As I mentioned earlier, individual organisms remain alive for only as long as:
They manage to keep their innards in and most of everything else out. Or, in more formal parlance, to maintain their structural integrity.
They manage to take in what they need in order to continue their metabolism and to excrete the consequences of the before mentioned metabolism.
To perform those tasks, organisms need two things.
Matter and rules. Substance distributed in such manner as to constitute the organism we’re talking about and instructions regarding what to do in each circumstance.
For example, while not all organisms need to breathe, all of them need to take in some ‘matter’. Use some of it for ‘maintenance purposes’ and the rest as fuel. In order to recognize the precise substances needed, each organism needs very specific ‘filters’. And information from ‘inside’ regarding the amount needed in each moment of time. Then, once the required quantities of those respective substances have been ‘ingested’, the organism needs to perform certain precise tasks in order to obtain the necessary results.
Not to mention the fact that ‘substance distributed in such a manner as to constitute the organism we’re talking about’ has to be ‘distributed’ in a certain manner… yet even more information!
So life is about matter and information. Big deal! Nothing new under the sun…
Even Pulcinella knows that living organisms rely on genes to pass information from one generation to the next one.
True enough.
My point being that transfer of information is inherent to being alive!
A ‘new born’ cannot ‘become’ unless the pertinent information is ‘put forward’ by its ‘parents’.
And it cannot remain alive unless information continues to flow between the individual organism and the environment where it lives. As well as inside the above mentioned organism…
But there’s a problem here.
I keep saying ‘information’. But what is it? How do we recognize a signal as being information?
The answer is contained in the question. To have information we need signals and a key to interpret the inputs.
For instance, ‘get some more oxygen, or ‘food’ ‘, and a receiving agent, capable of performing the task, which can decipher the signal. ‘Lungs’, or ‘guts’, able to simultaneously understand the signal and to fulfill the need expressed by the ‘managing center’.
To cut a long story short, languaging is how things work in the living world.
True or false?
Does it make any sense to sent false signals?
To interpret them ‘differently’?
‘Living’?!?
What does it mean, after all?
nicichiarasa 