Thanks, Christophe. These days I am involved in a paper on "prokaryotic intelligence", and have laterally approached the problem of cellular meaning. I am copying a fragment below (not corrected yet). Rosen's "impredicativity" looks to me an important concept to clarify things. However, rather than establishing it based on dynamic, open systems (boundary conditions) as he does, I would join Michael Conrad's viewss, in that protein folding and unpicturability of enzyme function are the deep causes of factual impredicativity in living cells... but perhaps my Conradian interpretation is forced.
Anyhow, the overall idea may be that the "signal" becomes "symmetry breaking" for the cell, and the elaboration of meaning becomes "symmetry restoration". best ---Pedro ------------------------------------ "...Along this view, living cells are enacting a new way of existence, an active “informational” one that is based on the capability to keep the own structures in a permanent state of flow. Cells would respond to signals from the environment, and produce the “meaning” they imply, by letting the signals themselves interfere with the ongoing molecular dynamics of the cellular self-production flow. Completion of the cell cycle would always appear as the fundamental reference... And on the other side, the/ impredicative /nature of biological information has to be taken into account (Rosen, 1993). It conduces to realizing that the information processing of living cells is not of the same class than the processes of formal, predicative nature (computation). Rather, biomolecular processing is a “tactilizing” phenomenon based on a myriad of specific “molecular recognition” events (Conrad, 1998; Marijuán, 2003); and there is no syntactic procedure or amount of computation that can fill in the modelling gap, in formal terms, between the sequences found in genomes and the emergent dynamics of protein & enzyme & RNA networks. The degree to which biological complexity can be efficiently fathomed in computational terms is a highly debatable question; it has also practical implications regarding the mentioned integration of signaling processes within the life cycle, and the cut-offs and trade-offs to establish in the models. Whatever the modelling option, the "real" biomolecular elaboration of meaning in the living cell and in the living brain would always keep the upper hand of complexity with respect any syntactic, computational procedures..." Christophe Menant escribió: > > Thanks Stan, > Biosemiotics can indeed be part of the story > (http://crmenant.free.fr/Biosemiotics3/INDEX.HTM ), but part only. > My point is about the importance of the notion of ”meaning” when > talking about information. Interpretation of information (meaning > generation) is key when information is processed by finalized systems. > Our lives are embedded in meaning generation, from auto-immune disease > to the smile of the Joconde. Meaning generation has probably an > evolutionary story, and can deserves (I feel) a systemic approach > (http://cogprints.org/6279/ ). So I’m just kind of surprised not to > see the notion of meaning explicited in the proposal. > Perhaps Pedro could tell us more on this point. > All the best > Christophe > _______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
