Abstract
The concept of biological information, and information in general, usually presupposes a purely quantitative view of reality. Even though actualist quantification has an important place in the description of the world, a nominalistic stance that tries to simplify reality in purely actualist terms inevitably runs into inconsistencies; these inconsistencies have been pointed out by the critical assessments of the notion of biological information. Rather than calling for an abandonment of the informational terminology, we try to rethink information as a part of an event, the description of which cannot be exhausted by a physicalist, mechanistic, temporally static view of reality. Reconceptualizing the notion of biological information in terms of a process of interpretation rather than as an informational object allows us to transcend the limitations imposed by an analysis of reality that depends on a fixed, finite structure of outcome. Thus, we argue that measuring biological information is intrinsically problematic.
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Notes
All of Peirce’s references are given in the standard notation of the Collected Papers: the number of the volume, followed by the number of the section of the text.
This notion of “grounding” is taken directly from T.L. Short (2007: 162): “We may refer to a prior relation as the ‘ground’ of significance, and we may define significance as grounded interpretability”.
As we understand it, the relationship between the operations of physicality (in one hand) and semiosis (in the other) is complex enough to be addressed in a different text, as it is an expression of Peirce’s intricate ontological view. As a) semiosis can be considered part of reality, and b) reality is constituted by a complex of the three categories lest we fall into nominalism, then c) the classification of signs is an abstractive procedure (as conceptualized by Hausman 1993: 10).
For a different, but probably not contradictory, account of the deployment of Peirce’s temporality, see Helm 1985: 32, in which the temporal dimensions spread out to connect a sign with the effects that it can have in other semiotic events.
This is the root of an especially problematic proposal of Peirce – namely, the idea that the universe itself is perfused by signs. To understand this radical proposal, one must understand that signhood is only one of many manifestations of Peirce’s ontological category of Thirdness. It’s not, then, a call for a panpsychist universe, but an application of a metaphysical list of categories.
It is worth quoting El-Hani et al. (2008) more extensively: “The concept of information and related notions should not only be taken seriously in biology, but also clarified by employing appropriate conceptual tools. Biosemiotics offers us a way of facing this challenge, by more precisely explaining in what sense informational notions can show how something physical can give rise to processes which cannot be explained as being purely physical.” (p. 82). However – and in contrast of our reading of the above quotation – our particular way of thinking is that processes are not emergent from the physical; in as much as neither is reducible to the other, we would not assert neither a temporal nor an ontological precedence of one over the other.
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Mercado-Reyes, A., Arroyo-Santos, A. The Limits of Measuring Information in Biology: an Ontological Approach. Biosemiotics 11, 347–363 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-018-9336-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-018-9336-9