Inquire about purchasing the book | Table of Contents | Annotated Bibliography | Class on Nature of Mind
These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
|
The Origin of
Biological Information A different but similar
non-biological approach to life is based on information, and directly
influenced by Cybernetics and Information Theory. Life is viewed as information
capable of replicating and modifying itself. The US anthropologist
Gregory Bateson argued that the substance of
the biological world is, ultimately, "pattern" (not this or that
chemical compost), a position that allowed him to seek a unified view of
cognitive and biological (and cybernetic) phenomena. His definition of
information stretched beyond mere computation: a bit of information is a
difference that makes a difference. Thereby implying that, in order to be
information, a pattern must affect something. (Also, information is not a
thing, it is a relation). The pioneering work of the
Spanish ecologist Ramon Margalef in the 1960s set the stage. He
viewed an ecosystem as a cybernetic system driven by the second law of
Thermodynamics. Succession (the process of replacing old species with new
species in an ecosystem) is then a self-organizing process, one whereby an
element of the system is replaced with a new element so as to store more
information at less energetic cost. The German biophysicist
Bernd-Olaf Kuppers found an elegant way to reconcile the paradox of increasing
information. Life is biological information, and the origin of life is the
origin of biological information. Information has different aspects: syntactic (as
in information theory), semantic (function and meaning of information for an
organism's survival), and pragmatic (following the German physicist
Carl-Friedrich Von Weizsacker, "information is only that which produces
information"). Since evolution
depends on the semantic aspect of information, there is no contradiction with
the second law of Thermodynamics, which only deals with the structural aspect
of matter (i.e., the syntactic aspect of information). The origin of syntactic
information relates to the prebiotic synthesis of biological macromolecules.
The origin of semantic information relates to the self-organization of
macromolecules. The US biologist Christopher
Langton emphasized that living
organisms use information, besides matter and energy, in order to grow and
reproduce. In living systems the manipulation of information prevails over the
manipulation of energy. Life depends on
a balance of information: too little information is not enough to produce life,
too much can actually be too difficult to deal with. Life is due to a
reasonable amount of information that can move and be stored. Life happens at the edge of chaos. Ultimately, life is a property of the
organization of matter. As the Canadian biologist
Lionel Johnson put it (“The Thermodynamic Origin of Ecosystems”, 1998), a
bio-system can be compared to an information processor, whose job is to
continuously extract, store and transmit information. Two fundamental and
opposed forces compete, one leading towards increased uniformity (and lower
information) over "ecological" time and one leading towards increased
diversity (and greater information) over "evolutionary" time. This
results in a hierarchy of living organisms, which has at the top the one
species that developed the best strategy of energy extraction and storage, the
highest resource utilization and the least dissipation (this is a reworking of
a principle due to Alfred Lotka in the 1920s). Extracting
information requires an energy flow, which in turns causes production of
entropy. This can also be viewed from the point of view of communication:
dissipative structures can exist only if there is communication among their
components, whether in the form of genetic code (communication over time) or
societies (communication over space). The bio-system is, ultimately, an
information processor and a communication network. Predating Freeman Dyson's definition of life, the Hungarian chemist Tibor Ganti views life as the combination
of two systems: metabolism and information control. The simplest form of life,
in practice, is the "chemoton": an autocatalytic cycle coupled with
an information molecule. Ganti's living organism, therefore, looks more like a
computer than a program, because it includes the "hardware". Life
without the hardware is not life, it is just the process that generates life.
It also takes that "information molecule" to have life. Ganti listed the traits that characterize the minimal living being (individuation, metabolism, stability, information storage, internal regulation, growth, reproduction, and death) and worked up from that definition.
|
| 
| 
| 
|