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

C. The Information Computation Turn

Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity. New York: Penguin, 2012. Some 15 years after The Fabric of Reality, in the midst of his Constructor theory work, the Oxford University polymath physicist offers a unique, engaging meditation upon our awesome reality, aided by chapter summaries. To wit, the objective physical world does contain real knowledge which is amenable to human discovery. In regard peoples are “universal constructors” thus meant to learn and continue the project, with a true “anthropocentric” identity. And David does not disappoint with quanta and multiverse pyrotechnics, akin to Max Tegmark.

In this important new book, David Deutsch, an award-winning pioneer in the field of quantum computation, argues that explanations have a fundamental place in the universe. They have unlimited scope and power to cause change, and the quest to improve them is the basic regulating principle not only of science but of all successful human endeavor. This stream of ever improving explanations has infinite reach, according to Deutsch: we are subject only to the laws of physics, and they impose no upper boundary to what we can eventually understand, control, and achieve. In his previous book, The Fabric of Reality, Deutsch describe the four deepest strands of existing knowledge-the theories of evolution, quantum physics, knowledge, and computation-arguing jointly they reveal a unified fabric of reality. In this new book, he applies that worldview to a wide range of issues and unsolved problems, from creativity and free will to the origin and future of the human species. (Publisher)

In this book I argue that all progress, both theoretical and practical has resulted from a single human activity: the quest is uniquely human, its effectiveness is also a fundamental fact about reality at the most impersonal, cosmic level – namely that it conforms to universal laws of nature that are indeed good explanations. This simple relationship between the cosmic and the human is a hint of a central role of people in the cosmic scheme of things. (vii)

Deutsch, David and Chiara Marletto. Constructor Theory of Information. arXiv:1405.5563. The Oxford University, Center for Quantum Computation, theorist is joined by an Oxford condensed matter physicist to enter a latest view upon a quantum universe better understood by way of primal, emergent, ever reiterated programs. To gloss, natural meta-laws do indeed exist which as they run serve to sequentially generate (construct) universe and now observant, participator human. The project website constructortheory.org cites an earlier version (search) and popular articles. All of which begs translation.

We present a theory of information expressed solely in terms of which transformations of physical systems are possible and which are impossible - i.e. in constructor-theoretic terms. Although it includes conjectured laws of physics that are directly about information, independently of the details of particular physical instantiations, it does not regard information as an a priori mathematical or logical concept, but as something whose nature and properties are determined by the laws of physics alone. It does not suffer from the circularity at the foundations of existing information theory (namely that information and distinguishability are each defined in terms of the other). It explains the relationship between classical and quantum information, and reveals the single, constructor-theoretic property underlying the most distinctive phenomena associated with the latter, including the lack of in-principle distinguishability of some states, the impossibility of cloning, the existence of pairs of variables that cannot simultaneously have sharp values, the fact that measurement processes can be both deterministic and unpredictable, the irreducible perturbation caused by measurement, and entanglement (locally inaccessible information). (Abstract)

Diaz Nafria, Jose and Rainer Zimmermann. Emergence and Evolution of Meaning: The General Definition of Information (GDI) Revisiting Program. Information. 3/472, 4/240, 2013. Published as Part I: The Progressive Perspective: Top-down, and Part II: The Regressive Perspective: Bottom-up, University of Leon, Spain, and Munich University of Applied Sciences engineers (Google each for more credits and papers) contribute to this mostly European project to advance theoretical understandings of a cumulative, significant knowledge as a prime natural quality. With such a properly explained physical basis, an evolutionary emergence from a cosmic origin to human societies can be defined as a progressive, biosemiotic codification of its meaningful, edifying content. That is, in translation, are we simply trying to say as if a parents to children genetic code?

In this second part of our inquiry into the emergence and evolution of meaning, the category of meaning is explored from the manifestation of reality in its corresponding level of interaction towards the interpretation of such reality (the first part deals correspondingly with an appropriate top-down approach). Based on the physical constraints of manifestation through electromagnetic waves, which constitutes the base of animal vision, we analyze the limits of the meaning-offer of such a manifestation, which allows us, on the one hand, to compare the efficiency of natural evolution in the reception of such meaning-offers; on the other hand, to analyze the conditions of developing agency able to acknowledge the reality underlying its manifestation. (Abstract, Part II)

In this first part of the paper, the category of meaning is traced starting from the origin of the Universe itself as well as its very grounding in pre-geometry (the second part deals with an appropriate bottom-up approach). In contrast to many former approaches in the theories of information and also in biosemiotics, we will show that the forms of meaning emerge simultaneously (alongside) with information and energy. (Abstract, Part I) Upon these new insights in physics, energy and information might be regarded as two aspects of a same underlying primordial structure of the world, which does not imply a reduction of beings to its physicals constituents, but an attempt to give an account of the emergence of irreducible beings throughout the ladder of complexity in a progressive perspective—in chemical structures, in organisms, in cognition, in consciousness, in societies. (Part I, 474)

Dodig Crnkovic, Gordana. Alan Turing’s Legacy: Info-Computational Philosophy of Nature. www.idt.mdh.se/~gdc/work/cie-2012-dodig-8.pdf. As the presentation by the Serbian-Swedish philosopher physicist to the premier “How the World Computes” Turing Centenary Conference, June 2012, at the University of Cambridge. The essay is accessible online at the above speaker’s website. Our certain interest, likewise for Gennaro Auletta, is the allusion that such a “universe as informational structure” gets closer to fulfilling a famously prophesized mathematical book of nature. Such a natural scripture, finally “genetic” in its generative kind, is imperative to right and guide this climatic and climactic century.

Alan Turing’s pioneering work on computability, and his ideas on morphological computing support Andrew Hodges view of Turing as a natural philosopher. Turing’s natural philosophy differs importantly from Galileo’s view that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics (The Assayer, 1623). Computing is more than a language of nature as computation produces real time behaviors. This article presents the framework of Natural Infocomputationalism as a contemporary natural philosophy that builds on the legacy of Turings computationalism. (Abstract)

It presents a framework for the development of a unified approach to nature, with common interpretation of inanimate nature as well as living organisms and their social networks. Computing is information processing that drives all the changes on different levels of organization of information and can be understood as morphological computing on data sets pertinent to informational structures. The use of info-computational conceptualizations, models and tools makes possible for the first time in history the study of complex self-organizing adaptive systems, including basic characteristics and functions of living systems, intelligence, and cognition. (Abstract)

Dodig Crnkovic, Gordana. Physical Computation as Dynamics of Form that Glues Everything Together. Information. Online April 26, 2012. The “Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute” website is www.mdpi.com/journal/information. The Malardalen University, Sweden, philosophical physicist is a leading theorist and articulator of the Information-Computation turn, for which this paper achieves a succinct overview. Along with a parallel effort to reconceive quantum realms, natural reality is no longer a one-dimension materialism, but possesses an implicate depth of “protoinformation networks.” By a further integration of complex systems science, an evolutionary cosmos is seen to compute, iterate and organize itself into nested emergent, cognitive scales. But terminologies do conflate, a section heading is: Gluing it all Together: Information/Computation – Matter/Energy – Structure/process in an Organic Whole. But we seem closer to truth, a living genesis with its own procreative code. For a 2015 update see The Architecture of Mind as a Network of Networks of Natural Computational Processes in the online journal Philosophies (1/111).

The framework is proposed where matter can be seen as related to energy in a way structure relates to process and information relates to computation. In this scheme matter corresponds to a structure, which corresponds to information. Energy corresponds to the ability to carry out a process, which corresponds to computation. The relationship between each two complementary parts of each dichotomous pair (matter/energy, structure/process, information/computation) are analogous to the relationship between being and becoming, where being is the persistence of an existing structure while becoming is the emergence of a new structure through the process of interactions. (Abstract, 204)

Conceptualizing the physical world as an intricate tapestry of protoinformation networks evolving through processes of natural computation helps to make more coherent models of nature, connecting non-living and living worlds. It presents a suitable basis for incorporating current developments in understanding of biological/cognitive/social systems as generated by complexification of physicochemical processes through self-organization of molecules into dynamic adaptive complex systems by morphogenesis, adaptation and learning. (Abstract, 204)

However, we know from the accumulated common experience of humanity that the world exists and is remarkably stable on human time scales. That is why we are able to reproduce physical experiments under given conditions. The stability of the world governed by “natural laws” is the basis for every epistemology and indeed a precondition for life as well. What we call “matter” appears to be a recursive structure of the Russian dolls down to elementary particles. (206)

Dodig Crnkovic, Gordana and Raffaela Giovagnoli. Computing Nature – A Network of Networks of Concurrent Information Processes. arXiv:1210.7784. Online October 2012, Marardalen University, Sweden and Pontifical Lateran University, Rome philosophers introduce a volume of papers from the August 2012 Alan Turing event “Symposium on Natural/Unconventional Computing,” held at the University of Birmingham. Select papers from this meeting, such as Philip Goyal, and Hector Zenil, et al, (search) are being published in the web journal Entropy in a collection with this title. These extended quotes again convey the welling movement.

This book is about nature considered as the totality of physical existence, the universe. By physical we mean all phenomena - objects and processes - that are possible to detect either directly by our senses or via instruments. Historically, there have been many ways of describing the universe (cosmic egg, cosmic tree, theistic universe, mechanistic universe) while a particularly prominent contemporary approach is computational universe. (1)

Within pancomputationalist framework, the whole universe computes its own next state from its current state. What causes different processes in the universe is the interaction between its parts or exchange of information. The universe is a result of evolution from the moment of big bang or some other primordial state, through the complexification of the relationships between its actors by computation as a process of changes of its informational structure. (2) Conceptualizing the physical world as a network of information networks evolving through processes of natural computation helps us to make more compact and coherent models of nature, connecting non-living and living worlds. It presents a suitable basis for incorporating current developments in understanding of biological, cognitive and social systems as generated by complexification of physicochemical processes through self-organization of molecules into dynamic adaptive complex systems by morphogenesis, adaptation and learning—all of which are understood as computation (information processing). (3)

It is evident that natural computing/ computing nature presents a new natural philosophy of generality and scope that largely exceed natural philosophy of Newton’s era, presented in his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Natural computation brings us to the verge of a true paradigm shift in modeling, simulation and control of the physical world, and it remains to see how it will change our understanding of nature and especially living nature and humans, societies and ecologies. (19)

Dodig-Crnkovic, Gordana. Biological Information as Natural Computation. Vallverdu, Jordi, ed. Thinking Machines and the Philosophy of Computer Science. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, 2010. The Malardalen University, Sweden, scholar with double doctorates in physics and philosophy well articulates this frontier melding of somatic life and semantic literacy, since living systems are said to be most defined by their prescriptive and communicative essence. But this intense paper, and the whole volume, seems to beg translation from its many abstractions. Could a simple shift from mechanism to organism be able to admit and realize nature’s parent to child genetic code? Please visit the author’s website for more writings, and her letter invitation as guest editor of a special issue on “Information and Energy/Matter” for the online journal Information.

The dynamics of natural systems, and particularly organic systems, specialized in selforganization and complexity management, presents a vast source of ideas for new approaches to computing, such as natural computing and its special case organic computing. Based on paninformationalism (understanding of all physical structures as informational) and pancomputationalism or natural computationalism (understanding of the dynamics of physical structures as computation) a new approach of info-computational naturalism emerges as a result of their synthesis. This includes naturalistic view of mind and hence naturalized epistemology based on evolution from inanimate to biological systems through the increase in complexity of informational structures by natural computation. (Abstract, 36)

Combining informational structures as the fabric of the universe and natural computation as its dynamics leads to the idea of info-computationalism (info-computationalist naturalism), the framework which builds on two fundamental concepts: information as a structure and computation as its dynamics. (37) Processes like selfassembly, developmental processes, gene regulation networks, protein-protein interaction networks, biological transport networks, and gene assembly in unicellular organisms are at present studied as information processing. Understanding of biological organisms as information processing systems is a part of understanding of the universe as a whole as an information processing computational structure. (40)

Dodig-Crnkovic, Gordana. IS4SI 2017 Summit DIGITALISATION FOR A SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY.. Proceedings. 1/3, 2017. In this new MDPI online journal, a posting from an International Society for Information Studies conference held Gothenburg, Sweden in June at Chalmers University of Technology. Its subtitle is Embodied, Embedded, Networked, Empowered through Information, Computation & Cognition. The event occurred amongst interlinked conceptual societies and meetings which have arisen across Europe for this information/computation turn, some links are in this issue. A core group seems to circulate such as Wolfgang Hofkirchner, Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic (search 2017), Mark Burgin, Pedro Marijuan, Joseph Brenner, Kun Wu, Martin Schroeder, Luciano Floridi, Annette Grathoff, and others. This subject meeting was attended by presenters from China with a similar interest. Within topical sessions are such entries as Information and Intelligence in the Living Cell, Evolutionary Systems: A Manifesto, Morphological Computing and Cognitive Agency, Physical Information Systems, The Floating Island Project: Self-Organizing Complexity, Water Origin Theory and Existence Question, The Universe is an Information Ecosystem, Transhumanism, Information as a Morpho-Ontological Process, Spiritual Life Awakening, Narrative Realities and Optimal Entropy, and some 150 more imaginaries.

Meaning is embedded within, and defined by, stories: narratives and rhetoric. This workshop will explore the use of the language of information in the stories of the digitalised society in order to enhance understanding, both of society and of information. ‘Smart cities’, ‘big data’ and ‘the internet of things’ constitute perhaps the most obvious examples of such stories, offering somewhat utopian views of a society enhanced through their application. The articulation of such views engages with the phenomenon of information and a shared, tacit understanding of its nature in order to generate meaning, rhetoric and the narratives themselves; reflexively, there is a need to also consider the role of rhetoric and narrative in the shift to a digitalised or informational conception of society. (Overall Theme)

Dodig-Crnkovic, Gordana. Morphological Computing as Logic Underlying Cognition in Human, Animal, and Intelligent Machines. arXiv:2309.13979. The veteran Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden information/computation polyscholar provides a timely synopsis of her integrative thought and collegial conferences over the past decade. In so doing she has achieved an integral survey of these 21st century endeavors as they seek to identify, express and quantify nature’s apparent program-like source and its language-like articulation. In regard, typical sections are Info-Computational Nature, Evolution as a Driver of Cognition in Living Organisms; Computing Cells: Self-generating Systems; Cognition in Nature and Artifacts as Computation of Information and Connecting Morphological Computing and Cognition in Nature to Logic. See also her current paper Computational Natural Philosophy: A Thread from Presocratics through Turing to ChatGPT at arXiv:2309.13094. Altogether Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic contributes a unique, woman wise, visionary perception going forward.

This work reviews the interconnections between logic, epistemology, and natural sciences that connect mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and cognition. Altogether they imply a scale-invariant, self-organizing dynamics across organizational tiers of nature. Our exemplary human language was evolved by living organisms from its basal cognition of unicellular organisms. The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis is essential for understanding the human-level relationship between logic and information processing/computational epistemology. We conclude that more research is needed to elucidate the details of the mechanisms linking natural phenomena with the logic of agency in nature. (Excerpt)

The basic tenets of my conception include: • All existing nature (universe) is a network of networks of computational processes on informational structures. • Nature is described as structure (information) with dynamics (computation) • Self-organizing nature – active matter drives spontaneous processes of complexification in a universe far from thermic equilibrium. • Cognition is seen as a result of computation of information (morphogenesis) • The “mind” as a result of cognition is extended in nature – embodied, embedded, and enactive. • Info-computational formulation of The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis EES explains the generation of novel biological forms and behaviors and the emergence of increasingly complex cognitive agents (minds). The theory of evolution followed from Darwinism to Neo-Darwinism, to the Modern Synthesis, and currently to its EES info-computational form as a process of learning under variable environmental constraints. (15-16)

Dodig-Crnkovic, Gordana. Nature as a Network of Morphological Infocomputational Processes for Cognitive Agents. European Physical Journal Special Topics. 226/181, 2017. In an Information from Physics to Social Science issue, the Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, natural philosopher (search) continues her wise articulation of a universe to human trajectory defined by these title qualities. In addition to matter and energy, vital physical/quantum information structures need be included. The cosmic to culture episodic scale then self-organizes by way of agental entities in relational community as it gains cognizant knowledge. A computational basis alludes to an emergent self-configuration, optimization, and healing with its own “context-awareness.” Albeit in abstract terms, a translation to a phenomenal organic, cerebral development with an intrinsic, genetic-like program seems apparent.

This paper presents a view of nature as a network of infocomputational agents organized in a dynamical hierarchy of levels. It provides a framework for unification of currently disparate understandings of natural, formal, technical, behavioral and social phenomena based on information as a structure, differences in one system that cause the differences in another system, and computation as its dynamics, i.e. physical process of morphological change in the informational structure. (Abstract) Recasting physical, chemical, biological and cognitive processes into the common framework of morphological computation provides a unified approach to the evolution of matter and life in infocomputational networks of agents communicating with given “languages” corresponding to their level of organisation – from elementary particles, atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, societies and ecologies. (4)

If computation is understood as a physical process, if Nature computes with physical bodies as objects while physical laws are governing the process of computation then the computation necessarily appears on many different levels of organization in nature. Natural sciences provide such a layered view of Nature. One sort of computation processes will be found on the quantum-mechanical levels of elementary particles, atoms and molecules; yet another on the level of classical physics. On the organizational level of biology, different processes (computation, information processing) are going on in biological cells, tissues, organs, organisms, and ecosystems. Social interactions are governed by still another kind of communicative/interactive processes. In short, computation on a given level of organization is implementation of the laws that govern the interactions between different constituent parts. (10-11)

Dodig-Crnkovic, Gordana and Mark Burgin, eds. Information and Computation: Essays on Scientific and Philosophical Understanding of Foundations of Information and Computation. Singapore: World Scientific, 2010. A substantial volume to date that braces this welling turn to and realization of a natural primacy of these properties and their conveyance. Leading players such as Soren Brier, Greg Chaitin, John Collier, Barry Cooper, Marvin Minsky, Aaron Sloman, and Hector Zenil discuss shifting from physical mechanism sans any motive agency to a textual cosmos which, in so many words, emerges into structural reality by virtue of algorithms, so as to compute itself into complex sentient beings. Chapters by the lead editor, and by Wolfgang Hofkirchner on self-organization, are noted elsewhere. In a phrase: “Information is related to knowledge and data as energy is related to matter.”

Dodig-Crnkovic, Gordana and Raffaela Giovagnoli, eds. Representation and Reality in Humans, Other Living Organisms and Intelligent Machines. International: Springer Praxis, 2017. The Malardalen University, Sweden, and UC Berkeley philosopher editors gather papers from meetings and writings which try to engage and grasp this significant information/computation turn. For a chapter survey, try Abstraction and Representation in Living Organisms (search D. Horsman), The Information-Theoretic and Algorithmic Approach to Human, Animal, and Artificial Cognition, Being Aware of Rational Animals, The Quantum Field Theory Dual Paradigm in Fundamental Physics, and Reality Construction in Cognitive Agents through Processes of Info-computation (GD-C). See also the editors own chapter, and one by Dominic Horsman herein.

This book enriches our views on representation and deepens our understanding of its different aspects. It arises out of several years of dialog between the editors and the authors, an interdisciplinary team of highly experienced researchers, and it reflects the best contemporary view of representation and reality in humans, other living beings, and intelligent machines. Structured into parts on the cognitive, computational, natural sciences, philosophical, logical, and machine perspectives, a theme of the field and the book is building and presenting networks, and the editors hope that the contributed chapters will spur understanding and collaboration between researchers in domains such as computer science, philosophy, logic, systems theory, engineering, psychology, sociology, anthropology, neuroscience, linguistics, and synthetic biology. (Springer)

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