The following response from Alberto GaitanĖ This notion isn't new, per se, growing as it has from epistemology. Major players in just the last 100 years have included Ludwig Holtzman (who described the property of the universe we call entropy), Gregory Bateson, Claude Shannon, Richard Dawkins, Francisco Varella. Another great book on this very subject is Grammatical Man by Jeremy Campbell. my band was named negentrope and made reference to this notion of the emergence of information from chaos by virtue of our collective will as media artists ad libbing. Negentrope turned into selforganizingsystem in the late 90s, a name that riffs on the fact that information is there only if you know what you're looking for. Ideas can't happen until...um...they can happen. In 1982, I read an astounding paper by Brian R, Gaines (Centre for Man-Computer Studies, Barbican, London, UK) published as part of the proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting; that year in DC. It was titled "Knowledge as an Autopoietic System." He mentions much of what Arie S. Issar seems to be getting at. Who said, "Knowledge is the topography of ignorance"? During my studies in biology, as I went through the list of required courses in the physical sciences, I was amazed at what scientists mean when they use the term "dimension." Every phenomenon is composed of a potentially infinite number of dimensions; it's all in what you look at and measure. The great pioneering evolutionary ecologist Evelyn Hutchinson said of ecology that it was "an N-th dimentional hypervolume" composed of all the environmental parameters of importance to a species. That's why I think that the term "dimension" is slippery. There is no doubt in my mind that information is self-organizing and using us as its medium to propagate itself into eternity by encoding its organic subset as DNA and other replicators. It also is clear that we are about 25 years into what John B. Calhoun described on that hot Summer day in 1982 as "the beginning [with the invention of the microprocessor, I assume] of a 200 year transition in the evolution of knowledge into an era when the human population continuously declines as comensal relations develop with computer-like systems which assume more properties of living matter as their population increases. This transition marks the threshold inception of the 8th major meanse by which information processing is enhanced, and thus negentropy increased and evolution continued. These means are genetic control, species diversification, systems complexification, brian and learning, 'velocity' (i.e., access to information), linkage into communication networks, information prostheses, and prosthetic systems." We are the universe looking at itself and the universe wants more and faster awareness. Make room for the cyborgs. The wonder of it all, for me [minus the prime-mover thing], was stated thousands of years ago: "So I walk on uplands unbounded, and know that there is hope for that which Thou didst mold out of dust to have consort with things eternal." -The Dead Sea Scrolls alberto@null.net
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