Dear FIS colleagues,
I am responding to a mail from Soeren (below) that, curiously, was
retained by the list filter. Sorry, but some parts of his message are
written in a rather arrogant tone that does not match the
unconditionally polite style of our exchanges. This is a pluralistic
list and quite different positions may be defended, always within
appropriate scholarly bounds.
First, my comment on semiotics was as it was --not with the exaggeration
introduced by Soeren. Looking in positive, it is interesting that in the
80's I also started a PhD thesis on the parallel evolution of
neuroanatomy and behavior, with a pretty strong ethological content, but
stopped it as I could not converge to any relevant outcome. Instead I
moved downwards, and started the informational study of the cell and the
evolution of biological information processing... Later on the approach
pleased Michel Conrad, and the rest is part of fis history.
About my "physicalist" conception of signaling and biological
information, I think the two recent papers in BioSystems ("On
prokaryotic Intelligence..." and "On eukaryotic Intelligence...")
represent an original view that can enrich the current system biology
debates on signaling bases of intelligence--or not!, people will tell.
To keep the explanation short, the way cellular life has channeled the
energy flow (eg, Morowitz, 1968) versus the channeling of the
"information flow" contains lessons for the further deployment of
biological and social complexity. In particular, the cellular processual
distinction between "metabolite" and "signal" looks fascinating, in
human terms it is like reading the newspaper vs, eating a sandwich (it
can be found in my recent paper of fis-Moscow, journal Information)...
Not far from these views, engineer Adrian Bejan (2012) has recently
proposed a "constructal law" based on the circulation needs of the
energy flow in nature and society--could we devise a parallel or
complementary scheme for the information flow? Actually Bejan's attempt
covers it but rather poorly, at least compared with the depth of the
energetic part.
In part, I am frustrated that we have been living the most momentous
changes in the social history of information and at fis have been able
to say very little about. Rather than struggling to achieve the true,
monolithic, universal theory of information, shouldn't we aspire to
frame a convivial multi-disciplinary space where plenty of both APPLIED
and theoretical research on informational entities can be developed and
cross-fertilize?
And this is my Second of the week.
Best regards
---Pedro
Søren Brier wrote:
Dear Pedro
This is a wonderful mail revealing all sorts of theoretical views and philosophy of
science prejudices. This one takes the price: " Semiotics could be OK for the
previous generation--something attuned to our scientific times is needed now." The
conclusion is that semiotics is not something new and advanced but old-fashioned and
outdated !!! The Peircean biosemioticians are fooling themselves ! They are not
scientific.
This is a crucial discussion that many of us have with Marcello Barbieri on a somewhat different theoretical platform. But he is wonderfully clear and explicit in his argumentation and always attempting to produce new alternative models and theories, not just arguing from the status quo of science.
I wonder how deep your own understanding of semiotics actually is - especially Peircean semiotics.
Peirce is very naturalistic. Your other price remark arouse this suspicion " of course,
later on Tinbergen, Lorenz, Eibl-Eibelsfeldt, etc. were to develop ad hoc theoretical
schemes". As one having written a master dissertation in Lorenz theoretical development of the
ethological paradigm over a period of 30 years and lecturing at the Konrad Lorenz institute and
researched in comparative psychology for three years after that, I must say that your knowledge of
this area of research is very weak. I have used some of the results of this analysis in my book
"Cybersemiotics: Why information is not enough". Which you probably have not bothered to
read as you deemed it outdated in its birth and unscientific.
I also wonder what the theoretical framework is for the concept of "signal". Is
it objective information transfer in a Shannon or a Wiener framework? Does it include any
first person experiential aspects and any social meaning aspects? Or is it - as I
suspect - a pure physicalistic approach used for explaining processes on the biological,
the psychological and the social level as well, but ignoring the special qualities of
those compared to the physical level?
Best
Søren
-----Oprindelig meddelelse-----
Fra: Fis [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] På vegne af Pedro C. Marijuan
Sendt: 29. oktober 2014 14:46
Til: fis@listas.unizar.es
Emne: Re: [Fis] "The Travellers"
Dear FIS colleagues,
Quite interesting exchanges, really. The discussion reminds me the times when
behaviorism and ethology were at odds on how to focus the study of human/animal
behavior. (Maybe I already talked about that some months
ago.) On the one side, a rigorous theory and a strongly reductionist point of view
were advanced --about learning, conditioned & unconditioned stimuli, responses,
observation standards, laboratory exclusive scenario, etc. On the other side, it
was observing behavior in nature, approaching without preconceptions and
tentatively characterizing the situations and results; it was the naturalistic
strategy, apprehending from nature before forming any theoretical scheme (of
course, later on Tinbergen, Lorenz, Eibl-Eibestfeldt, etc. were to develop ad hoc
theoretical schemes).
How can we develop a theory on signals without the previous naturalistic approach to the involved phenomena? Particularly when the panorama has dramatically changed after the information-biomolecular revolution. We have a rich background of cellular signaling systems, both prokaryotic and eukaryotic, to explore and cohere. We have important neuroscientific ideas (although not so well developed). We have social physics and social networks approaches to the social dynamics of information. We should travel to all of those camps, not to stay there, but to advance a soft all-encompassing perspective, later on to be confronted with the new ideas from physics too. The intertwining between self-production and communication is a promising general aspect to explore, in my opinion...
socially and biologically it makes a lot of sense.
Semiotics could be OK for the previous generation--something attuned to our
scientific times is needed now.
best ---Pedro
--
-------------------------------------------------
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/
-------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Fis mailing list
Fis@listas.unizar.es
http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
