![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
|
![]() |
![]() |
||||||||||
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
|
III. Ecosmos: A Revolutionary Fertile, Habitable, Solar-Bioplanet, Incubator LifescapeC. 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. 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) 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) 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) 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.
Previous 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 Next [More Pages]
|
![]() |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
HOME |
TABLE OF CONTENTS |
Introduction |
GENESIS VISION |
LEARNING PLANET |
ORGANIC UNIVERSE |