Dear FISers, Thanks to Christophe for his agents "narrative" and to Joseph for openly "buying" populational thinking and the doctrine of limitation. As for the narrative, I concur that the link between intelligence and info implies the introduction of some "agent" thinking --what kind of agent and scenario? Krassimir has attempted here some general-style option too. Murray Gell-Mann framed an interesting general description, about Information Gatherers and Information Utilizers or "Iguses" (in "the Quark and the Jaguar", 1995), which was accepted by quite many complexity scientists afterwards. The point is that knowledge gets introduced into a workable conceptual scheme together with information and intelligence.
Let me try a different track. Starting with an ample conception of intelligence, for instance what Raquel and Jorge penned "the capability to process information for the purpose of adaptation or problem solving activities. In the case of cells, problems can be caused by the environment, extracellular aggressions, communications, etc." But an important aspect is missing here. If we see some biological entity regularly entering some metabolic inputs and processing some external signals, we do not get much attracted to ad the term intelligence (plants, for instance). Rather intelligence implies "the ability to manipulate the life stories (and evolution) of the living portions of the environment and to develop efficient mechanisms (for cooperation/defence/aggresion) conducing to survival and multiplication." The important difference is the introduction of the "life cycle" concept, either as life stories or as survival and multiplication. Optimality principles can be discussed now, but limitation may be easier. Why the cell, any cell, does not grow indefinitely its genome (stock of knowledge) so to indefinitely increase its repertoire of intelligent mechanisms? Why the proteins encoded in bacterial genomes, the intracellular "intelligent" components or molecular agents, are not far bigger and powerful? And why do they become substantially "smaller" than their eukaryotic counterparts? Limitations of genome size, of energetics of protein synthesis, and those due to the folding process ("problem") have to be invoked, among others. I mean, one cannot make an abstract, idealized scheme of the bacteria (A. Danchin, 2009) as a computer or a Turing Machine without taking into account of the biolimitations at work. Something similar should be discussed with respect animal and human intelligence, particularly in the social setting. ---e.g., structures of political or economic organizations; or our idealized science for instance. The evolution of science during last centuries and the fascinating process of disciplinary recombination cannot properly be explained without developing a "doctrine of limitation" that helps make real sense of those mythical terms of today: interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinary, pluridisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, etc. Why have we passed from estimates of 3,000 disciplines in the 70's to close to 7,000 in our decade? Why not just 100 bigger ones? What are the laws of scientific recombination and how do they relate to our fundamental human limitations? In Beijing I proposed a collective research project on this very matter, I keep thinking it was a good idea. all the best, --Pedro ------------------------------------------------- Pedro C. Marijuán Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud Avda. Gómez Laguna, 25, Pl. 11ª 50009 Zaragoza, Spain Telf: 34 976 71 3526 (& 6818) Fax: 34 976 71 5554 pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/ ------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis