Information Processing IS Biology
Biosemioticians claim that biosemiotics
is biology and vice versa.
Semiotics is the study of signs, especially as developed by
Charles Sanders Peirce. It is fundamentally a study of how signs are used to communicate information, particularly meaningful information that has pragmatic value for the receiver.
We define "information
processing" as the communication of meaningful information that may lead to a change in the "behaviors" of the receiver. Senders and receivers in biology have evolved naturally to act in ways that humans do when they exchange messages. But the communication of meaningful information in biology is more than a metaphor or analogy to human activity.
Information processing is the essential thing that distinguishes the living from the non-living. It is made possible by a flow of matter and energy with negative entropy ("free energy") through the environment, whose proximate source is the solar radiation but ultimate source is the expansion of the universe.
The flow, the communication, of information and the "processing,' - the decoding of the linear sequence and re-encoding into something capable of utilizing the negative entropy stream to perform biological work - is clearly "one-way," from the genome to the proteome, in the central dogma of biology,
DNA → RNA → protein
The capability to process information may become dormant for a time, in viruses and spores, for example. But the existence of that potential, when returned to the right environment, makes them full members of the biome.
The active reaction to incoming communications, which can include active perception of passive information structures in the material (non-living) environment, is the basis for an information philosophy definition of "
consciousness."
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