Life and cognition. A postscript (original) (raw)

For Monod, the living being is a teleonomic object endowed with a project realized in its structure and through the influence of its performances, an object which reproduces itself invariant. Teleonomy, autonomous morphogenesis and, invariance are, therefore, the characteristics of this object whose expression and realization is its own structure. But for each expression of structure, there is necessarily a definite amount of information associated with it. An expressed information, in turn, presupposes a "broadcaster", a broadcaster which, for Monod, is an object identical to the first according to the laws of invariance. The teleonomic project is nothing other than the transmission of the content of invariance defined, precisely, as that quantity of information that, transmitted from one generation to another, ensures the conservation of the structure. This is the kingdom of Necessity in which Chance comes to creep in, thus seizing, each time, the opportunity for adequate selection. It is in such a frame of reference that Nature finally appears to Monod (in accordance with his reinterpretation of Democritus) as a tinkerer characterized by the presence of precise principles of self-organization (1). However, while Monod was obliged to incorporate his brilliant intuitions into the framework of first-order cybernetics and a theory of information with an exclusively syntactic character such as that defined by Shannon, research advances in recent decades have led not only to the definition of a second-order Cybernetics but also to an exploration of the boundaries of semantic information. As H. Atlan states, on a biological level "the function self-organizes together with its meaning". Hence the need to refer to a conceptual theory of complexity and a theory of self-organization characterized in an intentional sense. There is also a need to introduce, at the genetic level, a distinction between coder and ruler as well as the opportunity to define a real software space for natural evolution. The recourse to non-standard model theory, the opening to a new general semantics, and the innovative definition of the relationship between coder and ruler can be considered, today, among the most powerful theoretical tools