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A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
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III. Ecosmos: A Revolutionary Fertile, Habitable, Solar-Bioplanet, Incubator Lifescape

C. The Information Computation Turn

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)

Dodig-Crnkovic, Gordana and Vincent Muller. A Dialogue Concerning Two World Systems: Info-Computational vs. Mechanistic. Dodig-Crnkovic, Gordana and Mark Burgin, eds. Information and Computation. Singapore: World Scientific, 2010. In this volume noted above, Malardalen University, Sweden, and Anatolia College, Greece, philosophers contrast an older Ptolemaic paradigm based on physical objects alone to a 21st century Copernican view whereof an informational source serves to “compute” its complex animation. Nature is thus akin to a computer whose “software programs,” as they run, generate emergent “hardware-like” phenomena. As one peruses this exercise, and the whole book, might we actually be trying to express a genesis universe with its own, iterative, parent to child genetic code, if only this metaphorical shift and translation could be made?

What we begin to see at present is a fundamentally new paradigm of not only sciences but even a more general paradigm of the universe, comparable in its radically novel approach with its historical predecessors the Mytho-poetical Universe and the Mechanistic Universe. We identify this new paradigm as Info-Computational Universe.

Living organisms are complex, goal-oriented autonomous information-processing systems with ability of self‐organization, self-reproduction (based on genetic information) and adaptation.

Dyson, George. Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. New York: Pantheon Books, 2012. The science historian tells a well-researched, engaging story about the post World War II project at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, led by John von Neumann, to fulfill Alan Turing’s (1912-1954) imagination of a vast computational machine. With a cadre of leading scientists such as Robert Oppenheimer and Norbert Weiner, the endeavor became a race between nuclear weapons and knowledge gained from such a device to control them. (In a June Book TV interview the author mused that this has largely been achieved, but a greater danger may be a computer take over of civilization.)

A deeper origin and import is conveyed. Dyson rightly extends this mission back to Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) whose similar concept was to discern nature’s alphabetic secret by way of monads or “little minds,” a binary coding akin to Chinese hexagrams, which could program a universal calculator to reveal a palliative wisdom of worldly creation. A significant offshoot is recorded via a 1953 IAS member, biologist Nils Barricelli’s attempt to perceive life this way and to write an artificial genetic code. In regard, his effort sought a digital and analog way to create “symbio-organisms.” A March 26, 2012 posting on the Edge.org site by George Dyson, “A Universe of Self-Replicating Code,” comments on such a “digital biology” which is inferred to have a “cosmological” cast.

There are two kinds of creation myths: those where life arises out of the mud, and those where life falls from the sky. In this creation myth, computers arose from the mud, and code fell from the sky. (ix) Only the collective intelligence of computers could save us from the destructive powers of the (nuclear) weapons they had allowed us to invent. Turing’s model of universal computation was one-dimensional: a string of symbols encoded on a tape. Von Neumann’s implementation of Turing’s model was two dimensional: the address matrix underlying all computers in use today. The landscape is now three-dimensional, yet the entire Internet can still be viewed as a common tape shared by a multiple of Turing’s Universal Machines. (x)

Order codes constituted a fundamental replicative alphabet that diversified in association with the proliferation of different metabolic hosts. In time, successful and error free sequences of order codes formed into subroutines – the elementary units common to all programs, just as a fundamental alphabet of nucleotides is composed into strings of DNA, then interpreted as amino acids and assembled into proteins, and finally, many, many levels later, cells. (re Barricelli, 238)

Ebeling, Werner. Physical Basis of Information and the Relation to Entropy. European Physical Journal Special Topics. 226/161, 2017. In an Information from Physics to Social Science issue, the Humboldt University theorist (search) advances this revolutionary view that something more and deeper than “condensed matter physics,” his original field, is going on and distinguishes a dynamic creative cosmos. Five major aspects of Rolf Landauer’s information is physical, Manfred Eigen’s information processing is biological in nature, Konrad Zuse’s cosmic cellular automaton, J. A. Wheeler’s it-from-bit evolution, and new quantum phenomena are joined. A common theme is a perception of an active “underlying primordial structure” beyond material objects, which then engenders life’s emergent self-organization.

view differing between bound and free information. The quantitative physical aspects of information flow are given by flows of entropy, which are closely related to the reduction of uncertainty and the predictability of events. Free information is considered as a quantity, which has intrinsic non – physical components, and is originally created by selforganization and evolution. Bound and free information are both represented by a matter carrier but not as tight – bounded like mass or energy. Free information is connected with information – processing; it is introduced as a binary relation between a sender and a receiver, which may have different carriers, it is essentially characterized by symbolic representations. Processing free information is originally created by selforganization on the early earth and is connected with the origin of life, therefore it is always at least indirectly related to living systems. (Abstract)

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