Dear Michel and FIS colleagues,
Thanks for the excellent discussion, so far. The usual conspiracy of
bureaucratic things around me have precluded my involvement in the
important aspects dealt with (and cannot properly refer to the
individual messages before). Anyhow, three short reflections follow.
When and why chemoinformation appears? I remember that in very early
90's a new, international society on Molecular Computing was promoted by
a variety of comp-bio-chem-phys parties, with the leading scientific
figure of Michael Conrad (also FIS co-founder!, more or less around the
same time). The society had a few, important World congresses but
finally dissolved in late 90's. I suggested to Michael, and presented in
their 1993 Congress, an integration of the nascent molecular computing
field under the heading of "chemical information" and within an ampler
"information sceince" --but most of them were working in a more
technically centered alternative to "artificial life" and did not get
interested. Robert Rosen (in a parallel exchange, as he was invited to
publishing in a Spanish Journal) also agreed with me that there were
important conceptual differences regarding chemical systems between
"information processing" and "molecular computing"... the relationship
of information with "absence", involving "meaning", was part of the
discussion.
Somehow, what was realized around that time is that different properties
related to molecules could support new forms of "wet" processing, or
provide new views on biological selforganization, and new names for that
multidisciplinary new effort were looked after. What molecular
properties? Whatever. This forms part of my comment days ago, once you
"establish" the info framework, then the un-definition of information
dissolves and you can measure it, process it, amplify it, destroy it,
etc. But not before. The problem is that in order to achieve that
"establishment" the different disciplines would act quite differently,
and in non-communicable ways (among themselves). I discussed some of
this during Yixin's session, and until now I do not see any elegant way
to enter meaningful order among the different "establishments".
And finally, those efforts and problems of mol. computing and also
cheminformatics/cheminformation are more or less tractable if you remain
within highly constrained artificial settings---I remember however the
very exciting discussions in Paris FIS 2005 between experts working in
chemical databases, on their tough "ontological" problems. My contention
is that without introducing the "apophatic" path (Bob U., Terry D.), the
notion of "absence" (in my opinion, referring to the bio, within the
"life cycle") cheminformation will not develop complex enough systems
or decisive conceptual breakthroughs... Who knows. Maybe in the
frontiers between the non-purposive and the purposive chem. entities
there are valuable informational insights. Could a new approach to
"symmetry" be the conceptual-arch key?
best
---Pedro
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