Cari Tutti,
nei miei numerosi libri, a partire da Economia del patrimonio
architettonico-ambientale (1983), ho sostenuto che la triade semiotica
significazione, informazione e comunicazione attraversa il mondo biologico,
fisico e sociale e viceversa il mondo biologico, fisico e sociale
attraversa la triade semiotica significazione, informazione e
comunicazione. Quindi non ha senso pensare che il mondo informativo sia
separato dagli altri mondi (cfr. Maturana e Varela). A seconda i processi
o modelli dei suddetti mondi che si considerano si possono usare alcune o
tutte le categorie di informazioni possibili: genetica (genealogica),
termodinamica o naturale (entropico/neg-entropica), matematica
(entropico-cibernetica) e semantica (storico-culturale o
significato-significante). Le stesse unità autopoietiche possono allentare
o ridurre la loro auto-referenzialità mediante l'informazione-comunicazione
che supera la rigidezza o la chiusura dei loro codici. Per questo in
Valore e valutazioni (1999) mi sono posto in una situazione intermedia
tra Maturana-Varela e Niklas Luhmann. Per comprendere meglio il mio
approccio è necessario: assegnare all'economia il ruolo di scienza delle
scienze che le conferiva anche Ernst Mach; considerare l'informazione la
legge delle leggi di tutte le scienze dell'uomo e della natura.l
Un abbraccio affettuoso a Tutti, da un poverino esponenziale, quale sono.
Francesco Rizzo.
2015-01-19 20:37 GMT+01:00 Joshua Augustus Bacigalupi
bacigalupiwo...@gmail.com:
Josh Bacigalupi here, fellow pirate. Thank you all for this thoughtful
discussion.
Work is a fundamental focus of Terry's project. We can all agree that the
creation of entropy is necessary to do work; such degradation of a gradient
is a necessary precondition of work potential, but not just any work. The
specific kind of work that some self-entailed proto-cell does in its
environment must be such that it increases the chances that such nascent
agency will have increased the chances of its own propagation in that open
system. Terry calls this teleodynamic work.
But this isn't even the most stringent requirement we place on ourselves.
Not only must this work be relevant to its own persistence, *the
constraints necessary to enact this specific dynamic must be able to
persist for some finite time in the absence of any gradient what-so-ever.*
In other words, Terry's hypothesized autogen is specifically conceived to
retain the capacity to do self-efficacious work even after local chemical
equalibrium has been attained.
Once a gradient is again available, any viable autogen must be able to
restart the very specific co-constraints of auto-catalysis and
self-organized containment, a process that we suggest must be able to both
self-repair and create new sets of co-constraint in wholly novel
substrates. This, in effect, spans the ontological gap from the vast
majority of physico-chemical dynamics to the first distinct dynamic of a
measurable medium of informational significance, whose benchmark of
significance is the persistence of autogenic constraints.
Although intriguing, we are skeptical when speculating about vastly more
complex and likely intentional agents, like bacterium, or clearly
intentional agents, like humans. We suggest that focus on a priori
intentional agency skips the distinct logical step from ubiquitous
self-organizing dynamics, where rate of entropy production is increased
(dissipating not only the external gradient but the internal organization
itself), to the relatively rare teleodynamics, where rate of entropy and
work production are mitigated by the autogen's normative relation to its
surroundings.
Cheers,
Josh
On Sun, Jan 18, 2015 at 8:51 PM, Terrence W. DEACON dea...@berkeley.edu
wrote:
Hi Joseph,
Glad to have you join in. My goal is (paraphrasing Einstein) to
develop a model system that is as simple as possible but not too
simple to provide a foundation for formalizing the concepts of
reference and significance. If too simple, it would be helpful to know
what is specifically missing.
In considering more complex model systems the critical constraint is
to avoid cryptically assuming a homuncular perspective that sneaks in
some undescribed mentality (often an external observational
perspective) to do the interpretive work and to define what
constitutes reference and significance. I am unwilling to use a
bacterium as my model, because we implicitly assume their end-directed
and sensing capacities without explaining them. Nor am I willing to
assume that nucleic acids are intrinsically informational or that
information is just pattern replication, as has become a common
assumption in many evolutionary theories.
As I have said a number of times, my goal is not to deal with all
aspects of the information concept, and certainly not at the level of
human thought. I merely propose to dissolve the implicit dualism in
our current concepts at the
