Dear Joseph, Walter, Stan... & FIS colleagues, Following the track of "dissipative systems" and the prebiotic or biotic conditions of cellular organization is fine. But concerning the connection between "information" and "intelligence" (somehow still responding to Yixin's first question) other tracks could also be followed, it goes with the "narrative" one chooses. I think we have a number of connecting options: "information philosophy", "information theory", "information physics", "molecular information", "bioinformation", "systems neuroscience", "social information science", "semiosis"... almost every major trend in our community of info science discussants can legitimately claim a specific, interesting bridge between info and intelligence.
My contention, along Joseph's suggestions on looking for "starting points", is that the most general view implies a narrative of cognizing "agents" confronting "the world", also implying those three aspects I discussed last week (populational, optimality, limitation). Factually, information becomes undefinable, as it will be established after the implicit/explicit choices of action/perception for the agents and the related aspects of the world (depending on the options, yes, it can be done axiomatically; but never in general). Intelligence will also be mediated by those choices, with an added recursivity or circularity between mechanisms of agents and mechanisms of final scientific observers. Thus, the result is very different from other disciplines, where less "contaminated" or extrinsic facts help to establish theoretical-empirical ways of advancing the scientific construction. My impression is that one of the cul-de-sacs common to both information science and artificial intelligence is related to the absence of a "disabstraction" about that circularity between agent and final observer when the human case is at the stake. Maturana and Varela said interesting things about that. It is also curious that the observer of science is always a disembodied thought-collective, where individual limitations have disappeared, where notions of "epistemic distance" do not exist. Of course, then one can buy reductionism, "unity of science", or whatsoever in a real world of increasing mosaicism of science. My opinion is that the above information/intelligence connection can be ascertained relatively well for cellular (prok.) agents, as for first time in history of science we have nowadays a very advanced, almost complete description of their mechanisms (by means of bioinformatic and systems biology approaches). However, it is not trivial at all, as it implies a new way to connect cellular signaling systems and transcriptional regulatory networks, a work not assumed yet by mainstreams. It is a direction that Jorge, Raquel and me are little-by-little following in the concrete case of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Maybe the study of human information/intelligence is far more glamorous and deeper a case, really the paradigm of all other forms of intelligence, but we are still lacking a "central neurodynamic theory" on how our brain performs its information processes (to be based on optimality, I bet). And "social intelligence" is the most pressing topic, given the disproportion between accumulating problems and social use of knowledge. Thus, we have a difficult choice for preference among one those three paradigmatic narratives: clarity, depth, necessity. Apologies!, as all these reflections are pretty unclear, pretty obscure... best regards ---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
