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III. Ecosmos: A Revolutionary Fertile, Habitable, Solar-Bioplanet LifescapeC. The Information Computation Turn Sebeok, Thomas. Global Semiotics. Rauch, I. and G. Carr, eds. Semiotics Around the World. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997. The leading thinker in the field finds life to be most distinguished by a ‘semiosis’ manifest in its various genetic, immune, metabolic and neural codes. If the universe is perused with signs, is there a cosmic ‘semiophysics’ concerned with a broader quest for significant forms, a general theory of intelligibility transcending life? (118) Seife, Charles. Decoding the Universe. New York: Viking, 2006. A science writer plumbs quantum and relativity theory to argue that information and its processing is really what material and celestial nature is about. However these deliberations are stuck within the old mechanical, physicalist, reductive paradigm. The opening line is: Civilization is doomed. Life and human beings are seen as computer-like in an arbitrary, expiring, multiverse bubble. Such negative conclusions, along with those of Leonard Susskind in The Cosmic Landscape, can seem to border upon reckless for they convey our existence as quite devoid of meaning or hope. Incidentally Seife’s index lists 97 men and 2 women, while Susskind’s cites 145 men and 2 women. An entirely different vista awaits via a bicameral humankind looking toward whom a genesis universe might become. Semetsky, Inna. Information and Signs: The Language of Images. Entropy. 12/3, 2010. A University of Newcastle philosopher and wise woman (see personal website for interests and writings) endorses the general movement to a computational, semiotic cosmos, while advising that its digital emphasis needs to be balanced and leavened by analog visions. In such regard, the archetypal Tarot seen much as a self-organizing system can offer a luminous exemplar. Sharov, Alexei. Functional Information: Towards Synthesis of Biosemiotics and Cybernetics. Entropy. 12/5, 2010. By function is meant interrelations. A National Institute of Health NIH geneticist joins these two discursive modes, along with autopoiesis theory, to dialogue with an inherently communicative reality. Which altogether with other neighbor postings struggles to name and explain what is seems in fact a cosmic to child genetic complementarity. Biosemiotics and cybernetics are closely related, yet they are separated by the boundary between life and non-life: biosemiotics is focused on living organisms, whereas cybernetics is applied mostly to non-living artificial devices. However, both classes of systems are agents that perform functions necessary for reaching their goals. I propose to shift the focus of biosemiotics from living organisms to agents in general, which all belong to a pragmasphere or functional universe. (1050) Sowinski, Damian and Marcelo Gleiser. Information Dynamics at a Phase Transition. arXiv:1606.09641. In this of cosmic and scientific convergences, Dartmouth College physicists propose to join nature’s informational propensity with statistical physics and nonlinear complexity phenomena. We propose a new way of investigating phase transitions in the context of information theory. We use an information-entropic measure of spatial complexity known as configurational entropy (CE) to quantify both the storage and exchange of information in a lattice simulation of a Ginzburg-Landau model with a scalar order parameter coupled to a heat bath. The CE is built from the Fourier spectrum of fluctuations around the mean-field and reaches a minimum at criticality. In particular, we investigate the behavior of CE near and at criticality, exploring the relation between information and the emergence of ordered domains. We show that as the temperature is increased from below, the CE displays three essential scaling regimes at different spatial scales: scale free, turbulent, and critical. Together, they offer an information-entropic characterization of critical behavior where the storage and processing of information is maximized at criticality. (Abstract)
Stonier, Tom.
Information and Meaning.
New York, Springer,
1997.
A contribution on the fundamental, evolutionary role of content and communication in an emergent cosmos reaching florescence in a global biointelligence. Taborsky, Edwina, ed. Semiosis, Evolution, Energy. Aachen: Shaker, 1999. Conference papers explore an informational quality lately seen to distinguish a “post-darwinian” emergent evolution founded on self-organized relations. For example, Roberta Kevelson traces this process “from matter to meaning.” To Jesper Hoffmeyer, “our universe has a built-in tendency…to produce organized systems possessing increasingly more semiotic freedom…relative to its material basis.” (110) And Stan Salthe finds that as entropy increases, the universe is not losing coherence but gaining an informational capacity through relational networks. Terzis, George and Robert Arp, eds. Information and Living Systems: Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. While the editors are American philosophers, the papers in The Definition of Life; Information and Biological Organization; and Information and the Biology of Cognition, Value, and Language; sections draw upon an Iberian-Danish nexus in exploration of life’s “biosemiotic” essence. Characteristic chapters could be “The Biosemiotic Approach in Biology” by Joao Queiroz, Claus Emmeche, Kalevi Kull, and Charbel El-Hani, and Alvaro Moreno and Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo’s “The Informational Nature of Biological Causality.” The collection stands as one more attempt to engage the range and ramifications of this evident functional activity of creative conversation. But tacitly within a moribund physical cosmos, sans any sense of a larger context, the essays tend to abstract verbiage, are in need of common translation, unable to imagine a greater genetic genesis being deciphered and discovered. Information shapes biological organization in fundamental ways and at every organizational level. Because organisms use information—including DNA codes, gene expression, and chemical signaling—to construct, maintain, repair, and replicate themselves, it would seem only natural to use information-related ideas in our attempts to understand the general nature of living systems, the causality by which they operate, the difference between living and inanimate matter, and the emergence, in some biological species, of cognition, emotion, and language. And yet philosophers and scientists have been slow to do so. This volume fills that gap. Information and Living Systems offers a collection of original chapters in which scientists and philosophers discuss the informational nature of biological organization at levels ranging from the genetic to the cognitive and linguistic. (Publisher) Tkacik, Gasper and William Bialek. Information Processing in Living Systems. arXiv:1412.8752. Institute of Science and Technology Austria, and Princeton University physicists opine that in some deep way the universe is engaged in the optimization of information content. In this view, could one say this endeavor has reached its crucial stage of its conscious recognition by the human/Earth phenomenon. Life depends as much on the flow of information as on the flow of energy. Here we review the many efforts to make this intuition precise. Starting with the building blocks of information theory, we explore examples where it has been possible to measure, directly, the flow of information in biological networks, or more generally where information theoretic ideas have been used to guide the analysis of experiments. Systems of interest range from single molecules (the sequence diversity in families of proteins) to groups of organisms (the distribution of velocities in flocks of birds), and all scales in between. Many of these analyses are motivated by the idea that biological systems may have evolved to optimize the gathering and representation of information, and we review the experimental evidence for this optimization, again across a wide range of scales. (Abstract) Vallverdu, Jordi, ed. Thinking Machines and the Philosophy of Computer Science. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, 2010. A large volume of proceedings from the Seventh European Conference on Computing and Philosophy held in Barcelona, July 2009. Five sections span Philosophy of Information, Philosophy of Computer Science, Computer and Information Ethics, Simulating Reality?, and Intersections, wherein substantive papers attempt to accommodate and assimilate the 21st century turn to a generative natural realm of software-like “information.” Along with Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic noted above, Walter Riofrio’s “On Biological Computing, Information and Molecular Networks,” “Computing, Philosophy and Reality” by Joseph Brenner, and Klaus Mainzer’s “Challenges of Complex Systems in Cognitive and Complex Systems,” among others, are of much interest.
Varn, Dowman and Jim Crutchfield.
What did Erwin Mean? The Physics of Information from the Materials Genomics of Aperiodic Crystals & Water to Molecular Information Catalysts & Life.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
Forthcoming, October,
2015.
The paper by UC Davis, Complexity Sciences Center, physicists is online at arXiv:1510.02778. It is also a summary of Jim Crutchfield’s thirty year complex systems endeavor which began at the Santa Fe Institute. At the outset, the contribution ought to be joined with other domains from quantum to social to cosmic as they each and all become reconceived as dynamic, self-organizing networks. Now even their ground phase of “inorganic” passive matter can be seen to possess these same qualities. An historic path is traced from Erwin Schrodinger’s (1887-1961) 1940’s book What is Life?, which posited that organisms and physical nature are both necessarily suffused by an informative materiality, to this mid 2010s collaborative confirmation. Walker, Sara Imari. Top-Down Causation and the Rise of Information in the Emergence of Life. Information. 5/3, 2014. The Arizona State University and ASU Beyond Center physicist and astrobiologist, with colleagues Paul Davies, George Ellis, and others, explains the presence and role of algorithmic processes that serve to originate and drive a complexifying evolution. The approach does remain within the default model of software programs and hardware manifestations. But by this view, living systems can be joined with, and seen as an inherent result of, a fundamentally spontaneous materiality. Through her discussions with Oxford University mathematician Chiara Marletto, this vivifying scenario is seen akin to David Deutsch’s “constructor” version. In any event, a natural, cosmic reality is engaged and articulated that is composed as a doubleness of a mathematical source, and the overt organic entities along with our decipherment which it generates. See also the author's 2015 paper The Descent of Math at arXiv:1505.00312. Biological systems represent a unique class of physical systems in how they process and manage information. This suggests that changes in the flow and distribution of information played a prominent role in the origin of life. Here I review and expand on an emerging conceptual framework suggesting that the origin of life may be identified as a transition in causal structure and information flow, and detail some of the implications for understanding the early stages chemical evolution. (Abstract)
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