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

C. The Information Computation Turn

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)

Ensslin, Torsten, et al. The Physics of Information. Annalen der Physik. 531/3, 2019. An MPI Astrophysics theorist introduces a special Physics of Information issue in this European journal in print since 1799. Some 320 years later this distinctive quality, not evident until our 21st century, has become a primary feature of what can be known as physical reality. In regard, the lead paper is Information and the Reconstruction of Quantum Physics by Gregg Jaeger (herein), see also Information Theory for Fields by T. Ensslin, and Entropic Dynamics: Quantum Mechanics from Entropy and Information Geometry by Ariel Caticha.

Information is virtual. It can be carried by speech, an image, scratches on a stone, patterns in a photon field, the connections of neurons in our brains or even by the wavefunction of an electron. Information does not depend on the actual means of transmission. Information is physical. It needs to be sustained by a physical substrate which requires energy or work. Without a physical world, information can not be stored, processed, or transmitted. Actually information about the physical laws governing our Universe can be found everywhere and in everything. Could it then be that the real fundamental elements of this world are tiny bits of information? (1)

Farnsworth, Keith, et al. Living is Information Processing; from Molecules to Global Systems. arXiv:1210.5908. As the information-computation turn rises, this October 2012 posting by mathematical biologists Farnsworth and John Nelson, Queen’s University Belfast, and Carlos Gershenon, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, describes a temporally stratified cosmos suffused with algorithmic programs from physical to ecological scales. In this software/hardware, 21st century scenario, nested, autopoetic organisms are seen to iteratively compute and evolve themselves. Informative patterns arise “spontaneously” as they are “instantiated” in animate, somatic form. A “major evolutionary transitions” sequence is then laid out across biomolecules, proto-cells, prokaryotic cells, microbial colonies, eukaryotes, multicellular organisms, and ecological networks.

The paper merits extensive excerpts to convey its reach and import. To avail a natural philosophy, in contrast to an arid string multiverse nothingness, along with other contributions herein, a second, immaterial generative source is added once again in a novel way. But sprinkled metaphors of gene regulatory machinery, cybernetics, biosphere as a network computer, persist. We’re getting closer, but not yet able to imagine an innately organic uniVerse, where such formative phenomena could take on the guise and visage of a cosmic genetic code – original and independent, universally exemplified, lately breaking through as conscious knowledge, languagome, by an ordained human witness.

We extend the concept that life is an informational phenomenon, at every level of organization, from molecules to the global ecological system. According to this thesis: (a) living is information processing, in which memory is maintained by both molecular states and ecological states as well as the more obvious nucleic acid coding; (b) this information processing has one overall function - to perpetuate itself; and (c) the processing method is filtration (cognition) of, and synthesis of, information at lower levels to appear at higher levels in complex systems (emergence). We show how information patterns, are united by the creation of mutual context, generating persistent consequences, to result in ‘functional information’. This constructive process forms arbitrarily large complexes of information, the combined effects of which include the functions of life. Molecules and simple organisms have already been measured in terms of functional information content; we show how quantification may extended to each level of organization up to the ecological. In terms of a computer analogy, life is both the data and the program and its biochemical structure is the way the information is embodied. This idea supports the seamless integration of life at all scales with the physical universe. (Abstract)

Information is therefore not just stored in nucleotides: it is the whole biological system that embodies effective information, hence biocomplexity as a whole is the storage of effective information in living nature. (9) The total of global ecological processes may be interpreted as a network computer, whose input is the physical and chemical environment of the planet and the output is a computed adjustment of these to maintain equilibrium. Seen this way, life is a computer running a model of itself in order to control its interior state so as to perpetuate itself in a changeable environment. This view, which goes beyond cybernetic self-regulation to reveal autopoietic computation, is closely allied to a growing thermodynamic understanding of living processes in which energy accountancy is integrated with informational interpretations. (16)

The information perspective shows life to be a) continuous with the abiotic universe and b) the consequence of a spontaneous increase in complexity through repeated combination of formative patterns such that they give context and thence function to one-another. (17) Considering life as information processing (computation) where the subject of computation is life, we are faced with a ‘program’ running on itself, the function of which is to output itself. Such recursion is familiar and much exploited in computer science. It highlights the fact that for life, there is no distinction between the ‘machine’ and the program - both are information; they are the same information, ordering and re-ordering matter and energy so as to persist. It would not be right to think of life as a biochemical structure on which a program is run, because life is the program and the biochemical structure is its embodiment. This is why we say that information is not just in DNA, but is in the whole biological system. (17) Now that functional information content can be quantified at every level of life, we anticipate its use in further deepening our understanding of life and its place in the physical universe. (17)

Feistel, Rainer. Self-Organization of Symbolic Information. European Physical Journal Special Topics. Online December, 2016. The Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research physicist (search) continues his project since the 1980s, often with Werner Ebeling (search each), to achieve a theoretical explanation from cosmic structural, thermodynamic, and informational properties for life’s subsequent evolutionary emergence unto our retrospective human sapience. Into the mid 2010s a coherent scenario is becoming evident by way of innate, constant, self-organizing processes which result in a cumulative increase, storage, and practical veracity of knowledge. By this view a natural text-like narrative, as the quotes note, is seen to rise with and pass through organic development to our late articulation. By turns the physical universe gains a literary base, with which our linguistic intelligence can be connected and sourced. A further gloss might be to imagine a self-deciphering, reading, comprehending genesis, by way if its own genetic code, in order to commence our own future edition.

Information is encountered in two different appearances, in native form by arbitrary physical structures, or in symbolic form by coded sequences of letters or the like. The self-organised emergence of symbolic information from structural information is referred to as a ritualization transition. Occurring at some stage in evolutionary history, ritualization transitions have in common that after the crossover, arbitrary symbols are issued and recognized by information-processing devices, by transmitters and receivers in the sense of Shannon's communication theory. Symbolic information-processing systems exhibit the fundamental code symmetry whose key features, such as largely lossless copying or persistence under hostile conditions, may elucidate the reasons for the repeated successful occurrence of ritualization phenomena in evolution history. Ritualization examples are briefly reviewed such as the origin of life, the appearance of human languages, the establishment of emergent social categories such as money, or the development of digital computers. In addition to their role as carriers of symbolic information, symbols are physical structures which also represent structural information. (Abstract)

As the narrative historical may plausibly suggest, also for the general case, symbolic information is originally obtained from ambient structural information. Symbolic information has a purpose, namely the prediction of effects of future activities, derived from experience gathered in the past and safely stored away. Biological species carry symbolic information in their genes, collected over billions of years during the evidently successful struggle for existence of all ancestor generations back to the very originof life in order to equip recent offspring with inherited symbolic information as a recipe for their survival in the future. This method of transmitting information from the past to the future, using symbols as a “time capsule,” was overly successful in the biological, social, scientific and technological evolution. (2)

In this article, ritualization is understood quite generally as a universal qualitative transition from basic structural to the emergent symbolic information properties of signals or coded sequences of letters, in the course of evolution processes. Reitualzation had been defined previously in several ways such as the development of signal-activity from use-activity of animals, or as the self-organized emergence of systems capable of processing symbolic information. (3-4) The very first self-organized symbols appeared at the molecular level, namely as RNA and DNA chain molecules in protocells during the origin of life. (7)

Fitch, W. Tecumseh. Information and the Single Cell. Current Opinion in Neurobiology. Vol. 71, 2021. In a special Evolution of Brains and Computation issue, the University of Vienna linguist discusses Bacterial Chemotaxis, Attractant Gradients, Paramecium Associative Learning, and more whence life began to stir to its senses on the long course to our collaborative reconstruction. By this widest scan, our current advance toward global self-discovery could be the potential achievement that Earthuman, and Ecosmic life needs to achieve on her/his own.

Understanding the evolution of cognition involves the costs and benefits of cerebral computation. Thus we need to know neuronal circuitry in terms of information-processing efficiency. In regard, along with synaptic weights and electrochemical dynamics, neurons have multiple mechanisms including ‘wetware’ and cell morphology. Insights into non-synaptic information-processing can be gained by examining the quite complex abilities of single-celled organisms (‘cellular cognition’) which neurons also share. Cells provide the basic level at which information processing interfaces with gene expression. Understanding cellular computation should be a central goal of research on cognitive evolution. (Abstract excerpt)

Information and the single cell: Evaluating the costs and benefits of cellular computation requires approximate answers to a seemingly simple question: what is the information contained in a single neuron, and by what mechanisms is it stored and processed? There are at least five major information storage and processing systems within a cell: synaptic weights, electrochemical dynamics, protein phosphorylation, gene transcription, and cell morphology. Some are quite well-understood in computational terms, but others are relatively neglected, and available data allow only very rough estimates of information capacity. The following estimates are intended as order-of-magnitude values to give some relative sense of their potential relevance in evolution and not as precise quantitative estimates. (154)

This special issue of Current Opinion in Neurobiology addresses issues at the intersection of brain design, evolution and computation. With today’s considerable interest in the structure and function of neural circuits, it struck us that a shot of comparative perspectives might be timely and useful. The papers assembled in this issue thus address old and fundamental
questions, but in light of recent data in dominant and non-dominant experimental model systems, modern techniques (genomic, transcriptomic, computational, connectomics, etc.), and theoretical neuroscience. (Editors)

Floridi, Luciano. The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. In this third work of his Information tetralogy after Philosophy (2013) and Ethics (2015), the Oxford University scholar (search) presses a constructivist view whence human beings, lately immersed in a global sensorium, seem made and meant to take up future material and organic cocreation. The informed content and consent of our cumulative knowledge store (library of cosmos) can be a resource for such intentional imaginations. (Floridi is also editor of the Springer journal Philosophy and Technology, whose June 2019 Homo faber issue (32/2) explores the subject.) What accrues is a lively naturalism with a computational source that advises the more we know and share, the more we can altogether achieve a better future.

Thanks to Alan Turing, the Baconian-Galilean project of grasping and manipulating the alphabet of the universe has begun to find its fulfillment in the computational and informational revolution, which is affecting so profoundly our knowledge of reality and how we conceptualize it and ourselves within it. From this perspective, the philosophy of information can be presented as the study of the informational activities that make possible the construction, conceptualization and finally the moral stewardship of reality, both natural and artificial, both physical and anthropological. The philosophy of information enables humanity to give meaning to and make sense of the world and construct it responsibly. (213)

Floridi, Luciano. The Philosophy of Information. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. The University of Hertfordshire Unesco Chair in Information and Computer Ethics continues his erudite advocacy of this “fourth revolution,” namely Alan Turing after Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud, to appreciate how our lives, now of worldwide extant, and the natural cosmos, are much more than material, they are primarily semantic and communicative. Check the author’s web page for more contributions.

Table of Contents: 1: What is the Philosophy of Information? 2: Open Problems in the Philosophy of Information 3: The Method of Levels of Abstraction 4: Semantic Information and the Veridicality Thesis 5: Outline of a Theory of Strongly Semantic Information 6: The Symbol Grounding Problem 7: Action-Based Semantics 8: Semantic Information and the Correctness Theory of Truth 9: The Logical Unsolvability of the Gettier Problem 10: The Logic of Being Informed 11: Understanding Epistemic Relevance 12: Semantic Information and the Network Theory of Account 13: Consciousness, Agents and the Knowledge Game 14: Against Digital Ontology 15: A Defence of Informational Structural Realism.

Floridi, Luciano, ed. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Information. London: Routledge, 2016. The Oxford University professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information is the main advocate of this conceptual movement. Here he gathers a luminous collection across four parts: Basic Ideas, Quantitative and Formal Aspects, Natural and Physical Aspects, and Human and Semantic Aspects. Chapters consider computations, mathematics, probability, algorithms, logic, processing, AI, data, quantum, teleology, communication, and a lot more. We especially note Information Metaphysics: The Nature of Reality by Terrell Ward Bynum (search).

Gershenson, Carlos. The World as Evolving Information. Arxiv:0704.0304v3. The author is presently a postdoctoral fellow at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the New England Complex Systems Institute. I find this August 2007 paper to be a concise review of an innately semiotic cosmic and earthly milieu, with a sense of what deep revisions that would imply. In such regard, five ’laws’ are proposed of: information transformation, propagation, requisite complexity, criticality, and organization.

An October 2010 update to the paper with more laws of information, now appears as volume 3 on arXiv, and soon to be published in Understanding Complex Systems by Springer.
Postdoc Gershenson is now a full time researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, and also Editor-in-Chief of Complexity Digest.

This paper discusses the benefits of describing the world as information, especially in the study of the evolution of life and cognition. Traditional studies encounter problems because it is difficult to describe life and cognition in terms of matter and energy, since their laws are valid only at the physical scale. However, if matter and energy, as well as life and cognition, are described in terms of information, evolution can be described consistently as information becoming more complex. (Abstract)

Ghavasieh, Arsham and Manilo De Domenico. Statistical Physics of Network Structure and Information Dynamics. Journal of Physics: Complexity. February, 2022. University of Trento and Padua theorists consider a deeper, physical basis for network topologies, and their active informative content. In regard, they note how ubiquitous these phenomena are being found across every scale and instance. See also Statistical Physics of Complex Information Dynamics by the authors at arXiv:2010.04014.

Over the past decade, network science has well advanced the analysis of natural and social systems from quantum to deep learning phases. Specifically it allows one to define information-theoretic tools for use with a grounded physical basis in terms of a statistical field theory of computational dynamics. We discuss the some salient theoretical features of this framework and selected applications to protein–protein interaction networks, neuronal systems, social and transportation networks, as well as quantum network science and machine learning. (Abstract excerpt)

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