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III. Ecosmos: A Revolutionary Fertile, Habitable, Solar-Bioplanet, Incubator Lifescape

C. The Information Computation Turn

Merrell, Floyd. Resemblance: From a Complementary Point of View? Sign Systems Studies. 38/1-4, 2010. In a issue about the title term, this paper can accompany Merrell’s 2010 book Entangling Forms, reviewed next, with its focus on this fluidly creative reciprocity of an emergent natural genesis. In earlier centuries, known as exemplarity, sympathy, emblematic, correlative, this perennial secret reveals a gender-based reflection between every entity, community, and strata. Merrell’s essay is then a postmodern paean to this yin-yang-ness in its constant, organically spiraling florescence toward self-individuation. And for our website, in the translation this begs, might one suggest that we are at last simply reading the presence and activity of nature’s parents to children genetic code?

However, as this essay unfolds, we shall note that everything is ‘multivalently’ and ‘nonlinearly’ interdependently interrelated to, and interactive with, everything else, which is to say that nothing is absolutely incommensurable or incompatible with anything else, but rather, complementarity is the watchword. (94)

Miguel-Tome, Sergio. The Influence of Computational Traits on the Natural Selection of the Nervous System. Natural Computing. Online March, 2018. A University of Salamanca, Spain neurotheorist argues that in retrospect life’s evolution has arrived at robust computational neural networks because they empowered a critical brain function of better predictability across animal kingdoms.

Mitchell, Melanie. Biological Computation. The Computer Journal. 55/7, 2012. In a special issue in honor of the Alan Turing Centenary, a Portland State University systems mathematician and author (Complexity: A Guided Tour) elucidates how this Turing turn is aiding a better appreciation of how living nature is distinguished and sustained by such an incarnate informational essence. See also in this edition “Natural Computation” by Erol Gelenbe and “Computation and Fundamental Physics” by David Bacon.

In this note we argue that biological computation is a process that occurs in nature, not merely in computer simulations of nature. (Abstract) In this article, the term biological computation refers to the proposal that living organisms themselves perform computations, and, more specifically, that the abstract ideas of information and computation may be key to understanding biology in a more unified manner. While there is some overlap among these different meldings of biology and computer science, it is only the study of biological computation that asks, specifically, if, how, and why living systems can be viewed as fundamentally computational in nature. (852)

This widespread interest in biological computation reflects a strong intuition that the notions of information and information processing are building blocks that will shed new light on how living systems operate and the common principles underlying their operation. Biology has long suffered from being a science of specific details rather than abstractions and general laws. The theory of evolution serves as one grand organizing principle, but biology still lacks a general theory of how adaptive functionality emerges from large collections of individual, decentralized components. (852)

How, for example, do insect colonies, composed of thousands to millions of individual insects, collectively make decisions and accomplish complex tasks that seem to require the communication and processing of colony‐wide information? How does the immune system, composed of trillions of cells and molecular components circulating in the body, collectively recognize patterns of infection and other organism-wide conditions, and collectively decide how to mount an appropriate response? How do the hundreds of billions of neurons in the brain work together to continually make sense of and respond to the opportunities and threats of the environment in real‐time? These questions cry out for a unified theory involving information, communication, and computation. (852)

Mora, Thierry, et al. JSP Special Issue on Information Processing in Living Systems. Journal of Statistical Physics. 162/5, 2017. French (Mora and Olivier Rivoire) and American (Luca Peliti) theorists introduce a survey of life’s communicative source as it lately becomes amenable with and rooted in physical phenomena. Some papers are Landauer in the Age of Synthetic Biology, Informations in Models of Evolutionary Dynamics, and Biological Implications of Dynamical Phases in Non-Equilibrium Networks.

Living systems are information-processing systems: they need to copy internal information, e.g., contained in their DNA, for producing their proteins—and regulating their production—or for reproducing. They also need to monitor their environment and their internal state, and to control their activity based on the collected informations. Trying to understand how living systems manage these tasks defines an area of questions at the cross-roads between statistical physics, information theory and biology. The contributions contained in the present Special Issue cover a wide-range of topics from information-dissipation trade-offs to statistical inference and issues of biological noise, hope to shed some light on these questions. (First paragraph)

Moyer, Michael. Is Space Digital? Scientific American. February, 2012. A senior editor describes this persuasion of Craig Hogan, director of the Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center, that the deepest foundations of physical nature are discrete, grainy, and bitlike in kind. He plans to test this theory by a 21st century version of Michelson-Morley’s 1880’s interferometer, quite a low-cost option to the Large Hadron Collider, to detect and measure such intrinsic properties. It is then implied, as often alluded, that “the universe works like a computer,” whence this natural information operates as software. A technical Fermilab paper “Interferometers as Probes of Planckian Quantum Geometry” by Hogan can be accessed at arXiv:1002.4880. And once again, by a simple shift from machine to organism, might we be able to imagine the presence of an actual genotype and phenotype of a genesis cosmos?

He (Hogan) begins by explaining how the two most successful theories of the 20th century quantum mechanics and general relativity—cannot possibly be reconciled. At the smallest scales, both break down into gibberish. Yet this same scale seems to be special for another reason: it happens to be intimately connected to the science of information – the 0’s and 1’s of the universe. Physicists have, over the past couple of decades, uncovered profound insights into how the universe stores information – even going so far as to suggest that information, not matter and energy, constitutes the most basic unit of existence. Information rides on tiny bits; from these bits comes the cosmos. (32)

Yet the Planck length is much more than the space where quantum mechanics and relativity fall apart. In the past few decades an argument over the nature of black holes revealed a wholly new understanding of the Planck scale. Our best theories may break down there, but in their place something else emerges. The essence of the universe is information, (added) so this line of thinking goes, and the fundamental bits of information that give rise to the universe live on the Planck scale. (34-35)

Nicolis, Gregoire and Vasileios Basios, eds. Chaos, Information Processing and Paradoxical Games. Singapore: World Scientific, 2015. A collection in remembrance of the John Nicolis, a University of Patras professor and pioneer complex systems theorist. Chapters include Fractal Parameter Space of Lorenz-like Attractors (Tingli Xing, et al), Historical Contingency in Controlled Evolution (Peter Schuster), and Long Range Order and Fractality in the Structure and Organization of Eukaryotic Genomes (Dimitris Polychronopoulos, et al).

Nunez, Paul. Brain, Mind, and the Structure of Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Reviewed more in Current Vistas, a good case for our imminent, imperative revolution to a cognizant and informed genesis cosmos.

Oller, John. The Antithesis of Entropy: Biosemiotic Communication from Genetics to Human Language with Special Emphasis on the Immune Systems. Entropy. 12/4, 2010. In a journal that actually serves as a venue for progressive vistas, the University of Louisiana medical linguist expounds at length on waxing perceptions of an innate, informational organization that which works to wind the universe up, as opposed to an inevitable wearing out.

Overman, Dean. A Case for the Existence of God. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. I realize this is not “science,” the author is a scholarly lawyer, but it does provide a heuristic exercise. After dipping into quantum physics, a proposal is made that information indeed ought to be seen as foundational as a way to counter a materialist atheism.

The standard interpretation of the quantum world is based in information as the irreducible seed of the universe and all physical existence; such an interpretation is inconsistent with a strict reductionist materialism. (85)

Padmanabhan, Thanu and Hamsa Padmanabhan. Cosmic Information, the Cosmological Constant and the Amplitude of Primordial Perturbations. arXiv:1703.06144. A father-daughter team of a Pune University, India, theoretical physicist, and an ETH Zurich post-doctoral cosmologist contribute to realizations of an informational quality as the fundamental, distinctive essence and arbiter of physical evolutionary spacetimematter.

A unique feature of gravity is its ability to control the information accessible to any specific observer. We quantify the notion of cosmic information ('CosmIn') for an eternal observer in the universe. Demanding the finiteness of CosmIn requires the universe to have a late-time accelerated expansion. Combining the introduction of CosmIn with generic features of the quantum structure of spacetime (e.g., the holographic principle), we present a holistic model for cosmology. We show that (i) the numerical value of the cosmological constant, as well as (ii) the amplitude of the primordial, scale invariant, perturbation spectrum can be determined in terms of a single free parameter, which specifies the energy scale at which the universe makes a transition from a pre-geometric phase to the classical phase. For a specific value of the parameter, we obtain the correct results for both (i) and (ii). This formalism also shows that the quantum gravitational information content of spacetime can be tested using precision cosmology. (Abstract)

Guided Self-Organisation. www.prokopenko.net/IDSO. These quotes, c. 2010, are from the author’s web postings, a Principal Research Scientist for Information and Communication Technologies at CSIRO, Sydney, Australia. They pose another instance of budding efforts to articulate and understand what is going on, whereof it seems such an informational feature is a crucial clue.

Information-Driven Self-Organisation (IDSO) is a specific instance of GSO, where the guidance places constraints on information dynamics. Many evolutionary and self-organisation pressures can be characterised information-theoretically not only because it's an approximation useful in designing biologically-inspired systems, but also because numerous optimal structures evolve/self-organise in nature when information transfer within certain channels is maximised - i.e., evolution operates at a certain error threshold.

The strong IDSO view maintains that if such "lingua franca" is possible then it is likely that the evolution/self-organisation (and eventually human designers) discover it, and put to use. According to this view, maximization of information transfer through certain channels is one of the main evolutionary pressures.

Roederer, Juan. Information and its Role in Nature. Berlin: Springer, 2005. A volume in the Springer Frontiers Collection which considers the many aspects of a programmatic self-organization of life and complexity. The quote is from its web page. And how might we appreciate such a quality as genetic in kind? For a 2016 update by the University of Alaska geophysicist see Pragmatic Information in Biology and Physics in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (374/2063, 2016).

Information and Its Role in Nature presents an in-depth interdisciplinary discussion of the concept of information and its role in the control of natural processes. After a brief review of classical and quantum information theory, the author addresses numerous central questions, including: Is information reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry? Does the Universe, in its evolution, constantly generate new information? Or are information and information-processing exclusive attributes of living systems, related to the very definition of life? If so, what is the role of information in classical and quantum physics? In what ways does information-processing in the human brain bring about self-consciousness?

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