Dear colleagues,
Maybe I should postpone these comments and have a careful reading of Bob's
paper, John's list of bionfo articles, and the many well-crafted arguments
exchanged these days---but as usual one is overwhelmed...
On the discussion track about complexity info limits (followed by Joe,
Igor, Bob and a few others), there is an important paper on the ecological
"universals" of plants, by I.J. Wright (2004). He has established a
surprising similarity relating to almost any type of leaf, from blade grass
to beech leaves or the needles of cedars. Within any habitat, each square
centimeter of leaf will process a roughly similar amount of carbon per unit
are over its life span... Taking into account that plants are the primary
producers upon which all other animal trophic levels have to depend, one
may speculate that this "economic" limit behind primary productivity may
force further limitations in the connectivity networks described by Bob
(even more taking into account that each trophic level dissipates around
90% of the biomass energy below).
Thereafter, I bet that in our mental processes there is also an "economy"
on the personal limits handling external events; those limits also put a
constraint on how do we handle the strong/weak barrage of social
("trophic") bonds around each of us every day. Of course, we can ignore
this or any other constraint in our human nature... At least, we all have
the intuition that we have info limits, but in our conceptualizations do
not recognize them, yet.
Those hierarchical schemes that with a few categories cover realms and
realms of knowledge have an undeniable allure --but are they useful? When
discussing about the complexity of human societies, or biological
complexity, etc., one should not dispatch their amazing "boundary
conditions" as mere constraints from the level above. I do not mean that
one cannot produce interesting philosophical reflections (like on almost
any theme), but probably the problem we are around on how a matrix of
informational operations do characterize the origin, maintenance, survival,
decay, etc. of the complex self-producing entity alive and also of its own
"open" self-producing parts, disappears from sight. In the recent
exchanges, the interest of Jerry's chemical logics is that it contributes
to illuminate basic problems of "form", "formation", "conformation" ,
"recognition", etc. upon which life combinatorics is founded molecularly
--and that is something. It is not my turf, but I am curious on the
relationship this approach shows with Michael Leyton's grammar process,
with Ted's category theory, and also with Karl's multidimensional
partitions. No doubt that Stan's principle of maximum entropy production
is also an important dynamic point within this molecular "soup" of complexity.
best greetings
Pedro
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