de/patent.html
best
Rafael
> Dear Alex and colleagues,
>
> Thanks for the opportunity to ad a few lines on signaling matters. I 
> would not discard any organizational aspect of signaling pathways. I 
> have put below a diagram that approaches the dynamics of some major 
> ones.Your analogy with mobile phones would be right, provided that 
> conversations were mixed, that a number of receivers were just random, 
> and that a component of "experience information" would be entered too 
> --I think it can apply to the dynamics of second messengers, where 
> multitudes of microevents and pathways may be integrated via lots of 
> feedbacks (See the box in the figure below). Symmetry is a big word 
> concerning the organization of pathways in the construction of 
> multicellular development... opposed paths, tipping points, collective 
> (populational) symmetry breakings, massive feedbacks, etc.
>
> By the way, when we commented days ago on Tononi's phi, both from John 
> Collier and myself, the idea was to consider it as applied to the 
> closure of meaning episodes in language. How "getting" the meaning of 
> some linguistic episode (eg, a joke) provokes a sudden change of 
> transient connectivity between areas...
>
> Apart from meaning, it may also be interesting that there seems to be 
> a strong asymmetry in between the incoming / outgoing information 
> flows--the "social info loops" around. In most human organizations, 
> the ratio is in between 3 and 4. It means that you and me are ordered 
> by upper levels in around 80 % of our exchanges, while what we send 
> upwards becomes a meager 20 %. It is from a statistics on business 
> communication metrics. The generalization is far from direct, but 
> maybe it would occur in the cells too--amazingly there is very little 
> literature on cellular "signal emission".
>
> Anyhow, how the whole ascending and descending info flows give raise 
> to all the varieties of organizational complexity is a fascinating 
> problem,
>
> All the  best--Pedro
>
>
>
> *Figure 6: Prototypical signaling pathways of multicellularity.*From 
> left to right, a stimulus in the intercellular space binds to a 
> transmembrane receptor (sensor) on its extracellular domain. Upon 
> binding, the receptor undergoes a transient modification of its 
> cytoplasmic domain; this effect triggers a transient modification of a 
> series of proteins in the cell, each one acting as an intermediate in 
> the signal transduction pathway (signal processing), with 
> characteristic hierarchies of protein kinases and second messengers. 
> The last components are actuators or effectors that activate or 
> inhibit proteins and channels that control several cellular functions, 
> notably gene expression by means of transcriptional switches that may 
> interact with several coactivator partners. The whole biochemical 
> changes produced in the cell represent the response to the received 
> signal —its /molecular meaning/.
>
>
>
>
>  El 26/04/2016 a las 10:10, Alex Hankey escribió:
>> Dear Pedro,
>>
>> Thank you for the comments on my presentation, and particularly for 
>> reminding us all that life transmits information of many different 
>> kinds by very specific and selective processes in chemical signally 
>> molecules.
>>
>> I must confess that I had assumed that such kinds of signals could be 
>> considered special cases of digital information analogous to the 
>> codes transmitted by a digital signalling tower in a mobile telephone 
>> network, where the initial code has to name the device that the rest 
>> of that message section is meant to receive.
>>
>> In mobile phone systems, individual devices are sent information by 
>> identifiers. If we have a nervous system working with several 
>> neurotransmitters, or a cell signalling system working with a number 
>> of cytokines, each with a specific regulatory influence / purpose, 
>> are these individual items not performing in ways that are covered by 
>> the usual combination of Wiener and Shannon, and therefore in 
>> principle understood, and AS YOU SPECIFICALLY POINT OUT, with no 
>> particular "experience" component.
>>
>> I wonder whether the material I transmitted made the following point 
>> succinctly / precisely enough:
>> David Chalmers specifically hypothesized that 'experience 
>> information' (my terminology) mst have a double aspect, and that the 
>> 'loop' arising from criticality specifically fulfils his hypothesis 
>> in a new and potent way.
>> (The material contains so many points that this, to my mind, really 
>> significant one may have got buried.)
>>
>> Thank you also for appreciating the amplification of Tononi's 
>> contribution
>> (Tononi, I personally regard as of real significance). The internal 
>> loop creates
>> the internal coherence that is required to form the 'integrated 
>> information'.
>>
>> I have a suspicion that the following propositions are probably correct:
>> a. any information structure that is truly 'non-reductive'
>> (Chalmers requirement 3) must possess long range coherence.
>> b. any information structure with long-range coherence will be a form 
>> of integrated information.
>> c. Hence Chalmers requirement 3 in fact specifies integrative 
>> information.
>> This sequence a, b, c simplifies what those writing in the 1990's 
>> were saying:
>> they were in fact setting equivalent requirements on the form of 
>> 'experience information'
>> (though Tononi undoubtedly thought he was saying something different, 
>> as did those who followed up on his work, and Chalmers did not 
>> realize that Tononi's proposal was equivaent to the point that he had 
>> proposed.
>>
>> Anyone's thoughts on this would be very much appreciated,
>> All best wishes,
>>
>> Alex
>>
> -- 
> -------------------------------------------------
> Pedro C. Marijuán
> Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
> Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
> Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
> Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X
> 50009 Zaragoza, Spain
> Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
> pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
> http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
> -------------------------------------------------
>
>
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-- 
Prof.em. Dr. Rafael Capurro
Hochschule der Medien (HdM), Stuttgart, Germany
Capurro Fiek Foundation for Information Ethics (http://www.capurro-fiek-foundation.org)
Distinguished Researcher at the African Centre of Excellence for Information Ethics (ACEIE), Department of Information Science, University of Pretoria, South Africa.
Chair, International Center for Information Ethics (ICIE) (http://icie.zkm.de)
Editor in Chief, International Review of Information Ethics (IRIE) (http://www.i-r-i-e.net)
Postal Address: Redtenbacherstr. 9, 76133 Karlsruhe, Germany
E-Mail: rafael at capurro.de
Voice: + 49 - 721 - 98 22 9 - 22 (Fax: -21)
Homepage: www.capurro.de

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