Towards a science of informed matter
Section snippets
Introduction: Form vs. Matter
There is, I think, a sense in which the notion of a science of informed matter is oxymoronic. And that sense has precisely to do with the extent to which modern scientific traditions remain rooted in distinctions between form and matter inherited from classical traditions. In Plato’s philosophy, it was form that was the object of the rational knowing mind; matter was the realm of the irrational, the sensual, the chaotic, the indeterminate, the unknowable. For Plato, knowledge required
Information
I cannot begin to do justice here to the huge literature on the different notions of information currently in use in mathematics, computer science, physics, and biology that exists, and I make no pretence to doing so. Nevertheless, in the essayistic style of the present discussion, I would like to suggest that similar echoes of ancient form–matter dualisms can also be found in information theory and in computational science. Let me start with information theory: Classically (at least since
The move towards embodiment in computer science and cognitive science
The distinction between SI and EI, between structural and effective information, bears some striking parallels with a set of distinctions that a number of computer scientists have (more or less independently) recently introduced, and I want to argue that they signal the beginnings of a distinct break from one, relatively formalistic, tradition and the forging of another; the crafting of a new epistemological culture in which form is always and inextricably material, and matter always and
A science of informed matter
But the call for a “science of informed matter” with which I began comes from an altogether different quarter. It comes not from computer science, nor from cognitive science, and not even from biology; it comes instead from chemistry. More specifically, it comes from the field that Jean-Marie Lehn has dubbed “supramolecular chemistry”, and that his own efforts have been so important in establishing. The focus of supramolecular chemistry, largely inspired by the self-assembly of proteins and
Conclusion
It is just a little more than 200 years ago that the subject of the life sciences was adjudicated to be sufficiently distinct as to require of its science a name of its own. That name is of course biology. But ever since, the splitting off of biology from the physical sciences has posed an apparently insurmountable problem for committed materialists: On the one hand we agree that life is nothing more than physical and chemical processes; on the other hand, for all the successes physicists and
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