Contents:Søren Brier: Foreword Full Text Claus Emmeche: Defining life as a semiotic phenomenon Abstract David J. Depew & Bruce H. Weber: What Does Natural Selection Have to Be like Abstract Jesper Hoffmeyer: Surfaces Inside Surfaces Abstract Robert Vallée: Cognition et Système, Essai d'Épistémo-praxéologie Abstract Robert Vallée: An Introduction to "Epistemo-praxiology" Abstract Columns Ranulph Glanville: A (Cybernetic) Musing: Varieties of Variety? Full Text Louis H. Kauffman: Virtual Logic - The Calculus of Indications Full Text Reviews Maj-Britt Rosenkilde, Anja Abel Sørensen, Christine Nordentoft and Søren Brier: Review of International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics Full Text Axel Randrup: Whispering Pond Full Text Mariaelena Bartesaghi: "The Therapy of Dialogical Possibility" Full Text
|
Foreword: Life -- Natural Selection, Self-Organization and SemiosisBy Søren Brier The present issue is the first to appear with Imprint Academic as publisher. As you can see we have taken the opportunity to make a few improvements in format and layout. We have added the concept 'autopoiesis' to the journal's subtitle as studies in discourse communities and encyclopedias have led us to realize that many researchers into autopoieses theory do not consider themselves as working in second order cybernetics but rather in a related paradigm with common ground. We have respected that and put autopoiesis in the subtitle. The first three articles have as a common theme the use of concepts of self-organization to further develop the theory of pre-biological and biological evolution and deepen the understanding of the phenomenon of life. Claus Emmeche discusses the role of definitions of life in biology and artificial life research and investigates the consequences of a semiotic conception of life. David Depew and Bruce Weber investigate how natural selection and self-organization work together to produce biological order. To this end they combine autopoiesis theory and developmental system theory to a new basis for the synthesis of genetics, developmental biology and evolutionary theory in a way that goes beyond algorithmical thinking. Jesper Hoffmeyer uses autopoiesis and semiosis as supplementary categories to describe the semiotic loop that integrates self-reference and other-reference in the closed surfaces of living systems' temporal life. Robert Vallée gives an introduction and a summary of his own book published in French summing up a life's work with his special formulations of second order cybernetics and the nature of observing and the praxis of the observer, and in the subsequent paper he gives a condensed account of his Epistemolo-praxiological theory of cognition. In the columns, Ranulph Glanville writes about the variety of the concepts of variety and how we can come to terms with them in second order cybernetics and even to measure them and Louis Kauffman gives a logical story that goes deep into foundational aspects of Spencer-Brown's 'Logic of Form' and the relation between distinctions, names, reality and elusion. Finally there are reviews of Francois' new International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics -- which is a major event in systems and cybernetics, of Ervin Laszlo's Whispering Pond and Harlene Anderson's The Therapy of Dialogical Possibility. The artist of this issue is Felix Pedersen.
|
