The concept of information has acquired a strikingly prominent role in many parts of biology. The biological study of perception, cognition, and language seem reasonable enough, but we now have descriptions of how genes play their causal role in metabolic processes and development routinely given in terms of “transcription,” “translation,” and “editing” - “gene expression.” A pivotal role for information in evolution suggests that major transitions in evolution depend on expansions in the amount and accuracy with which information is transmitted across the generations. Some even argue that we can only understand the evolutionary role of genes by recognizing an informational “domain” that exists alongside the domain of matter and energy. Anything is a source of information if it has a range of possible states, and one variable carries information about another to the extent that their states are physically correlated. Many uses of informational language in biology use a more problematic concepts, even drawing on the teleosemantic tradition in philosophy of mind. "Teleosemantic" might just tease Chaz into a rage, once he's over his 5,000 word 'E' trip! And I can say that the peculiarities of biological appeals to information have also been used by critics of evolutionary theory within the “intelligent design” movement, another red rag! One possibility is to argue that genes and other biological structures literally carry semantic information, and their informational character explains the distinctive role of these structures in biological processes. Another possibility is to treat the appeal to meaning and information as an analogical one. Here the idea is that language, coding systems, computer programs and other paradigmatically information-exploiting systems can serve as useful models for biological systems. If we take this second route, our task then is to identify the similarities between the cases of semantic phenomena used as models and the biological systems we seek to understand, and to show how those similarities are informative. If we think of genes or cells as literally carrying semantic information, our problem changes. Paradigm cases of structures with semantic information — pictures, sentences, programs — are built by the thought and action of intelligent agents. So we need to show how genes and cells — neither intelligent systems themselves nor the products of intelligence — can carry semantic information, and how the information they carry explains their biological role. We need some kind of reductive explanation of semantic information.
It is rare in my experience that stuff like this works as much other than what we chat about over probably too many beers. Biologists are highly materialist, and incompetent ones like me attached to the 'slapped in the face by a wet fish' form of the realist hypothesis, whatever I may have forgotten about creatures with red spots whose main predators are prawns that can't see red. Mostly, one can do biology without thinking too hard about such matters. The philosophy doesn't interest me much, but questions as to how 'biological information' gets into and affects human affairs does. It seems to challenge the meditative 'I think therefore I am'.
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