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

C. The Information Computation Turn

Loewenstein, Werner. Physics in Mind: A Quantum View of the Brain. New York: Basic Books, 2013. The emeritus Columbia University physiologist, biophysicist and philosopher follows up his the Touchstone of Life (2000, search) with an expansive cosmic scenario defined by the temporal flight of an informational vector. A “first arrow” is shot from the big bang by way of atomic, chemical matter. Then a “second information arrow” flies as life evolves, quickens and awakens via complexity and consciousness – “an evolutionary process that generates its own information repository to progressively reduce the element of chance.” An order emerges from a relative, contingent randomness to developing macroscopic realms of intentional sentience. One man’s technical take, as if trying to describe a cosmic elephant, but once again it reflects a regnant genetic genesis is extolled from universe to human.

So heaven’s vault is crisscrossed with information arrows. The arrows hailing from out there are long – some have been on the fly for nearly 14 billion years. Those are the lines of information issuing from the primordial kernel, the initial state of information in the universe. Eventually that initial state led, in the course of the universe’s expansion, to the condensation of matter locally and the formation of galaxies, as we have seen: as those vast structures evolved, more and more structures – stars, planets, moons, etc. – formed inside them. From our perch in the universe, we ordinarily get to glimpse only segments of the arrows, - local arrowlets, we might say. We therefore easily lose sight of the continuity. But as we wing ourselves high enough, we see that those arrowlets get handed down from system to system: from galaxy to stars to planets…to us. (21)

This is a much broader perspective than we ever had before – a view from the physics bottom – showing us that it is the totality of the information flows mentioned above, not just the flow between (computing protein) molecules, that propels the Information Arrow and hence the evolution of all organization on Earth. It is a view wherein the evolutions of inanimate and living matter are part of one and the same information landscape. (266)

Loewenstein, Werner. The Touchstone of Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. A veteran biochemist contends that information and its communicative flow is the fundamental essence of life as it evolves from molecules to sentient mind. In an expansive survey, the book describes recursive circles in internal cellular communication, external intercellular networks, and in neuronal webs which are seen to foster an informed consciousness. Such content evolves by a principle of information economy on a path of least cost.

Information means something different in science from what it does in everyday language - something deeper. It connotes a cosmic principle of organization and order… (xvi) And this, the principle of information economy of self-developing systems, I submit, is the guiding principle of biological evolution. (xvii) …there is the trend of ever-increasing information as life climbs the phylogenetic rungs - what actually evolves is information in all its forms and transforms. (94)

Lutz, Eric and Sergio Ciliberto. Information: From Maxwell’s Demon to Landauer’s Eraser. Physics Today. September, 2015. In a historic 1991 paper, physicist Rolf Landauer (search) theorized that in some deep way physical materiality is suffused with an active information content. This paper by a German and a French physicist reviews the original conception and the latest proofs of its actual veracity.

Mackay, Alan. Generalized Crystallography. Journal of Molecular Structure: Theoretical Chemistry. 336/293, 1995. We cite this pithy paper among many by the leading British crystallographer, born in 1926 and still prolific at 89 in 2015. His academic career was at Birkbeck College, London, the home of polymath J. D. Bernal’s (1901-1971) liberal science, who was Mackay’s doctoral advisor. It could be situated between a long prior phase of a classical inorganic determinism, which is described, and his 2012 article with Julyan Cartwright (search) which extols an organic, self-organizing materiality. A distinction of this biological revolution is Mackay’s allusion to a genetic equivalent at work in heretofore passive matter. His 1999 paper, From “The Dialectics of Nature” to the Inorganic Gene, leads off the first journal issue of Foundations of Chemistry, and continues this synthesis of “natural selection with innate genetic algorithms.”

Mainzer, Klaus. The Digital and the Real Universe: Foundations of Natural Philosophy and Computational Physics. Philosophies. 4/1, 2019. A paper for a Contemporary Natural Philosophy collection by the Technical University of Munich “emeritus of excellence” scholar (search) which describes how our viable, developmental cosmos seems to be running some manner of informative program which serves to generate life’s long course from origins to humanities.

In the age of digitization, the world seems to be reducible to a digital computer. However, mathematically, modern quantum field theories do not only depend on discrete, but also continuous concepts. Ancient debates in natural philosophy on atomism versus the continuum are deeply involved in modern research on digital and computational physics. This example underlines that modern physics, in the tradition of Newton’s Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis, is a further development of natural philosophy with the rigorous methods of mathematics, measuring, and computing. We consider fundamental concepts of natural philosophy with mathematical and computational methods and ask for their ontological and epistemic status. The following article refers to the author’s new book, The Digital and the Real World: Computational Foundations of Mathematics, Science, Technology, and Philosophy (World Scientific, February 2019). (Abstract)

Mainzer, Klaus and Leon Chua. The Universe as Automaton. Berlin: Springer, 2012. The title is misleading, in the text it is The Universe as (Cellular) Automaton. For the Technical University of Munich philosopher physicist and University of California, Berkeley computer engineer broach a full apply and extrapolation of Stephan Wolfram’s cellular automata theories to the lineaments of cosmic nature. And how simple a shift to read as “genetic.”

Historically, in science and philosophy people believed in a sharp difference between “dead” and “living” matter. Aristotle interpreted life as the power of self-organization (entelechy) driving the growth of plants and animals to their final form. A living system is able to reproduce itself and to move by itself, while a dead system can only be copied and moved from outside. Life was explained by teleology, i.e., by non-causal (vital) forces aiming as some goals in nature. In the eighteenth century Kant showed that self-organization of living organisms cannot be explained by a mechanical system of Newtonian physics. The concept of cellular automata was the first mathematical model to prove that self-reproduction and self-organization of complex patterns from simple rules are universal features of dynamical systems. (87)

Summing up all these insights, we are on the way to conceiving quantum systems as Quantum Cellular Automata. (105) This booklet has shown that many basic principles of the expanding universe and the evolution of life and brain can be illustrated with cellular automata. The emergence of new structures and patterns depends on phase transitions of complex dynamical systems in the quantum, molecular, cellular, organic, ecological, and societal worlds. (105)

Manca, Vincenzo. Infobiotics: Information in Biotic Systems. Berlin: Springer, 2013. A volume in Springer’s Emergence, Complexity and Computation series by a University of Verona professor of computer science. In its Preface, it is advised that we quite need in this 21st century, as others aver, to fulfill Erwin Schrodinger’s 1940s project of truly understanding life by way of grounding in physical and informational perspectives. In regard today, the natural evolutionary universe is becoming more characterized and described in terms of essential, prescriptive programs. With chapters such as Strings and Genomes, Algorithms and Biorhythms, and Languages and Grammars, the book proceeds to scope out a current, physics = life, reconception.

The book presents topics in discrete biomathematics. Mathematics has been widely used in modeling biological phenomena. However, the molecular and discrete nature of basic life processes suggests that their logic follow principles that are intrinsically based on discrete and informational mechanisms. The ultimate reason of polymers, as key element of life, is directly based on the computational power of strings, and the intrinsic necessity of metabolism is related to the mathematical notion of multiset. The volume is organized in seven chapters. The first part is devoted to research topics (Discrete information and life, Strings and genomes, Algorithms and Biorhythms, Life Strategies), the second one to mathematical backgrounds (Numbers and Measures, Languages and Grammars, Combinations and Chances). (Publisher)

If we want to disclose the deep logic of basic mechanisms of life, we need new scientific theories, and therefore new conceptual frameworks. Discrete mathematics, algorithms, and computational approaches are good candidates for introducing new scientific ideas in life sciences. For this reason the discipline evoked by the title of this text, Infobiotics, is viewed as the reverse side of Bioinformatics. The two roots “info” and “bio” are inverted in these words. In bioinformatics the biologists ask computer scientists to assist them in elaborating the data they obtain. Conversely, in infobiotics computer scientists and mathematicians provide biologists with explanations and theories which biologists need to verify by means of specific experiments. (Preface)

Marijuan, Pedro. Bioinformation: Untangling the Networks of Life. BioSystems. 64/1-4, 2002. An insightful paper on the persistent, dynamic role of informative templates in organic development.

Life is knowledge-bearing matter…the story is about genes or Darwinian replicators that embody knowledge about their niche, laws of nature included, causing the niche to keep that knowledge in existence. (112) We may argue, following Gell-Mann, that from the point of view of information, this organization of the living cell represents the emergence of a very special ‘complex adaptive system’: it is a quasi-universal problem solver based on the cytoplasm-genome representation interrelationship. (114)

Marijuan, Pedro. Knowledge Recombination on the Informational Adaptability of cells, Nervous Systems, and Societies. International Journal on Information Theories and Applications. 18/1, 2011. A veteran theorist, Pedro Marijuan (search) is in the Bioinformation and Systems Biology Group, Aragon Institute of Health Sciences, Zaragoza, Spain. The journal is based in Bulgaria and offers such premier articles with full online access. Also in the issue are “Emergent Information: Some System-Theoretical Considerations About an Integrative Information Concept” by Wolfgang Hofkirchner, “Information as a Natural and Social Operator” Joseph Brenner and Mark Burgin, and “From Philosophy to Theory of Information” by Marcin Schroeder. As Marijuan well states, there is just some kind of instructive, creative quality that is nature’s essential source which needs to be entered and articulated. And as many papers in this section and throughout the site, it begs to be seen, in translation, much as an innate parents to children “genetic code” of a procreative family cosmos.

Actually the growth of informational complexity of cells, nervous systems, and societies along their respective evolutionary, ontogenetic, and historical trajectories has been based on the cumulative consequences of knowledge recombination phenomena. However, the recognition of this commonality has been obscured, among other causes, by the structural and dynamic heterogeneity of repositories in the different informational entities, and by being subject of quite separated scientific disciplines: molecular and evolutionary biology, cognitive neurodynamics, philosophy of science/”geography” of science. In the extent to which such commonalities may be elucidated from a new vantage point, it would help in the development of information science itself, as well as in the pragmatics of education, in the social organization of science, and in the research effort of contemporary societies. Finally, the new term of “scientomics” is proposed in order to capture the knowledge combinatory processes and disciplinary mixings within the sciences. (Abstract)

Marijuan, Pedro. The Advancement of Information Science. TripleC. 7/2, 2009. In a special section “What is Really Information? An Interdisciplinary Approach,” the Spanish systems bioinformatician has been a pioneer advocate for the interpretation of life from cosmos to children as most characterized, both in essential origin and constant discourse, by a quality of and proclivity for constructive communication. See in regard his earlier “Information and Life: Towards a Biological Understanding of Informational Phenomena” in this journal (2/1, 2004), and other postings herein.

The advancement of a new scientific perspective, information science, devoted to the study of the vast field of informational phenomena in nature and society, implies putting together a number of cognizing domains which are presently scattered away in many other disciplines. Comparable to previous scientific revolutions spurred by thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, it would be time to go beyond the classical discussions on the concept of information, and associated formal theories, and advance a “new way of thinking”. Cells, Brains, Societies, and Quantum information would be crucial arenas for this discussion. Rather than hierarchy, reduction, or unification, the catchword is unending recombination... A mature information science should offer a new panoramic view on the sciences themselves and contribute to achieve social adaptability & sustainability. (Abstract, 369)

Markopoulou, Fotini. The Computing Spacetime. arXiv:1201:3398. Posted January 2012, wherein the Perimeter Institute, University of Waterloo, and Max Planck Institute physicist provides a cogent overview of this Turing turn lately gaining adherents, substance, and press, as this section reports. By way of her quantum theory interests, the admission of an informational quality, “a universe thought of as software,” will help physics unify gravity and relativity, and resolve further issues. As she writes “The universe as Computation suggests a new kind of unification: physical systems and their dynamics can be represented in terms of their information content.”

The idea that the Universe is a program in a giant quantum computer is both fascinating and suffers from various problems. Nonetheless, it can provide a unified picture of physics and this can be very useful for the problem of Quantum Gravity where such a unification is necessary. In previous work we proposed Quantum Graphity, a simple way to model a dynamical spacetime as a quantum computation. In this paper, we give an easily readable introduction to the idea of the universe as a quantum computation, the problem of quantum gravity, and the graphity models. (Abstract, 1)

Quantum information theory has given a new and interesting twist on the Universe as a Computation. A common idea that is advocated by many practitioners in this field is that everything fundamentally is information, an old idea that can be traced at least back to Wheeler's influential it from bit. In that view, all interactions between physical systems in the universe are instances of information processing, and the information involved in those processes is more primary than the physical systems themselves. Instead of thinking of particles as colliding, we should think of the information content of the particles being involved in a computation. (2)

Markos, Anton, et al. Life As Its Own Designer. Berlin: Springer, 2009. Six university natural philosophers from the Czech Republic attempt a recast of Darwinian evolution so as to emphasize biosemiotic communication as its defining, self-organizing motive quality. In such a view living beings become narrative “co-creators” of their own worlds. You get the impression that the authors have something important to say, but this mostly gets lost in disjointed chapter essays and academic jargon. But there is a distinction impression that these thinkers, and many others, are simply trying to evoke and describe a real universe to human genetic code.

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