[Fis] Fwd: TR: How Molecules Became Signs. LIFE CYCLES
joe.brenner at bluewin.ch
joe.brenner at bluewin.ch
Thu Mar 24 10:13:57 CET 2022
Dear Christophe and Dear All,
As usual, you have expressed clearly the relation of your concepts to life cycles and some of their constraints. I still would very much welcome your views and those of others regarding some changes and additions to this picture.
As I look at it, your system does require input of information and energy, but how can it then be called autonomous and self-contained? Why should a simplistic physical process, like that of Benard cells, be a valid model for complex biological and cognitive processes?
However, when you start to talk about "a natural trend to local complexity increase" I completely agree. One of the features of this domain is the presence of close to equilibrium states, as well as a dynamic change between actual and potential ones. The existence of the potential for development in a certain direction rather than another can only have come from prior states in the process.
Perhaps even more iconoclastic and heretical, should one talk of life cycles at all? No real process comes back to exactly the same point from which it started, and cognitive/social processes have the capacity for regression. I have suggested talking about spirals, not to be "difficult", but to introduce an absolute minimum new formulation for discussion. Pedro looks ahead to something like this by implication in his next to last paragraph, on communication.
Perhaps a better model is that of the Ki-Ki bird, which we used to joke about in high-school. The Ki-Ki bird spends most of its existence flying up its own anus, during which it cries out "Ki-Ki-Khrist it's dark in here", hence its name.
Best wishes,
Joseph
----Message d'origine----
De : christophe.menant at hotmail.fr
Date : 23/03/2022 - 14:46 (CEST)
À : fis at listas.unizar.es
Objet : [Fis] TR: How Molecules Became Signs. LIFE CYCLES
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Dear All
Our recent discussions on information, constraint and meaning brought back to my mind an IS4SI 2017 presentation on a close subject (https://sciforum.net/manuscripts/4033/manuscript.pdf), with some link to life cycle.
It was about extending to a pre-biotic world and to a possible post human one the modeling of meaning generation for constraint satisfaction (here under).
For a pre-biotic world the focus is on the locality of a constraint in an ubiquitist physico-chemical world. The idea is to consider the possibility for a local far from thermodynamic equilibrium status to maintain itself. A kind of local Benard Tourbillon maintaining itself, by itself (and so introduce autonomy in the process). The constraint applied to the local entity is then “maintain the far from equilibrium status”. Where would such a constraint come from? Perhaps we could introduce it as a consequence of a natural trend to local complexity increase in the evolution of our universe.
For the post-human side, the focus is about a better management of our “anxiety limitation constraint”. The subject of anxiety limitation is an unpleasant one, but I feel it is unavoidable as it shares an evolutionary nature with our self-consciousness. In other words it is what makes us humans with anxiety limitation driving many of our mental states (much more than assumed so far).
Overall, this could also be looked at as "life cycle of local constraints" in our universe.
De : Fis <fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es> de la part de Pedro C. Marijuán <pedroc.marijuan at gmail.com>
Envoyé : lundi 21 mars 2022 20:06
À : fis at listas.unizar.es <fis at listas.unizar.es>
Objet : Re: [Fis] How Molecules Became Signs. LIFE CYCLES
Dear List,
Some comments on the recent exchanges that I will try to connect with the informational centrality of "life cycles".
The input-output view, apparently common to stimulus/response and to physical interactions (Howard), forgets a relevant characteristic of life: it does not follow blindly the requisites of its boundary conditions, its inputs, but has inner drives (conatus principle for Spinoza) that impels it to circumvent adverse conditions and to change its own structure and dynamics so to keep ahead with the potential advancement of the life cycle. The inanimate is inert and just follows the laws of nature, the animate establishes its own lawfulness. Obviously we, ourselves, are not restricted to input/output in our daily life. Most of our behavior stems from inner needs or drives, from impulses that overall grant us a tentative fit withing our environment and our social groups. Not different from all the other forms of life.
The life cycle is essential in signaling science, in bacteriology, in microbial ecology, in multicellular development & specialization, in epigenesis, in ecological disciplines, social sciences, daily life...
In our societies, we use sketches or records of our life cycles in progress: short "bios", CVs, biographies, etc. In order to fruitfully communicate and understand the other party we need to have some idea on the age, sex, ideas, professional background, family... how the life cycle has progressed. And last but not least we compose fine obituaries at the end.
That it becomes an embarrassing theme for formal approaches does not diminishes at all the centrality of life cycle in relation with the sources and destinies of communication processes and the subsequent elaboration of meaning. Well, we can make a rough sketch of the communication process as occurs in life, prune it of all its complex aspects of inner drives & cycle, and then apply it as stimulus/response to everything. Not serious. A bland metaphor.
How molecules may support that type of life communication? The simplest, most consistent way relates to prokaryotic cells and their signaling systems. All further down we may speculate on protobiology is just that, speculations on a scientifically unsolved matter.
Regards---Pedro
El 21/03/2022 a las 18:42,
joe.brenner at bluewin.ch escribió:
Dear All,
Karl’s note below, and that part of it which refers to Howard’s below, refers to aspects of my approach to logic, information and reality. They deserve some responses and clarifications, the order (in this case) does not have any particular significance.
1. 1. The intent of the statement “all logical statements being true, etc.”, relevant only for standard logics, is not clear to me in this context.
2. 2. On the other hand, my non-propositional, non-truth-functional logic of processes is a way of seeing how (my emphasis) things interact.
3. 3. I do not think we are talking about “the same interdependence of parts and wholes” unless you can agree that interdependence means that parts and wholes share some of each other’s properties, to a different and changing degree.
4. 4. The reference to the beginning of an interaction is very good since it avoids reification of an “interaction”. One could simply say that interactions imply transformations, more or less continuous.
5. 5. The concept introduced of exactitude as a property of interactions, leading to tautologies, is a difficult one for me to grasp. I tend to avoid tautologies like the plague, and my interactions are far from exact.
6. 6. In this context, we have a core definition of information as anything a receiver can interpret. The concepts of a receiver and information, however, appear to be everything that participates in a real-world process, at all levels of reality, in other words, everything. There is a certain attraction to seeing “everything” as information, but it is ultimately a form of idealism I for one cannot accept.
7. 7. A meaningful sentence for me is that information is an “artefact of the stage of our dramas.” I would say that it is built on the existence of entities (with different densities, OK) moving between actuality and potentiality. I would be interested in seeing if either of our authors could integrate this statement in their systems.
Thank you and best wishes,
Joseph
----Message d'origine----
De :
karl.javorszky at gmail.com
Date : 19/03/2022 - 17:31 (CEST)
À :
howlbloom at aol.com
Cc :
fis at listas.unizar.es,
christophe.menant at hotmail.fr,
joe.brenner at bluewin.ch
Objet : Re: [Fis] Fwd: TR: RE: How Molecules Became Signs. One Way Out.
Oomph this does have, Howard. An idea came to me on reading this explanation of what happened right after the big bang.
All logical statements being true, none of them is true.
Some of the melee will become differentiated, on whichever property. In your model, these are leptons etc mainly along magnetism.
This fits all very well as the first chapters of a book for young adults. My contribution would come later, as we discuss the ideally running stable middle stage of the contraption, where and on which we demonstrate that and how the cogs fit together. Maybe a polite invitation to Joseph to attach words to concepts that are the background to what we all 3 (actually, all of fis) try to put to words and concepts and numbers and drawings.
Namely that information is an artefact of the stage of our dramas. It is built on the difference between densities space vs matter. There are thresholds below and above which the concept of unit changes. We could figure that out once we clearly see how things interact.
Memory functions like genetic only in the best of ideal circumstances. So in my world the interactions are that exact that one may talk about tautologies.
In the beginning of the interaction or during transformations of it, there are the pictures Joseph and you paint.
In my impression, we talk about the same interdependence of many parts of a whole.
Karl
On Fri, 18 Mar 2022, 01:45 Howard Bloom, <
howlbloom at aol.com> wrote:
The Evolution of Information
Most of us think that information is a relatively new phenomenon, limited to human kind, computers, and perhaps to animals. But that view is wrong. Information reared its head in the first 1032 second of the big bang. It got its start when space first told matter how to move. That was a communicational exchange. An informational exchange. And information showed itself in that first 1032 second after the Big Bang when the first “things” precipitated from a sheet of space and time. Those first things were leptons and quarks. And quarks have a peculiar property. They cannot survive on their own. So they rushed to find each other and to gang up in groups of two or three. But not just any partners would do. Each quark was born with the equivalent of an etiquette book, an instruction manual telling it which fellow quarks to rush toward and which quarks to avoid. Each quark was born picky. Each quark was born with a vocabulary called attraction and repulsion. Each quark read the signals from another quark and either sped away or glommed together in a permanent embrace. Yes, quarks met others and either rushed away or sped toward each other to embrace. How did quarks “know” which to do? They read each other’s signals. They read each other’s electromagnetic and weak force. Then they acted on those signals. In other words, quarks exchanged information. In my book The God Problem, How a Godless Cosmos Creates, I give a simple definition of information. Information, says the God Problem, is anything a receiver can interpret. How do we know when a receiver is getting the message? We watch the receiver’s response. In other words, stimulus and response—the two things that BF Skinner felt were the core of psychology--are vital to the observation of information. Quarks fleeing from each other or flying together were responding to the cues of other quarks. They were interpreting a stimulus and producing a response. They were communicative. They were social. And they were informational. Those 13.8-billion-year-old social quarks, by the way, are alive inside of you and me today. Quark threesomes are your protons and neutrons. But there’s more. Informational processes of the sort we see in quarks appear at every stage of the cosmos’ evolution. They appear in attraction and repulsion. Information, attraction, and repulsion showed up 380,000 years after the big bang in electrons and protons. Electrons and protons read each other’s electromagnetic signals and came together as atoms. Attraction, repulsion and information appeared in the sweepings of cosmic dust that would someday be called galaxies. Information and attraction showed up in the form of gravity, signals that change based on a body’s mass. Information and attraction appeared in the gravity balls that would form stars, planets and moons. Informaion, attraction, and repulsion appeared when atoms read each others signals and came together in the first molecules. And they information, attraction, and repulsion are alive in every macromolecule that would become a part of life. Molecules communicate with each other via electromagnetism and either attract or repel. Information is the backbone of the evolution of the universe. And information is the essence of the gatherings of matter that think of themselves as you and me.
-----Original Message-----
From: Karl Javorszky <karl.javorszky at gmail.com>
To: Joseph Brenner <joe.brenner at bluewin.ch>
Cc: fis <fis at listas.unizar.es>; Christophe Menant <christophe.menant at hotmail.fr>
Sent: Thu, Mar 17, 2022 6:57 am
Subject: Re: [Fis] Fwd: TR: RE: How Molecules Became Signs. One Way Out.
Yes, this is absolutely correct
Meaningful information is reality in potential form
Congratulations!
joe.brenner at bluewin.ch <
joe.brenner at bluewin.ch> schrieb am Do., 17. März 2022, 11:34:
Dear Christophe and All,
In his note, reproduced below, Christophe provides an interim answer to my first response to his of the same day (March 13). In looking at the relation between Information and Meaning, he looked forward (as I certainly do) to further input by Terry regarding the potential of information as meaning and the process of emergence. (One should perhaps better write information_as_meaning.) In the meantime, I offer my own interpretation from my recent (2020) book with Andrei Igamberdiev:
"I summarized the concept developed in LIR (Logic in Reality) in the following points:
1. Information generation and transfer occur in nature as a natural process that is constituted by and requires energy.
2. Information is present throughout nature, but its conversion to meaning requires organisms capable of recursive processing of it.
3. Meaning is constituted by all the information valuable to a living organism for its survival, reproduction and well-being.
4. Information processes follow principles applicable to energy and energetic processes in general
Many authors have noted the complexity of information and the difficulty of giving a ‘single, clear’ definition of it. Attempts to do so are typical of standard substance ontologies, where firm definitions – identities - are automatically given preference. The failure of such attempts suggests that a major categorial error is being made. I therefore made the following lapidary statement:
Meaningful information is reality in potential form.
It is derived from the Lupasco/LIR conception of consciousness which basically looks at the real dialectical interactions in and between internal and external, and internalizing and externalizing processes as they move between potentiality and actuality.
I suggest that the above can be placed in relation to Christophe's Systemic Theory of Meaning, most recently of March 2020, (his reference MENITA-7 below), which constitutes the primarily epistemological part of a more complete theory embodying my ontological ideas as well.
These fit well, at least in my view, with Christophe's treatment of anxiety in which potential states are critical, also for emergence.
Thank you and best wishes,
Joseph
De : Christophe Menant <christophe.menant at hotmail.fr>
Envoyé : dimanche 13 mars 2022 18:26
À :joe.brenner at bluewin.ch <joe.brenner at bluewin.ch>
Objet : RE: RE: [Fis] How Molecules Became Signs. One Way Out. OFF-LINE for one point
Joseph,
We can agree that a process transforms an input into an output.
Reverse engineering, as I know it, is a tool to improve processes. We know what we want at the output. We look at how the process builds it in order to see if it is the best way to do so (other ways may exist and be better).
The output is then the starting point. It needs to be clearly defined and understood to address possible improvements of the process that builds it.
Our case is about an evolutionary process that transforms meaningless states present in a-biotic matter into meaningful states present in living matter. We need there a precise definition of what is expected as output of the process (meaningful information) in order to look at how the evolutionary process may have produced it.
Best
Christophe
De :joe.brenner at bluewin.ch <joe.brenner at bluewin.ch>
Envoyé : dimanche 13 mars 2022 15:12
À :christophe.menant at hotmail.fr <christophe.menant at hotmail.fr>
Objet : Re: RE: [Fis] How Molecules Became Signs. One Way Out. OFF-LINE for one point
Before giving a full response to your very promising note, please let me ask you one question about reverse engineering: is it really necessary to know the outcome of the process, which may be difficult or impossible? If Information IS Meaning, then the relative weight of actual and potential defines the probability of an outcome, not the outcome itself. Qu'est-ce que tu en dit?
Best,
Joseph
----Message d'origine----
De : christophe.menant at hotmail.fr
Date : 13/03/2022 - 14:46 (CEST)
À : joe.brenner at bluewin.ch
Cc : fis at listas.unizar.es, deacon at berkeley.edu
Objet : RE: [Fis] How Molecules Became Signs. One Way Out
Thanks Joseph for your position.
If I understand you well:
1) There is information and meaning in our world (I&M).
2) There is no information nor meaning in an a-biotic/inert world.
3) In that a-biotic/inert world there is only “potential for information as meaning”.
4) Information is defined in the process of its emergence from some energetic ground.
In addition, I feel we can say that:
a) I&M can be defined (https://philpapers.org/rec/MENITA-7).
b) Having from Terry his definitions for I&M would allow a better understanding of the “potential for information as meaning” and of the “process of emergence”.
This is about the well known reverse engineering activity where the outcome of a process is available, and when we look for some understanding about the process itself. The more we know about the outcome of the process, the more we can pretend understanding the process.
Here we need to clearly know the outcome of the process. We need definitions for I&M by Terry. Their availability is needed to look at understanding the “potential for information as meaning” and the “process of emergence”.
All the best
Christophe
De :joe.brenner at bluewin.ch <joe.brenner at bluewin.ch>
Envoyé : dimanche 13 mars 2022 11:51
À :christophe.menant at hotmail.fr <christophe.menant at hotmail.fr>
Cc :fis at listas.unizar.es <fis at listas.unizar.es>; deacon at berkeley.edu <deacon at berkeley.edu>
Objet : Re: [Fis] How Molecules Became Signs. One Way Out
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
There is one way out of the dilemma which has not been directly refuted. When Christophe and others ask if can we talk of information in an a-biotic or pre-biotic world, if information means something actual, present, the answer is no. If one asks instead did the potential for information as meaning exist, the answer for me is yes.
An additional statement must be added, otherwise the above is no more than a trivial tautology. It is that information is defined in the process of its emergence from some energetic ground. Since no process, nothing in process is complete, complete and incomplete parts of the process are present simultaneously and dynamically. The locus of this "nascent" information is the detailed physico-chemical structure of the living entities involved and their non-living constituents. These or parts of them move from actual to potential and vice versa and this movement is what ultimately defines their meaning.
One reading of the above is that I have given a new interpretation of the nature of a sign. I would gladly accept this, provided it can be subsequently decided whether or not the concept of sign adds further information. It may not.
Thank you and best wishes,
Joseph
----Message d'origine----
De : christophe.menant at hotmail.fr
Date : 13/03/2022 - 00:02 (CEST)
À : deacon at berkeley.edu, fis at listas.unizar.es
Objet : [Fis] How Molecules Became Signs
Dear Friends,
that war is a horrible drama for innocent civilians. And I agree with your comments.
Our FIS discussions cannot bring much help to that human drama, but our tentative analysis of what is “information” may somehow lead to a better understanding of human motivations guide behaviors.
Let me add another comment to Terry’s work.
Dear Terry,
In addition to my Feb 23 post I would appreciate some information on parts of your paper I may not have understood that well.
Regarding the concept of information, you consider that information in a pragmatic-functional sense can be understood in terms of molecular evolution.
This brings to consider that “information” is present in an a-biotic or pre-biotic world (a purely molecular world). Such pre-biotic world has existed before the emergence of life in our universe. But can we talk of information and meaning, of signs, in such a world? How should they be understood in a purely material world devoid of living entities?
As said, it would be nice if you could clarify these points by making available definitions for information, meaning and sign in such an a-biotic world. This would allow a better understanding of your starting point.
Also, I do not see that well using the Peircean term of “Interpretant” for an inert world. We know that the Interpretant (the meaning) needs an Interpreter (the meaning generator). So introducing Interpretants in your paper also brings to introduce Interpreters in an inert world. Your sentence “In Peircean terms, this amounts to asking what sort of molecular system is competent to produce the Interpretants” is equivalent to: “what sort of molecular system is competent to generate meanings”. I’m not sure that meaning generation by a molecular system in a purely material and inert world can be clearly understood by today science or philosophy. And I do not remember Peirce theory of sign being about inert matter. Could you tel us more about your position on these subject?
Thanks again for your time
Christophe
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