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

C. The Information Computation Turn

Gleick, James. The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. New York: Pantheon, 2011. In 1987 Chaos: Making a New Science by this science journalist told so well the cast of players and approaches beginning to engage nature’s complexities that the endeavor rose into public awareness. A generation later, in the age of Google, his second opus seeks to identify, chronicle, and define this title property as the quintessence of universe and human. The work begs a long review, for it is a capsule of our situation. As a starter, the text struggles with a mix of metaphors. Jorge Borges’ infinite library with all knowledge but no catalog is apt, so is John Archibald Wheeler’s self-realizing, ‘it from bit,’ cosmos. But does raw randomness rule per Richard Feynman, Jacques Monod, and Gregory Chaitin, or a textual reality that “computes its destiny” per Alan Turing? Is a “program” really running universe and us with its own content and intention? But a magnificent read, leading to these further ruminations.

While Gleick’s first landmark about nonlinear theories conveyed a sense of promise, by 2011 a weariness unto despair before insensate algorithms and a boggling multiverse seems to have set in. The well-studied chapter essays seem unawares of deep contradictions. After scene-settings about early alphabets, calculating engines, and other aspects, “Life’s Own Code” narrates how the presence of generative nucleotides became known, much through linguistic script, editing, and transcription analogies. Apropos, I visited the Santa Fe Institute in 1987 to hear a talk by Harold Morowitz, Stuart Kauffman was in the audience, an expectation of breakthroughs in the air. In the quarter century since, self-organizing, complex adaptive network systems have indeed been found from galaxies to genomes. A double domain is indeed revealed of an explicate, scale-invariant recurrence and an implied, implicate, mathematical source.

But a Ptolemaic physics has hardened over the same span. Two versions obtain – a material machine sans design or destiny, or a computational turn to hard matter and soft programs. Insightful reviews of the book that broach a way forward are Freeman Dyson’s (search), and Geoffrey Nunberg’s essay in the New York Times Book Review for March 20, 2011, about what to make of this literal “vital principle” or “primal substance” that so subsumes. From a global vista, one wonders if just by a shift of imagination, a woman’s bicameral mind, an organic gestation that every other age and culture reveres could be recovered. If via a biological procreation, an informational within of things could be realized as a “cosmic genetic code” of parental entity and empathy complements, a ‘methinks it is a genesis” moment might dawn. We could be that close.

Goonatilake, Susantha. The Evolution of Information. London: Pinter, 1991. Innovative conjectures and ideas on the operation of informative codes in genetic, neural, and cultural settings within a self-organizing universe.

The central thesis in this book has been that several phenomena covering a wide variety of disciplinary fields can be scientifically discussed by examining their information flow lines. (167)

Goyal, Philip. Information Physics – Towards a New Conception of Physical Reality. Information. 3/4, 2012. In this online paper, the SUNY Albany theorist summarizes the history and waxing status of this new formulation of quantum phenomena. Again taking John Archibald Wheeler as prescient exemplar (see quotes below), a major revision of cosmology is merited that includes, indeed requires, sentient observation by emergent aware entities for its full manifestation. By these lights, the classic, mechanical model of “matter moving in space by universal laws of motion” can be surpassed by the novel inclusion of the knowing, self-recognizing personages.

The concept of information plays a fundamental role in our everyday experience, but is conspicuously absent in framework of classical physics. Over the last century, quantum theory and a series of other developments in physics and related subjects have brought the concept of information and the interface between an agent and the physical world into increasing prominence. As a result, over the last few decades, there has arisen a growing belief amongst many physicists that the concept of information may have a critical role to play in our understanding of the workings of the physical world, both in more deeply understanding existing physical theories and in formulating of new theories. In this paper, I describe the origin of the informational view of physics, illustrate some of the work inspired by this view, and give some indication of its implications for the development of a new conception of physical reality. (Abstract)

“It from bit” symbolizes the idea that every item of the physical world has at bottom—at a very deep bottom, in most instances—an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin, and this in a participatory universe. (J. A. Wheeler, 584)

As described in Section 3, many developments in physics and other disciplines over the course of the last century have paved the way for the emergence of this informational view. One can discern a number of key stages in this emergence: Shift from the view of a physical theory as a description of reality in itself to a description of reality as experienced by an agent. Mach’s emphasis on the primacy of the experience of an agent over the concepts of a physical theory, thermodynamics as a theory explicitly constructed to interrelate the macro-variables accessible to limited agents, and quantum theory with its highly non-trivial model of the measurement process have all helped to shift the focus of physical theory from being a description of reality in itself to a description of reality as experienced by an agent. (584)

Haefner, Klaus, ed. Evolution of Information Processing Systems. New York: Springer, 1992. A good technical survey of the information perspective. Haefner’s introduction presents the basic concepts of a hierarchy of information processing at physical, genetic, neural, and social levels.

Hao, B.-L., et al. Fractals Related to Long DNA Sequences and Complete Genomes. Chaos, Solitons and Fractals. 11/6, 2000. A self-similar geometry distinguishes molecular genetic networks, which is then seen as a reflection of the underlying structure of nature.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. In a work on the transformative dynamics of cyberspace, a humanities professor perceives an active, formative information at the root of living systems. Insights abound: bodies are like books; our world is becoming virtual as informational patterns increasingly take over materiality.

Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother was a Computer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. For past centuries, an era’s definitive machine, such as steam engine or telephone, became the image of natural reality. Hayles, a Duke University “postmodern literature critic” is well regarded for showing how complex system themes now pervade the arts - check Amazon for her Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (1991) and How We Became Posthuman (1999). In this work, as the quotes note, she entertains the iconic computer model that has taken over our age and lives. Early chapters specify a “computational” universe, from Stephen Wolfram, Edward Fredkin to Harold Morowitz whose The Emergence of Everything (2002) views an ascendant evolution due to “interactions between components” which self-organize into a multilevel sequence. But per third quote, may one gain a deep insight that genetic phenomena is a complementarity of digital and analog, DNA and AND? Later chapters take on writers such as Neal Stephenson, Shelley Jackson and Stanislaw Lem who try to express reality as some sort of dynamic simulation. However might imaginations finally reach and read “Methinks it is a grand cosmos to child genesis?”

This view of materiality goes hand and hand with what I call the Computational Universe, that is, the claim that the universe is generated through computational processes running on a vast computational mechanism underlying all of physical reality. (3) In this context, “My mother was a computer” can be understood as alluding to the displacement of Mother Nature by the Universal Computer. Just as Mother Nature was seen in past centuries as the source of both human behavior and physical reality, so now the Universal Computer is envisioned as the Motherboard of us all. (3)

The Regime of Computation, then, provides a narrative that accounts for the evolution of the universe, life, mind, and mind reflecting on mind by connecting these emergences with computational processes that operate both in human-created simulations and in the universe understood as software running on the “Universal Computer” we call reality. This is the larger context in which code acquires special, indeed universal, significance. In the Regime of computation, code is understood as the discourse system that mirrors what happens in nature and that generates nature itself. (27)

Take DNA replication for example. DNA is often understood to operate as a digital code, in the sense that it is discrete rather than continuous. With the sequencing of the human genome, however, it has become clear that sequence is only part of the story, perhaps even the less important part. Protein folding, an analog process that makes use of continuous transformation in form, is essential to understanding how the genome actually functions. The combination of the two processes, the digitality of DNA and the analog process of protein folding, gives the gene its remarkable power of information storage and transmission. Similar cooperations between digital and analog processes occur everywhere in nature and in contemporary technologies. (29)

Hidalgo, Cesar. Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies. New York: Basic Books, 2015. The Chilean-American physicist directs the MIT Media Lab Macro Connections group. His doctorate was earned at Notre Dame with Laszlo Barabasi. From our late global vista, in order to empower successful 21st century economic societies it serves to perceive and define them in terms of a cosmic informational vector. A far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics is seen to counter entropy as it forms local, organic concentrations of shared knowledge. By this wide perspective, physical matter is a process that computes itself, an effective society is one that employs and enhances this learning process.

Hoffmeyer, Jesper. A Biosemiotic Approach to the Question of Meaning. Zygon. 45/2, 2010. In a topical section on “God and the World of Signs: Semiotics and the Emergence of Life,” the University of Copenhagen biologist continues his elucidation of life’s increasingly free ability to articulate and express itself. This evolutionary progression occurs by way of enhanced personal “relative being” beyond isolate objects. But per the second quote, although closer to truth, whence can an indispensible, essential “meaning” be found? (Also in the issue are papers by Andrew Robinson, Christopher Southgate, Bruce Weber, Robert Ulanowicz, and Terrence Deacon.)

The biosemiotic approach to the study of living systems is a logical consequence of the profound trend toward a semiotization of nature that characterized biology up through the twentieth century. (369) Let me confess outright that I do not believe (and Christian thinkers need no more believe) that the world is a fundamentally lawful place. I find it to be more consonant with modern scientific conceptions – building on nonequilibrium thermodynamics or nonlinear systems dynamics, complexity theory, and biosemiotics – that the world was indeterminate in the beginning and that the orderliness we find is the result of an ongoing process of emergence that has been operative through several billions of years. (385)

Hoffmeyer, Jesper and Frederik Stjernfelt. The Great Chain of Semiosis. Biosemiotics. Online September, 2015. It is curious that while this historic concept of an evolutionary scale from molecules to minds is denounced in the US and UK, in continental Europe, such as France (Vic Norris, e.g.), Hungary (Eors Szathmary), and here from Denmark, a teleological sequence can readily be allowed and availed. University of Copenhagen philosophical biolinguists profess a theory of life’s prime distinction as an increasing sapient content of instructive knowledge, a vectorial “semiotic freedom.” Akin to new work which views evolution as a neural net learning process (Richard Watson), by this insight a progression of individual agency, stored representations, relative knowledge, a quickening sentience, and regnant selfhood from biochemicals to human cultures is evident. Nature’s organic development thus involves and proceeds by an “active information gathering.” Here is one more inkling of an imminent cosmic Copernican revolution from silence to sensibility.

Previous attempts at finding progressive trends in evolution that might justify a scaling of species from primitive to advanced levels have not met with much success, but when evolution is considered in the light of semiosis such a scaling immediately catches the eye. The main purpose of this paper is to suggest a scaling of this progression in semiotic freedom into a series of distinct steps. The eleven steps suggested are: 1) molecular recognition, 2) prokaryote-eukaryote transformation (privatization of the genome), 3) division of labor in multicellular organisms (endosemiosis), 4) from irritability to phenotypic plasticity, 5) sense perception, 6) behavioral choice, 7) active information gathering, 8) collaboration, deception, 9) learning and social intelligence, 10) sentience, 11) consciousness. In light of this, the paper finally discusses the conceptual framework for biosemiotic evolution. (Abstract excerpt)

Our idea is that the evolution of nervous tissue and its organization into CNSs served to facilitate simpler semiotic-cognitive processes that were already there. Indeed, each single link of such processes will run according to simple causal dynamics and, yet, the overall cyclic, self-sustaining structure of metabolism in which they partake cannot be reduced to such simple dynamics. The ongoing self-organization of that process makes it prone to cognition: to find the means to get to crucial nutrients, escape predators, find shelter etc. is needed to uphold the process. Self-organizing structures best able to achieve this end would have an obvious selective advantage over less successful self-organizing structures thus favoring the evolution of systems, organisms, equipped with a basic intention, that of self-preservation. Long before the appearance of mental life, organisms and their behavior display this intentional structure, which is why such entities are selectable and evolvable in the first place. (4)

Hofkirchner, W., ed. The Quest for a Unified Theory of Information. Amsterdam: Gordon & Breach, 1999. Scholars from information and computer science, semiotics, complex systems, evolutionary theory, physics, biology, psychology, consciousness research, sociology, and technology studies explore and expand the concept of information to bridge the gap between "hard" and "soft" sciences.

Hofkirchner, Wolfgang. Does Computing Embrace Self-Organization? Dodig-Crnkovic, Gordana and Mark Burgin, eds. Information and Computation. Singapore: World Scientific, 2010. A University of Salzburg internet philosopher works at setting aside the Newtonian clockwork machine in favor of a broadly algorithmic model, here made additionally credible and complete by this spontaneously generative agency.

Actually, with the paradigm shift from the mechanistic worldview cognizant of objects only towards a more inclusive view of a less-than strict, emergent, and even creative universe inhabited by subjects too, we have got everything required to connect the notion of information to the idea of self-organisation.

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