Response to Pedro's first comments: My choice of autogenesis is motivated by ... 1. It is the simplest dynamical system I have been able to imagine that exhibits the requisite properties required for an interpretive system (i.e. one that can assign reference and significance to a signal due to intrinsic properties alone - that is these features are independent of any extrinsic perspective). A simple organism is far too complex. As a result it is possible to make misleading assumptions about what we don't account for (allowing us to inadvertently sneak in assumptions about what information is and is not - for example just assuming that DNA molecule are intrinsically informational). As I note when introducing this model, developing a simplest but not too simple model system is the key to devising clear physical principles. 2. Autogenesis is not the same as autopoiesis (which is only a description of presumed requirements for life) rather autogenesis is a well-described empirically testable molecular dynamic, that is easily model able in all aspects. Autopoiesis fit with the class of models assuming that simple autocatalysis is sufficient and then simply adds (by assertion) the (non-realized) assumption that autopoiesis can somehow be causally closed and unitary, whereas in fact autocatalytic systems are intrinsically dissipative* and subject to error catastrophe. More importantly, the assumption about coherent finite unity and internal synergy is the critical one, and so it needs to be the one feature that is explicitly modeled in order to understand these aspects of information. 3. The self-regulating self-repairing end-directed dynamic of autogenesis provides a disposition to preserve a reference target state (even when its current state is far from it). This serves as the necessary baseline for comparative assessment, without which reference and significance cannot be defined because these are intrinsically relativistic informational properties (there is a loose analogy here to the 3rd law of thermodynamics and the relativistic nature of thermodynamic entropy).
* PS: Autogenesis is also not a Maximim Entropy Production process because it halts dissipation before its essential self-preserving constraints are degraded and therefore does not exhaust the gradient(s) on which its persistence depends. — Terry -- Professor Terrence W. Deacon University of California, Berkeley
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