Dear Stan In general I can accept the drift of most of your answers, but I think you overlook one important process in the living systems, they experience the universe and the more they develop the more refined their experience becomes. Then they start to talk about them, later to write tem down and then to make institution to discuss and develop them such as religion and science.
Venlig hilsen/best wishes Søren Brier Professor of semiotics at Department of International Studies of Culture and Communication, CBS, Dalgas Have 15, DK-2000 Frederiksberg. Tel. (+ 45) 38153132 Ed. Cybernetics & Human Knowing http://www.imprint.co.uk/C&HK/ , Subscription $ 104 New book: Cybersemiotics: Why Information Is Not Enough, Toronto University Press. Now also a Google Book. ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected] [[email protected]] Sent: Monday, November 30, 2009 3:53 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Fis] Asymetry and Information: A modest proposal Commenting upon Christophe's: C: Assuming we put aside the reason of being of the universe, there is no entity to care about information before the coming up of life on earth. -snip-: C: I feel that the meaning of information (whatever it’s naming) exists because there is a system that needs this meaning, S: As a materialist, I am unable to see that something completely new can come into being without any precursor. Thus, our 'meaning' had to have had a precursor relationship. We are aided in identifying this by using the Aristotelian causal analysis, and we can find the general precursor of meaning in final cause. The universe itself, being in a non-equilibrium condition since its inception has the deepest finality of all -- the tendency toward thermodynamic equilibrium. Thus everything that happens, at all scales, has the meaning of furthering universal equilibration. Our own human finalities are refinements added to this. C: Information is a notion that we humans have invented as a set of tools to help the understanding and managing of our world. And animals also manage information. S: All of the natural world as we name and model it is a 'human invention'. Then Joseph says: I like your approach. Here is something even simpler: the system is the meaning of the information. System and meaning are not totally separable. One's perspective focuses on one or the other, as the case may be. S: The universe fits this 'bill' nicely! then Chritophe replies: Yes Joseph, you are right. As the satisfaction of the constraint is mandatory for the system to maintain its nature, system and constraint are indeed tightly linked. The “stay alive” constraint came up on earth with the first organisms that had to maintain a local far from equilibrium status. The existence of the constraint goes with the being of the living entity. S: Once again, the universe fits this 'bill'. then Søren replies: May I point out then that meaning of information is not information, but meaning and therefore not comprehensible in information theory or science? S: Yes indeed. In the Aristotelian causal analysis, the system embodies formal causes. Its aims are the finalities. Søren adds: Again, I would like to point out that "a local far from equilibrium status" is not enough to define life. It only defines a chemical aspect of living system as well as many other non-living systems. Our problem is that something about life evades our present scientific attempts to find a scientific model to describe it, because meaning is not a scientific concept and neither s first person consciousness, even if we include the largest informational paradigm as long as it is ontologically based on matter, energy and information only.. S: What the living bring in is the preservation and multiplication of historical accidental configurations, which, nodding to John, increases dramatically the degrees of freedom in any system. Their 'role' in the universe's project is to ferret out energy gradients that do not dissipate rapidly by conduction alone. Thus, the living, as dissipative structures, are basically convection centers. STAN fis mailing list [email protected] https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis _______________________________________________ fis mailing list [email protected] https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis _______________________________________________ fis mailing list [email protected] https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
