Bravo Arturo - I totally agree - in a paper I co-authored with Stuart Kauffman
and others we talked abut the relativity of
information and the fact that information is not an absolute. Here is the
abstract of the paper and an excerpt from the paper that discusses the
relativity of information. The full papers available at:
https://www.academia.edu/783503/Propagating_organization_an_enquiry
Best wishes - Bob Logan
Kauffman, Stuart, Robert K. Logan, Robert Este, Randy Goebel, David Hobill and
Ilya Smulevich. 2007. Propagating Organization: An Inquiry. Biology and
Philosophy 23: 27-45.
Propagating Organization: An Enquiry -
Stuart Kauffman, Robert K. Logan, Robert Este, Randy Goebel, David Hobill and
lIlya Shmulevich
Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle Washington
Abstract: Our aim in this article is to attempt to discuss propagating
organization of process, a poorly articulated union of matter, energy, work,
constraints and that vexed concept, “information”, which unite in far from
equilibrium living physical systems. Our hope is to stimulate discussions by
philosophers of biology and biologists to further clarify the concepts we
discuss here. We place our discussion in the broad context of a “general
biology”, properties that might well be found in life anywhere in the cosmos,
freed from the specific examples of terrestrial life after 3.8 billion years of
evolution. By placing the discussion in this wider, if still hypothetical,
context, we also try to place in context some of the extant discussion of
information as intimately related to DNA, RNA and protein transcription and
translation processes. While characteristic of current terrestrial life, there
are no compelling grounds to suppose the same mechanisms would be involved in
any life form able to evolve by heritable variation and natural selection. In
turn, this allows us to discuss at least briefly, the focus of much of the
philosophy of biology on population genetics, which, of course, assumes DNA,
RNA, proteins, and other features of terrestrial life. Presumably, evolution by
natural selection – and perhaps self-organization - could occur on many worlds
via different causal mechanisms.
Here we seek a non-reductionist explanation for the synthesis, accumulation,
and propagation of information, work, and constraint, which we hope will
provide some insight into both the biotic and abiotic universe, in terms of
both molecular self reproduction and the basic work energy cycle where work is
the constrained release of energy into a few degrees of freedom. The typical
requirement for work itself is to construct those very constraints on the
release of energy that then constitute further work. Information creation, we
argue, arises in two ways: first information as natural selection assembling
the very constraints on the release of energy that then constitutes work and
the propagation of organization. Second, information in a more extended sense
is “semiotic”, that is about the world or internal state of the organism and
requires appropriate response. The idea is to combine ideas from biology,
physics, and computer science, to formulate explanatory hypotheses on how
information can be captured and rendered in the expected physical
manifestation, which can then participate in the propagation of the
organization of process in the expected biological work cycles to create the
diversity in our observable biosphere.
Our conclusions, to date, of this enquiry suggest a foundation which views
information as the construction of constraints, which, in their physical
manifestation, partially underlie the processes of evolution to dynamically
determine the fitness of organisms within the context of a biotic universe.
Section 4. The Relativity of Information
In Sections 2 we have argued that the Shannon conception of information are
not directly suited to describe the information of autonomous agents that
propagate their organization. In Section 3 we have defined a new form of
information, instructional or biotic information as the constraints that direct
the flow of free energy to do work.
The reader may legitimately ask the question “isn’t information just
information?”, i.e., an invariant like the speed of light. Our response to this
question is no, and to then clarify what seems arbitrary about the definition
of information. Instructional or biotic information is a useful definition for
biotic systems just as Shannon information was useful for telecommunication
channel engineering, and Kolmogorov (Shiryayev 1993) information was useful for
the study of information compression with respect to Turing machines.
The definition of information is relative and depends on the context in which
it is to be considered. There appears to be no such thing as absolute
information that is an invariant that applies to all circumstances. Just as
Shannon defined information in such a way as to understand the engineering of
telecommunication channels, our definition of instructional or biotic
information best describes the interaction and evolution of biological systems
and the propagation of organization. Information is a tool and as such it comes
in different forms. We therefore would like to suggest that information is not
an invariant but rather a quantity that is relative to the environment in which
it operates. It is also the case that the information in a system or structure
is not an intrinsic property of that system or structure; rather it is
sensitive to history and environment. To drive home this point we will now
examine the historic context in which Shannon (1948) information emerged.
Before delving into the origin of Shannon information we will first examine the
relationship of information and materiality. Information is about material
things and furthermore is instantiated in material things but is not material
itself. Information is an abstraction we use to describe the behavior of
material things and often is thought as something that controls, in the
cybernetic sense, material things. So what do we mean when we say the
constraints are information and information is constraints as we did in Section
3.
“The constraints are information” is a way to describe the limits on the
behavior of an autonomous agent who acts on its own behalf but is nevertheless
constrained by the internal logic that allows it to propagate its organization.
This is consistent with Hayle’s (1999, p. 72) description of the way
information is regarded by information science: “It constructs information as
the site of mastery and control over the material world.” She claims, and we
concur, that information science treats information as separate from the
material base in which it is instantiated. This suggests that there is nothing
intrinsic about information but rather it is merely a description of or a
metaphor for the complex patterns of behavior of material things. In fact, the
key is to what degree information is a completely vivid description of the
objects in question.
This understanding of the nature of information arises from Shannon’s (1948)
original formulation of information, dating back to his original paper:
The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point
either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently
the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to
some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic
aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The
significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of
possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible
selection, not just the one that will actually be chosen since this is unknown
at the time of design. If the number of messages in the set is finite then this
number or any monotonic function of this number can be regarded as a measure of
the information produced when one message is chosen from the set, all choices
being equally likely.
A number of problems for biology emerge from this view of information. The
first is that the number of possible messages is not finite because we are not
able to prestate all possible preadaptations from which a particular message
can be selected and therefore the Shannon measure breaks down. Another problem
is that for Shannon the semantics or meaning of the message does not matter,
whereas in biology the opposite is true. Biotic agents have purpose and hence
meaning.
The third problem is that Shannon information is defined independent of the
medium of its instantiation. This independence of the medium is at the heart of
a strong AI approach in which it is claimed that human intelligence does not
require a wet computer, the brain, to operate but can be instantiated onto a
silicon-based computer. In the biosphere, however, one cannot separate the
information from the material in which it is instantiated. The DNA is not a
sign for something else it is the actual thing in itself, which regulates other
genes, generates messenger RNA, which in turn control the production of
proteins. Information on a computer or a telecommunication device can slide
from one computer or device to another and then via a printer to paper and not
really change, McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” aside. This is not true of
living things. The same genotype does not always produce the same phenotype.
According to the Shannon definition of information, a structured set of numbers
like the set of even numbers has less information than a set of random numbers
because one can predict the sequence of even numbers. By this argument, a
random soup of organic chemicals has more information that a structured biotic
agent. The biotic agent has more meaning than the soup, however. The living
organism with more structure and more organization has less Shannon
information. This is counterintuitive to a biologist’s understanding of a
living organism. We therefore conclude that the use of Shannon information to
describe a biotic system would not be valid. Shannon information for a biotic
system is simply a category error.
A living organism has meaning because it is an autonomous agent acting on its
own behalf. A random soup of organic chemicals has no meaning and no
organization. We may therefore conclude that a central feature of life is
organization—organization that propagates.
______________________
Robert K. Logan
Prof. Emeritus - Physics - U. of Toronto
Fellow University of St. Michael's College
Chief Scientist - sLab at OCAD
http://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertKLogan
www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan
www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Logan5/publications
On Dec 11, 2016, at 10:57 AM, tozziart...@libero.it wrote:
Dear FISers,
I know that some of you are going to kill me, but there’s something that I must
confess.
I notice, from the nice issued raised by Francesco Rizzo, Joseph Brenner, John
Collier, that the main concerns are always energetic/informational arguments
and accounts.
Indeed, the current tenets state that all is information, information being a
real quantity that can be measured through informational entropies.
But… I ask to myself, is such a tenet true?
When I cook the pasta, I realize that, by my point of view, the cooked pasta
encompasses more information than the not-cooked one, because it acquires the
role of something that I can eat in order to increase my possibility to
preserve myself in the hostile environment that wants to destroy me. However,
by the point of view of the bug who eats the non-cooked pasta, my cooked pasta
displays less information for sure. Therefore, information is a very
subjective measure that, apart from its relationship with the observer, does
not mean very much… Who can state that an event or a fact displays more
information than another one?
And, please, do not counteract that information is a quantifiable, objective
reality, because it can be measured through informational entropy…
Informational entropy, in its original Shannon’s formulation, stands for an
ergodic process (page 8 of the original 1948 Shannon’s seminal paper), i.e.:
every sequence produced by the processes is the same in statistical properties,
or, in other words, a traveling particle always crosses all the points of its
phase space. However, in physics and biology, the facts and events are never
ergodic. Statistical homogeneity is just a fiction, if we evaluate the world
around us and our brain/mind.
Therefore, the role of information could not be as fundamental as currently
believed.
P.S.: topology analyzes information by another point of view, but it’s an issue
for the next time, I think…
Arturo Tozzi
AA Professor Physics, University North Texas
Pediatrician ASL Na2Nord, Italy
Comput Intell Lab, University Manitoba
http://arturotozzi.webnode.it/ <http://arturotozzi.webnode.it/>
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