I think its all in the approach. It seems like the approach within the biosemiotics community or what i've read is weighted towards traditional semiotics discourse which is essentially literary or as you say metaphorical/metaphysical, they don't seem to do too well with incorporating mathesis or physics as you do with Wolfram (among many others) who really sort of bridges the digital/analog with his computationalism (this is probably wrong) but they do bring in Kaufmann who is a noted proponent of "the new biology" I think but nowhere have i seen even a discrete discussion of something as common as the Dorion Sagan's endosymbiotic origins of mitochondria discussed using their own terms of "endosemiosis" which seemingly could get into some pretty intriguing questions of protoctistan omnisexuality as a 'digital' constructionism of 'analogic' organism or some such.. this leads essentially to what i would call nested umwelts (ie the body as emergence) which certainly just in the sense of lineages of organelles could get very confusing ie calling the genetic system digital and the mobile agency analog.. i really think wolframs computationalism destroys the distinction at the environmental level or perhaps i'm just seeing dancing pixies..
remedially lq
----- Original Message ----- From: "Alan Sondheim" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, May 10, 2005 8:45 PM Subject: Re: Note towards a foundational phenomenology of analogic/discrete
I don't know what to make of the article. For one thing, temporal processes and histories do seem encoded in physics, Latour notwithstanding - although I may be missing something of course. That's what cosmology is all about, as well as any of the qm thought- or physical- experiments. On the other hand, the essay speaks in such generalities for me that it seems more metaphysical than anything; I'm not sure what function the approach would have. But then every time I hear 'autopoesis' I get worried. I do see a relation between all of this and catastrophe theory and the claims of the latter, but again I'm probably wrong. On the other hand, I feel that the metaphoric increasingly dominates here, but I'm not an nth-order cyberneticist, not even a 1st, even with Bateson.
- Alan
On Tue, 10 May 2005, Lanny Quarles wrote:
isn't that a strange term? but do a google search on it and you'll find a wealth of contexts for the term. my guess is its fairly synonymous with analogical
here's another paper mentioning the "analogly coded" which i take to mean in one sense "alive" though perhaps it has more to do inside-outsides/outside-insides in a stricter sense.. you tell me! :)
http://www.molbio.ku.dk/MolBioPages/abk/PersonalPages/Jesper/Surfaces.h tml
two
I'm just not sure what 'analogly coded' actually means.
Thanks! - Alan
On Tue, 10 May 2005, Lanny Quarles wrote:
thought this bit about "code duality" and the biosemiotics take on the analog and the digital might be of interest here. Wonderful to read this kind of work Alan, Thanks!
lq
Life, then, exhibits a non-trivial, semiotic, interaction between1991).co-existing messages, the analogly coded message of the organism itself and its redescription in the digital code of DNA. This principle has been termed code-duality (Hoffmeyer and EmmechewithAs analogly coded messages the organisms recognise and interactmessageseach other in the ecological space, while as digitally codedfertilisationthey (after eventual recombination through meiosis andtimein sexually reproducing species) are passively carried forward insurvival' .between generations. The essence of heredity is 'semioticus
The joint emergence on our planet of life and code-duality broughtfactfrom the sphere of difference to the sphere of distinction, i.e. information in the sense of Gregory Bateson's famous definition: "a difference which makes a difference" (Bateson 1970), which is inlastquite close to a sign in the sense of Peirce. Sebeok's prophesy that "a full understanding of the dynamics of semiosis may in theworthanalysis turn out to be no less than the definition of life" ismentioning in this connection (Sebeok 1979).
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