Hi Fisers,
I agree.
Communication may be the key concept in developing a theory of informaton.
Just as it is impossible to define what energy is without defining the
thermodynamic system under consideration (e.g., energy is conserved only in an
isolated system and not in closed or open systems; the Gibbs free energy
content decreases only when a spontaneous process occurs in non-isolsted
systems with a constant temperature and pressure, etc), so it may be that
'information' cannot be defined rigorously without first defining the
"communication system" under consideration. If this analogy is true, we can
anticipate that, just as there are many different kinds of energies depending
on the characteristics of the thermodynamic systems involved, so there may be
many different kinds of 'informations' depending on the nature of the
communication systems under consideration.
The properties or behaviors of all thermodynamic systems depend on their
environment, and there are three system-environment relations -- (i) isolated
(e.g., the Universe, or the thermos bottle), (ii) closed (e.g., refriegerator),
and (iii) open (e.g., the biosphere, living cells).
It is interesting to note that, all communication systems (e.g., cell, organs,
animals, humans) may embody ITR (Irreducible Triadic Relation) which I found
it convenient to represent diagramamatically using a 3-node network arrows as
shown below:
f g
A ----------> B ---------> C
| ^
| |
|__________________|
h
Figure 1. The Irreducible Triadic Relation (ITR) of C. S. Peirce (1839-21914)
represented as a 3-node, closed and directed network. The arrows form the
commutative triangle of category theory, i.e., operations f followed by g leads
to the same result as operation h, here denoted as fxg = h.
f = information production; g = information interpretation; h = correspondence
or information flow. Please note that Processes f and g are driven by
exergonic physicochemical processes, and h requires a pre-existing code or
language that acts as the rule of mapping A and C.
Again, just as generations of thermodynamicists in the 19-20th centuries have
defined various kinds of "energies" (enthalpy, Helmholtz free energy, Gibbs
free energy) applicable to different kinds of thermodynamic systems, so
'information scientists' of the 21st century may have the golden opportunity
to define as many kinds of 'informations' as needed for the different kinds of
"communcation systems" of their interest, some examples of which being
presented in Table 1.
________________________________________________________________________
Table 1. A 'parametric' definition of information based on the values of the
three nodes
of the ITR, Figure 1.
________________________________________________________________________
Communication system A B
C
(Information)
________________________________________________________________________
Cells DNA/RNA Proteins
Chemcal reactions
(Biological informations)
or chemical waves
_________________________________________________________________________
Humans Sender Message
Receiver
(Linguistic informations)
_________________________________________________________________________
Signs Object
Representamen Interpretant
(Semiotic informations, or
'Universal informations' (?))
__________________________________________________________________________
With all the best.
Sung
________________________________
From: Fis <fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es> on behalf of JOHN TORDAY
<jtor...@ucla.edu>
Sent: Saturday, September 23, 2017 10:44:33 AM
To: fis@listas.unizar.es
Subject: [Fis] Principles of IS
Dear Fis, I am a newcomer to this discussion, but suffice it to say that I have
spent the last 20 years trying to understand how and why physiology has
evolved. I stumbled upon your website because Pedro Maijuan had reviewed a
paper of ours on 'ambiguity' that was recently published in Progr Biophys Mol
Biol July 22, 2017 fiy.
Cell-cell communication is the basis for molecular embryology/morphogenesis.
This may seem tangential at best to your discussion of Information Science, but
if you'll bear with me I will get to the point. In my (humble) opinion,
information is the 'language' of evolution, but communication of information as
a process is the mechanism. In my reduction of evolution as communication, it
comes down to the interface between physics and biology, which was formed when
the first cell delineated its internal environment (Claude Bernard, Walter B
Cannon) from the outside environment. From that point on, the dialog between
the environment and the organism has been on-going, the organism internalizing
the external environment and compartmentalizing it to form what we recognize as
physiology (Endosymbiosis Theory). Much of this thinking has come from new
scientific evidence for Lamarckian epigenetic inheritance from my laboratory
and that of many others- how the organism internalizes information from the
environment by chemically changing the information in DNA in the egg and sperm,
and then in the zygote and offspring, across generations. So here we have a
fundamental reason to reconsider what 'information' actually means
biologically. If you are interested in any of my publications on this subject
please let me know (jtor...@ucla.edu<mailto:jtor...@ucla.edu>). Thank you for
any interest you may have in this alternative way of thinking about
information, communication and evolution.
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