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Med 7 - Fall 2005

Digital Culture

Information: between

nature and culture

Luis E. Bruni

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Two basic kinds of information

1) Biological information. 

2) Cultural information. 

Two basic kinds of information techniques: 1) techniques for manipulating, transferring and storing biologically derived information e.g. breeding, biotechnology.2) techniques for manipulating, transferring and storing culturally derived information e.g. natural language, digital media.

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The Nature – Culture Interface

The Biological Realm

The Cultural Realm

From molecules to narratives

and from narratives back to molecules …

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Francis Crick (1958)

three separate factors were involved in protein synthesis:

“the flow of energy, the flow of matter, and the flow of information”

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10 years earlier Norbert Wiener (1948)

“information is information, not matter, nor energy”

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The continuous ‘chain of information’ “If there is no continuous ‘chain of information’ from the lowest level to the highest, there is not justification in claiming that ‘DNA is the repository of biological information’ ”

(Erwin Chargaff, 1962)

How can we conceive “the continuous chain of information from the lowest level to the highest”

and perhaps from the highest to the lowest?

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Biological information between levels of complexity

Multicellular level

Ecological level

Celullar level

Molecular level

Multitrophic Multisemiotic

Embriological

Physiological

Epigenetic

Genetic

Information OrganismicEpigenetic

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Levels of neurosciences

Social and cultural cognitive processes

Organisms

Brain regions

Networks

Individual neurons

Proteomics

Genomics

Information

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An integrative concept of “biological information”

Gregory Bateson context-dependent information in biological systems

This concept of “biological information” departs from:

• paradoxical physicalist accounts of information

• purely probabilistic accounts of information

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News of a difference

The smallest unit of information is a difference or distinction, or news of a difference.

A sign an idea a complex aggregate of differences or distinctions

More elaborate signs and ideas can be formed by complex aggregates of differences emerging codes.

Biological information an emergent property based on sensed differences and complex aggregates of differences.

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Two types of causal links

1) “pleroma” (Bateson)

• the world of non living billiard balls and galaxies • the material world • where forces and impacts are the “causes” of events

2) “creatura”

• the world of the living • where distinctions are drawn and a difference can be a cause• the equivalent of cause is information or a difference

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+

=

Receptor Signal-molecule

Receptor-signal complex

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Information is always contextual,

and context is always hierarchical.

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• The transform of a difference travelling in a circuit is an elementary idea the binding of a single signal-molecule

• The concentration of transforms is a less elementary idea

• Still less elementary is the difference created by coktails of concentrations of transforms of diverse signals acting simultaneously

Gregory Bateson(1904 – 1980)

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Receptors

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From cybernetics to semiotics

Digital and analogical codes.

Indexes, symbols and icons.

Hierarchies and contexts.

From dyadic to triadic causality.

Mental and cognitive processes.

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Information is context-dependentBoth kinds of information are contextual and hierarchical.

 Information is conveyed through different kind of signs which are interpreted according to the context in which they are present there must be a system for interpretation and an organism to which it makes sense.

 The minimal unit of information is a single difference that makes a difference to some system capable of picking up such difference and reacting to it.

 There would be no information if there were not living organisms to receive and react to such information.

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The living sphere

The production and exchange of information and signs is a defining characteristic of life communication and semiosis occur only in the living sphere.

 

In the non-living sphere there are only impacts, forces and energy transformations.

 

Life is a communication web with a long history.

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The Biosphere

1875 the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess  

1920s The ecological concept of the Biosphere Russian geologist Vladimir I. Vernadsky

 The Biosphere the totality and the organic whole of living matter and also the condition for the continuation of life.

 “… all life-clusters are intimately bound to each other. One cannot exist without the other. This connection between different living films and clusters, and their invariancy, is an age-old feature of the mechanism of the earth’s crust, which has existed all through geological time.”

The Atmosphere

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The Biosphere todayThe biosphere that part of a planet's terrestrial system— including air, land and water— in which life develops, and which life processes in turn transform.

 

It is the collective creation of a variety of organisms and species which form the diversity of the ecosystem.

 

From the broadest geophysiological point of view the biosphere is the global ecological system integrating all living beings and their relationships, with their interaction with the elements of the lithosphere (rocks), the hydrosphere (water), and the atmosphere (air).

Man and Woman in the Biosphere culture.

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Semiotic interactions

Any elemental biological organism already interacts semiotically with its invironment when it selects or avoids energetic or material objects in it.

The semiotic interactions of organisms are not limited to physical dependence modes.

Other possibilities for semiotic mutualism in which one organism uses regularities exhibited by other organisms as cues in the same way it may use perceived regularities from the abiotic world for similar purposes.

A trend in evolution the development of organisms with ever more complex Umwelts organisms with a subjective experience of the world supported by increasingly sophisticated sensory apparatus (and corresponding nervous system in higher animals) which would enable organisms to form fine-tuned internal impressions of what lay round about them.

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The “Umwelt”

“Umwelt” the phenomenal worlds of organisms, the world around them as they themselves perceive it, i.e.: what they actually “construct” out of the semiotic niche (von Uexküll, 1940).

The Umwelt-space of a moth will contain no sounds emitted by birds or other vertebrate animals with the single exception of the 20.000 hertz frequency used by hunting bats.

The Umwelt-space maps onto a "response space" defined by the set of possible activities of the organism. (Hoffmeyer, 1998).

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Complex Umwelts

One important trend in evolution the development of animals with still more complex Umwelts.

 

Many advantages of possessing refined Umwelts semiotic freedom e.g. the capacity for anticipation, the possibility of foreseeing actual events and protect oneself against them the possibility of deriving advantage from anticipating events.

 

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Signals that build signs

1) Conspecific signals Pheromones

2) Inter-species/inter-kingdom signals Semio-chemicals

Exo-semiosis (communication between organisms)

Endo-semiosis (communication within organisms)

3) Intercellular signals Hormones/neurotransmitters

4) Intracellular signals Second messengers

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Social complexity

Horizontal synchronic communication is a precondition for advanced social complexity learning and organizational processes are not be possible without it.

 

Due to this trend the horizontal or ecological semiotic network has gained an increasing autonomy relative to the genetic semiotic system the authority to make decisions was gradually delegated from the genomic systems to the organisms themselves (Hoffmeyer 1993).

 

Gradually a semiotic network was established throughout the surface of the Earth an autonomous sphere of communication a semiosphere.

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The biological semiosphere

The semiosphere a sphere like the atmosphere, the hydrosphere or the biosphere. It pervades the biosphere and consists in communication: sounds, odours, movements, colours, electric fields, waves of any kind, chemical signals, touch etc. (Hoffmeyer, 1997).

Semiotic niche organisms not only belong to ecological niches they are always also bound to a semiotic niche, i.e. they will have to master a set of signs of visual, acoustic, olfactory, tactile and chemical origin in order to survive (in the semiosphere).

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Man and Woman in the Semiosphere

Cultural History a vertical semiotic system complex subjective relations between human individuals and societies through the times runs in parallel or immersed in Natural History.

Natural language a particular state of consciousness a particular cognitive and communicational process the Cultural Semiosphere Yuri Lotman (1990).

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Two communication systemsIn living systems:

1) Vertical semiotic system genetic and epigenetic communication down through the generations heredity.

2) Horizontal semiotic system communication throughout the ecological space.

In cultural systems:

1) Diachronic communication history

2) Synchronic communication here and now

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Med 7 - Fall 2005

Digital Culture

Information: between

nature and culture

Luis E. Bruni