Dear FIS colleagues,
The comments by Stan and Koichiro are intriguing. Particularly if we
swap the term energy for information (communication exchanges). What
kind of communication relationship develops between the living and the
environment along the advancement of the life cycle? How does this
relate to complexity? Maybe the endless repetition of cycles, when an
inner coding is included, can take both directions: the increase of
complexity and also the decrease. Stephen Gould made good arguments
about that: organismic complexity may actually decrease in certain
environments, as dramatically happens for instance in Mycobacteria
Pneumonia, one of the simplest living (autonomous) organisms. The life
cycle imposes its adaptive rules to which complexity should passively
follow... The prokaryotic biomass still predominates and rules the
geocycles of the Planet.
Steven and Jerry have made another series of interesting comments, to
which I would like to ad. The discussion of locality is a preliminary
aspect, as in my view the nitty-gritty occurs afterwards. What happens
along the relatively delocalized "propagation of influence" of the
received signal? The ample self-modification & self-reconfiguration that
follows is the essential topic: all the other attributes & concepts
associated to information both as communication and as self-production
would hang from the events which surround this flow of influence.
Nothing like that web of physical self-modification occurs in the
artificial computing: the hardware is very, very hard. Adaptive
self-reconfiguration could be a more or less adequate technicality, but
actually it is the production of palpable "meaning". It is the
intertwining of communication and self-production, endlessly in action,
repeating the cycle of life --a back of the envelope estimation would
tell that more than 3 x 10 exp 14 times has been running the roulette of
the life cycle in each one of the existing lines of descent...
Best wishes to all
--Pedro
Koichiro Matsuno wrote:
At 4:38 AM 10/6/2015, Stan wrote:
Then we need to consider which life cycle we are going to
investigate. One conversation? The duration of conference?, etc.
Cycles are really enigmatic. Listening to the same old story
repeating itself may sound tedious. However, there is one exception.
If each turn of repetition is affinitive in recruiting something new
from the outside while replacing some of the predecessor already
there, the cycle can constantly be updated. The whole enterprise is
empirically structural. In addition, repeating oneself can be
guaranteed even on the thermodynamic ground alone. If adiabatic
processes are allowed to intervene, they can assume two roles at the
same time. One is to feed upon the available resources as fast as
possible. One more is to install a highly complicated pathway of
energy flow full of cycles to dissipate the intake at the similar fast
rate so as to make both ends of the inlet and outlet to meet. While
the intake of the resources proceeds through the surface of the
organized whole of those cycles, the dissipation takes place in the
entire volume of the organization. Thus, enhancing the volume of the
organized web of those cycles may be a natural consequence for meeting
the greater rate of resource intake. Of course, chemistry can provide
a lot of material hardware to implement such a prescient web of cycles.
Koichiro
--
-
Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
-
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