Towards a science of informed matter

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Abstract

Over the last couple of decades, a call has begun to resound in a number of distinct fields of inquiry for a reattachment of form to matter, for an understanding of ‘information’ as inherently embodied, or, as Jean-Marie Lehn calls it, for a “science of informed matter.” We hear this call most clearly in chemistry, in cognitive science, in molecular computation, and in robotics—all fields looking to biological processes to ground a new epistemology. The departure from the values of a more traditional epistemological culture can be seen most clearly in changing representations of biological development. Where for many years now, biological discourse has accepted a sharp distinction (borrowed directly from classical computer science) between information and matter, software and hardware, data and program, encoding and enactment, a new discourse has now begun to emerge in which these distinctions have little meaning. Perhaps ironically, much of this shift depends on drawing inspiration from just those biological processes which the discourse of disembodied information was intended to describe.

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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