[Fis] Cultural Legacy Redux (Freewheeling Speculation)

[Loet Leydesdorff]

Dear Michel and colleagues,

I agree that adaptation is not specifically human and that "humanity's main
adaptive role" is not to be defined as "information". The best candidate
for a spefically human is probably, in my opinion, "double contingency":
Ego expects Alter to entertain expectations as s/he does herself. These
expectations can be exchanged (for example, in language), and also be
codified at the interpersonal level (for example, in legislation or in
scholarly discourse).

How does this relate to information? In my opinion, the dynamics of meaning
are driving cultural evolution. Information is needed at the bottom
providing the variation. The codes of communication -- for example, in
discourse among biologists (Pedro!) -- operate as next-order selection
mechanisms. These selection mechanisms are not "objective" or observable,
but can be expected to operate and be hypotesized; for example, in a
sociology of communication. We have access to these discourses
infra-reflexively.

Best,
Loet



On Sat, Jul 16, 2016 at 4:42 PM, Michel Godron <migodron at wanadoo.fr> wrote:

>
> You wrote :
> "First, humanity’s MAIN ADAPTIVE ROLE is “information,” if someone
> questions that fact *I invite you to post your view *and I will happily
> “reply.
>
> My reply is  (in red) :
> O K but I am not sure that the profound reason why it is true is clear for
> every one : this constatation "humanity’s MAIN ADAPTIVE ROLE is
> information,”  (or "information is the main way to adapt") is true also for *any
> living being*, because the basic functioning of Life is a tranmission of
> information. That information is necessary for any living being to adapt to
> its environment in a cybernetic system (which was not well understood by
> von Bertalanffy cf. Fritjof Capra p. 48).
>
>  I could explain this with more details, if you want, for each of the six
> main scales (molecules in a cell, genetics with DNA, epigenetics, vegetal
> and animal communities, landscapes, humanity).
>
> M. Godron
>
> _______________________________________________
> Fis mailing list
> Fis at listas.unizar.es
> http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
>
>


-- 
Loet Leydesdorff
Professor Emeritus, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR)
loet at leydesdorff.net;  http://www.leydesdorff.net/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listas.unizar.es/pipermail/fis/attachments/20160717/44bd868e/attachment.html>