Part 07: Seldon Presents Series -- DNA is not “Information”.

Part 07:  Seldon Presents Series -- DNA is not “Information”.

Dear Reader,

It is my pleasure, and my honor, as an officer of the Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.] Office of Public Liaison, to share with you, from time to time, as they are approved for public release by the F.E.D. General Council, key excerpts from the internal writings, and from the internal sayings, of our co-founder, Karl Seldon.

The seventh such release in this new series is entered below [Some E.D. standard edits have been applied, in the version presented below, to the direct transcript of our co-founder’s discourse].

For more information regarding, and for [further] instantiations of, these Seldonian insights, please see --

www.dialectics.info

http://www.dialectics.info/dialectics/Applications.html

ENJOY!

Regards,

Miguel Detonacciones,

Member, Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.],

Participant, F.E.D. Special Council for Public Liaison,

Officer, F.E.D. Office of Public Liaison.

“... DNA is not “information”, contrary to what is habitually claimed or assumed by much biological and sociological discourse today.  “Information”, if it means anything, means semantics; means MEANING.”

“Information” always involves a certain semantic sense, which thus requires a ‘psychê-ic’, [self-]conscious, cognizing being -- i.e., a human[oid] being, or perhaps something beyond that, beyond our present knowledge -- to process it.”

“The ‘‘‘pre-eukaryotic’’’, or “prokaryotic”, living cells, and the eukaryotic livings cells, that process their own [and, sometimes, other, e.g., viral RNA or] DNA, show no empirical signs of human[oid]-level, +, ‘cognitivity’.”

“Therefore, DNA is not “information” -- is not semantic.”

“Instead, DNA is an organization of biochemical causes, key to a vastly complex, and ‘‘‘self-reflexive’’’, self-reproducing orchestration of bio-molecular catalyses, a “spontaneously”-arisen system of biochemical [re]agents, of ‘bio-atomic’ and, especially, of bio-molecular, physical operators.”

“Mis-applying such terms as “information” to DNA risks a ‘contra-scientific’ mystification; a prochronistic ‘retro-projection’ of human[oid] self-consciousness onto pre-human causal systems; a kind of astray animism, and a peculiar variant of the typical modern-ideological INVERSION of real, human ‘subject-ivity’, or ‘agent-ivity’, vis-a-vis pre-human ‘object-ivity’-- as if, e.g., human DNA mega-molecules possess the knowledge as to how to make a human being/body.”  

“DNA mega-molecules are agential but not yet semantic, not yet self-aware, not yet cognitive.  Hence THEY belong to ‘‘‘pre-human-Nature-al’’’ ‘object-ivity’, or, at most, to ‘pre-subjectivity’ and ‘sub-subjectivity’, and not at all to the level/scale of existence wherein “information” can reside. ...”