Dear Pedro, dear colleagues, Thank you for this announcement.
I make a comment below based on the abstract of the conference: > On 11 Jan 2018, at 13:28, Pedro C. Marijuan <pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es> wrote: > > > Dear FISers, this Conference in Code Biology may be of interest to some > parties. It will be in beautiful Granada (Spain), next June. Although the > deadline for abstract submission is too close, there would be a longer term > if requested to the organizers. > I hpe to see you there. Best--Pedro > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > Fifth International Conference in Code Biology > > > > > Call for Papers > > The International Conferences in Code Biology aim at bringing together > scholars and researchers who are interested in the study of all codes of > life, from the genetic code to the codes of culture. > > The Fifth International Conference in Code Biology will take place in Granada > (Spain) from 5 to 9 June 2018. The Conference will host individual talks, > poster sessions, a roundtable discussion and the Annual General Assembly of > the Code Biology Society. > > People who wish to deliver individual talks are invited to email an Abstract > of between 200-500 words to granada-abstra...@codebiology.org > <mailto:granada-abstra...@codebiology.org> > Abstracts should be sent as one-page files written in a format such as .doc > or .rtf (no PDF please). > > The deadline for Abstract submission is 15 January 2018. > Earlier submission is highly recommended. > > More details are available in the Conference homepage > http://www.codebiology.org/conferences/Granada2018/ > <http://www.codebiology.org/conferences/Granada2018/> > > This seems *quite* interesting, not so much far from number biology (and psychology, and theology). But … from: http://www.codebiology.org/conferences/Granada2018/ <http://www.codebiology.org/conferences/Granada2018/> << Fifth International Conference in Code Biology Granada (Spain), 5-9 June 2018 Code Biology is the study of all codes of life with the standard methods of science. The genetic code and the codes of culture have been known for a long time and represent the starting point, the historical foundation, of Code Biology. What is really new in this field is the study of all codes that came after the genetic code and before the codes of culture. Some of these new codes have already been discovered, and it is likely that many more will come to light in the future. The existence of many organic codes in Nature is not only a major experimental fact. It is one of those facts that have extraordinary theoretical implications. The first is that most great events of macroevolution were associated with the appearance of new organic codes, and this gives us a new description and a new understanding of the history of life. The second theoretical implication comes from the fact that codes involve meaning and we need therefore to introduce in biology, again with the standard methods of science, not only the concept of information but also the concept of meaning. The third theoretical implication comes from the fact that the organic codes have been highly conserved in evolution, which means that they are the great invariants of life, the entities that must be perpetuated while everything else is changing. Code Biology, in short, is bringing to light new mechanisms that have operated in the history of life and new fundamental concepts in theoretical biology. The International Society of Code Biology (ISCB) has been founded in 2012 with the aim of promoting the study of all codes of life. Applications for membership are welcome from scholars and researchers of all disciplines, including biology, biophysics, biochemistry, neurosciences, psychology, anthropology, ecology, information theory, systems theory, linguistics, semiotics and philosophy. >> It is incredible for me that the disciplines of Logic, Mathematical Logic and Theoretical Computer Science, which have so many results concerning coding and its possible semantics (operational semantic, denotation semantics, connotational semantics, …) are not mentioned. Mathematical logic is, I think, the oldest science having introduced and exploit the distinction between a sentence or a theory (code, number) and its interpretation/meaning, usually represented by some infinite subset of some infinite set, including many variations possible. And this without mentioning that a computer, (a physical or mathematical universal digital machine) provides a simple direct operational semantics for the coding, at the base of its own functioning. Computer science, which is born from philosophical or foundational problem in mathematics, where indeed Naive Set Platonism leads quickly to contradiction and paradoxes (cf Russell paradox) has found a universal number/machine associating meaning (to coding with precise mathematical semantics). Then with the Church-Turing thesis, we don’t need to assume less than any “Turing-complete” formalism. There are tuns of journal on this, like “Information and control” for example, and a very vast literature, always suggested to be used by philosophers, but the philosophers remain very shy, if not negative, about this. I am aware that some people believe that there is a net separation between the digital information and its treatment by digital machine, and possible non digital machinery. That might be the case, but I have not yet found evidences for this. Anyway, my work shows that the non-digitalism of nature is a consequence of digitalise in philosophy of mind (or cognitive science), and that this can be tested (and up to now the evidences are *quite* in favour of digitalise (of the mind, not of nature). Yet, even if digitalism is refuted some day, theoretical computer science remains inspiring because it does lead to very interesting theories on the relation between codes/words/formula/theories and a large sample of semantics (in fact a whole branch of mathematical logic “model theory” is concerned with the semantics of theories, seen as mathematical syntactical object). My own “discovery” of computer science was done through the study of molecular biology and molecular genetics. I was about to decide becoming a biologist when I discover Gödel’s theorem and his proof technic which showed me that what fascinated me the most in molecular biology (self-reproduction) was already made real and conceptually explained in arithmetic (which decides me to study mathematics instead of biology). Gödel’s arithmetization of Metamathematics illustrates (and proves) that arithmetic contains the means to interpret itself and to build internal semantics, suggesting strongly that we might not need to assume more than arithmetic in the fundamental studies. Then, by making the Digital Mechanist thesis explicit; the mind-body problem is reduced into a (testable) justification of the first person *appearance* of matter and physical laws from a special statistics on computations, seen from some special self-referential modes (and eventually this has been shown to work by justifying some quantum logical formalism as a number theoretical necessity. Many people oppose mechanic and organic, or artificial and natural. I think that such a separation might very well be … artificial (and thus natural for the entities developing some (big) ego (and judging that their construction are of a nature different from the environment). I am open that my intuition might be wrong, but I find quite premature to decide it wrong at the start, and to dismiss the giant quantity of quite interesting work done in the digital frame. There is no notion of (Turing, Church) universal machine in the analog domain, (I am aware some are still searching for one, but it never really works). The universal machine, by itself is an associator of meaning to code, and this in a quite number of ways, from simple boolean decoding (cf Boole’s law of thought) to semantics à-la Tarski. In fact, all universal machines have a very rich “theology”, if we dare to use this term in his ancient pre-christian sense (where theology is the science of the ultimate truth when we understand its transcendental character (something the machine and formal system can do as Gödel foresaw and as Hilbert and Bernay (and Löb) eventually proved. I do not defend the Mechanist hypothesis, but I use it as a tool, as it can be tested, and in all case we will learn something interesting on the humans. What is lacking in computer science is the semiotic, and that is the reason I participate here, to think how some semiotics can develop itself in the arithmetical reality. Some conversation are very interesting, but I have to dig deeper to get something solid on that issue. Louis Kauffman made some contribution which gives me hope to help in building a bridge between semantics (with symbols) and semiotics (based on signs, which I see as symbols having a proto-semantics in their shape, sort of non symbolic symbols, so to speak), I am doing this comment, because I feel sometimes like if there was some resistance to computer science, and to "mechanist philosophy" (which is closer to Plato than to Aristotle materialism) in this group, and I am still not sure why. I have realised eventually that the work of the founder of mathematical logic and computer science are not well known and often misunderstood, even by great caliber (like Penrose), and this despite the computer revolution (or perhaps because hidden by that revolution?). Most philosophical critics of Mechanism seems to use the 19th century conception of the machine, which is a reductionism of the type of those directly refuted by Gödel’s incompleteness. Best regards, Bruno
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