Emergence and Evolution of Meaning: The General Definition of Information (GDI) Revisiting Program - Part 2: The Regressive Perspective: Bottom-up

In this second part of our inquiry into the emergence and evolution of meaning, the category of meaning is explored from the manifestation of reality in its corresponding level of interaction towards the interpretation of such reality (the first part deals correspondingly with an appropriate top-down approach). Based on the physical constraints of manifestation through electromagnetic waves, which constitutes the base of animal vision, we analyze the limits of the meaning-offer of such a manifestation, which allows us, on the one hand, to compare the efficiency of natural evolution in the reception of such meaning-offers; on the other hand, to analyze the conditions of developing agency able to acknowledge the reality underlying its manifestation. Regarding the complexity of such an agency and its related pragmatic response, we distinguish different levels, which allow the development of the General Definition of Information (GDI) properly, with respect to interpretation, as advanced in the first part, throughout nature. As we show at the end, our approach provides new grounds for the Unified Theory of Information (UTI) Program, as well as the possibility for bridging other approaches in the converging fields of information, meaning, computation, and communication.

[1]  J. Bruner,et al.  Value and need as organizing factors in perception. , 1947, Journal of abnormal psychology.

[2]  A. Hendrickson,et al.  Distribution of cones in human and monkey retina: individual variability and radial asymmetry. , 1987, Science.

[3]  L. Brain.  The Nervous System , 1963, Nature.

[4]  C. Lévi-Strauss.  The Elementary Structures of Kinship , 1969 .

[5]  Epitome of Copernican astronomy , 1995 .

[6]  J E LEBENSOHN.  The evolution of the eye. , 1959, American journal of ophthalmology.

[7]  David Shortt,et al.  Science and Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology and Complexity. . , 2006 .

[9]  S. A. Schelkunoff,et al.  Some equivalence theorems of electromagnetics and their application to radiation problems , 1936 .

[10]  Einar M. Rønquist,et al.  Foreword , 1999, Biological Psychiatry.

[11]  W. K. Purves.  Life: The Science of Biology , 1985 .

[12]  John Zachary Young,et al.  The retina of cephalopods and its degeneration after optic nerve section , 1962, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences.

[13]  José M. Díaz Nafría,et al.  Emergence and Evolution of Meaning , 2012 .

[14]  S. Brier.  Cybersemiotics: Why Information Is Not Enough , 2008 .

[15]  Mario Pérez-Montoro,et al.  Is Information a Sufficient Basis for Cognition? Part 2: Physical Foundations , 2011 .

[16]  Luciano Floridi,et al.  What is the Philosophy of Information , 2002 .

[17]  S. Kauffman,et al.  On emergence, agency, and organization , 2006 .

[18]  R. Thom.  Structural stability and morphogenesis , 1977, Pattern Recognition.

[19]  Marcus Hutter,et al.  Algorithmic Information Theory , 1977, IBM J. Res. Dev..

[20]  B. Stephenson.  Epitome of Copernican Astronomy , 1987 .

[21]  C. Balanis.  Advanced Engineering Electromagnetics , 1989 .

[22]  Mark Burgin,et al.  Theory of Information - Fundamentality, Diversity and Unification , 2009, World Scientific Series in Information Studies.

[23]  Robert Rosen,et al.  Structural stability and morphogenesis , 1977 .

[24]  R. Guimarães.  The Organic Codes: an introduction to semantic biology , 2003 .

[25]  Philip K. Maini,et al.  Mathematical models in morphogenesis , 1999 .

[26]  J. Laidlaw,et al.  ANATOMY OF THE HUMAN BODY , 1967, The Ulster Medical Journal.

[27]  Mark Burgin.  Algorithmic Information Theory , 2009 .

[28]  J. Aguado.  Information, Self-Reference and Observation Theory in the Context of Social Sciences Epistemology , 2009 .

[29]  T. Gojobori,et al.  Comparative analysis of gene expression for convergent evolution of camera eye between octopus and human. , 2004, Genome research.

[30]  Wolfgang Hofkirchner.  The quest for a unified theory of information : proceedings of the Second International Conference on the Foundations of Information Science , 1999 .