WHAT IS INFORMATION ?

From matter towards meaning

A. LAGACHE

Philosophe

75017 Paris - France

"The highest point a man can reach is surprise".

Goethe

1 - Circumstances of Understanding
2 - The Mechanistic Paradigm
3 - On the Brinks
4 - From Matter Towards Information: an Intermediate object, the violin
5 - Imagery of the Passage
6 - What is information? general Principle
7 - from Signal to Representation
8 - To Whom it May Concern"
9 - The Frame of Reference: Principle of levels
10 - The Continuity of the Paradigms
11 - References

1. Circumstances of Understanding

We understand what we choose to understand, building up the tools to carry out: the "big book of Nature" by itself doesn't display what is to be known. Yet the whole reality is always present round about us, eternally sparkling and rolling on. But amongst it, mind is limited to choosing what he is able to evolve.

Experiment doesn't speak by itself : we need ideas in order to interpret it. About 1615, William Harvey invented the circulation. Experience had not been lacking before : for some centuries, men had bled on battlefields. But it was not interpretable, before the conceptual approach of hydraulics was usable. Thus, even if we are used of considering circulation as a very realistic idea, it had to be invented.

Every fruitful scientific activity requires a paradigm : that is a logical device of choices which makes reason operating in front of phenomena, and at the same time limits it. What is the interesting element of reality that we select, what appears to us as an object of science? What kind of interactions will we set between these objects ? What kind of coherence will we use in order to follow developing phenomena ? We have to answer these questions by choosing relevant tools.

Although these choices were unconsciously done in the history of science, they are always implicitly present, and necessary. But we don't care about when sciences work easily : the emerging part of sciences is usually a "natural" gentleman's agreement, just as well intellectual as social : a possible experimentation fits with the "normal" set of concepts available at this time.

Beyond this, abnormality and paradox arise when new objects appear, near the limits of the explicative power of a paradigm. And, by a movement of backlash, this situation on-the-limits sheds new light on the previous paradigm, until then remained tacitly accepted and now to be criticized. To a certain extend, we only know afterwards what we were doing : it is the normal historical process of knowledge.

2. The Mechanistic Paradigm

The classical paradigm of science is, for us, the materialistic and mechanistic one. It is so usual, and has been so fruitful, that we tend to mistake it for the mere law of rationality. Since the Seventeenth Century, we learnt from physics and chemistry the ruled use of mind, including both logical deduction and control by experiment. It is not to be forgotten neither to be changed.

But this science is a method, not a metaphysical necessity : the paradigmatic choices of classical science are one way, not all the possible ways. The mechanistic paradigm must be criticized in so far as it claims to encompass every reality, and to be the only and one method.

A short examination of its main features can show these choices and their limits.

-Matter is the object of classical science : the spatial object, with a mass. It assumes the law of situs : one thing in one place. Each object takes up an exclusive and determined location in space. That is fine for matter! But some facts do not fulfil this condition : semantic phenomena have no location, meaning facts imply a wide organization in which no special point of space can be, by itself, the "place"of sense.

-The interactions which can take place between material objects are external and negative : symmetrical exchange of elements, or friction forces. It rules out another kind of interactions, the positive ones, through which exchanging transforms the interacting structures themselves ; like for example in the immune system, where the very meeting with an antigen irreversibly changes the background ; in this area, exchanges are creative, and different from an exchange of objects in which, at the end, there is always a zero-sum.

-In the same way, the principle of identity of substance has its limits. By saying "One thing is and remains what it is", Aristotle put a great order in thought. But he made difficult to evolve a science of changing objects, like biological ones, where transformation is a constitutive piece of facts. Objects of physics fulfil the theorem of Poincaré ; on the contrary, living systems never come back to a previous state, individuality is not periodic.

-We know now that physics and chemistry deal with closed systems, in which the most balanced equilibrium is the description in terms of elements. But we know also that the living beings are open systems, and resist to analysis : their own balance involves totality, which cannot be explained by the sum of analytic elements. The concept of creative organisation arises from science but overtakes its previous principle.

The physico-chemical approach had been formed on a macroscopic pattern of matter. Physics itself is now ahead. But it seems that other sciences still have the same look at material objects ; in fact, a normative way for results and experiment imposes in practice an idea of materialism that physics itself has overtaken for a time. Henceforth we can wonder whether the strength of the mechanistic way of thinking is an intellectual requirement, or a social set.

3. On the Brinks

Anyway, the need to go ahead and to overtake the limits of the previous model is now actual for everybody. And many present ideas endeavour to create new ways, without loosing the best of rational requirements. But a lot of attempts remain ambiguous : the prevailing model of mechanistic thought still keeps on shaping its escape bids to go beyond itself.

3.1. ARGUING ABOUT COMPLEXITY

One can say that we are confronted to more and more complex objects, which is probably true, but according to the meaning we give to it. If it was only a question of quantitative complexity, yet science would be led to a deadlock : a more complex object would require a more complex technology, a computer as big as the earth whose product would be a new more complex object which would require a computer as big as the universe, and so on... The nonsense which arises from this description shows the process : it implies to deal with more complex objects without changing our mind, with the same concepts and techniques that we already acquired for more simple things. Let us remind history : it is not the first time that such questions are asked! The solar system "complexity" was in a similar situation at the end of the Middle Age : by the improvement of optical instruments, astronomic observations mutiplied, and their classification became too complex. Some people hastily concluded that there was no rational order in universe.

Then, around 1543, came Copernic and his hypothesis of heliocentrism... The first reactions, by the way, were that... it was far too complex to be evolved and used! About 1573, Tycho Brahé still refined observations and accumulated experimental data. But he refused the copernician assumption.

Let us then emphasize the difference, that Einstein explains, between "psychological complexity" and "conceptual complexity" : the first one comes from historical inertia and habits of thinking ; we always consider as the most simple idea what we are accustomed to using, and then mind mistakes its own acclimatization for logics. But Einstein subtly remarks that for example relativity, when applied to the right phenomena, hugely simplifies loads of problems. Light came from theory : Kepler (1609) improved the theoretical model of Universe ; and then, Galileo Galilei (1632) was able to assert : "e pure gira !" ; It is still going round !

Theory was good enough to organize experimental data and to prospect ahead. The right paradigm was found for the right object, and complexity was shown to be an historical effect : a temporary inadequacy between observed facts and conceptual frame. Are we in the same situation ? At least we can ask the question, whether we must reduce complexity by means of cumulative analysis, or find new concepts fitting with the new levels of organization we now deal with.

3.2. THE FORTUNE OF CHAOS

The notion of "deterministic chaos" gives rise to the same questioning. It certainly has its right implement and gets a new look at some mechanical system's behaviour. But it is too much in fashion, and I wonder if it can keep the promises that scientific litterature nowadays asks it to give. Actually, it is used beyond its strict physical definition, each time one needs to overtake a classical determinism.

Prigogine and Stengers (1988) gave a beautiful analysis of chaos, scrupulously displaying its limits. Yet the notion of chaos can describe "the complex and unforeseenable activity, collective and erratic, the very contrary of inert disorder" about a system. But there we find two limits, especially concerning the application of chaos to living system. First, it is a description, not an explanation; there is no new possibility to describe any new kind of interactions between elements, as we need in biology to conceive the genuine fate of molecules in the original living connecting ways. Second, and consequently, we only can describe chaos as a collective behaviour : the idea shows there its affinity with large numbers, which is the uppest limit that a mechanistic paradigm can reach without introducing qualitative changings. Then the original element that lacks in biology is missing again : the individual factor , whose need is noticeable now in so many medical and biological problems. Then we feel that we are not on the good level of interpretation for living beings, which demonstrate precisely their amazing ability in finding their order where we see only our mechanical disorder. Besides, deterministic chaos often looks like a psychological safe investment.

Sometimes chaos is used as merely reinforcing the very belief in mechanistic almightiness : as if it were necessary to make it decreasing, in order to make room for anything else. This view would suppose that mechanistic determinism is antagonistic with any other one, like for example living order ; which is obviously absurd with regard to natural laws unity : if living systems determine them in an original way, it can only be in accordance with the mechanical order, though ahead of it. Sometimes chaos simply looks like the ultimate disguise of a supplier chance, which has always been the last resort of materialism (like a new version of spontaneous generation).

It amounts to trying to transgress a limit by means of negating the first position, which is the old dialectical process. But it does not provide anything new, because the negation does not contain anything different from what it negates.

In the same kind of idea, the great development of statistics during the Twentieth Century became a marvellous tool for analysis ; but, as regards concepts, in its common use, it is only a variation on classical determinism, and doesn't introduce any new kind of relations between elements. Although the notion of determinist chaos is worthy to note, because it introduces the idea of a positive and creative irreversibility, however we must be careful not to ask it to be a panacea.

Nevertheless, from different horizons new ideas about determinism arise. They do not imply any contradiction or negation of a natural order in phenomena. But they suggest that this order can be qualitatively different from these we already know. We still assume a general and harmonizing order in nature, more than ever. But the very limits of our ways of thinking imply several paradigms to evolve it.

4. From Matter Towards Information : an Intermediate object, the Violin.

Yet cybernetics, for example, provided new possibilities. It still deals with mechanical devices, but allows to reach a new level of organization, displaying new properties. Let us take the example of a violin, as a very organized and integrated object. From a materialistic point of view, it is nothing more than about 70 pieces of wood and metal. But it presents some properties which already overtake a plain analytic description.

- Each piece is strongly linked with the others, in order to vibrate in a total unity. Everybody knows the very symbolic "soul" of the violin : the soundpost, this thin little piece of wood which joins up the back and forward sounding boards ; it ensures the free circulating of vibrations in the whole instrument. The position of the soundpost is strictly related with the quality of the sound, and the slightest changing in it is highly thrown back by low and treble registers. A violin already looks like a living system, in which the parts are so much linked that the function of the whole supplants the analytic combination : more than a combination, it becomes a solidarity. Then another feature arises, in analogy with life : a good violin has no scattering sounds ; yet the sound can be made of different harmonics, like a voice; but like a voice too, it sounds with a recognizable unique voice: it gets individual.

- Nevertheless, this strong binding is not obtained by means of strength and stiffness. On the contrary, each linkage seems to be negociated like a compromise between lithe and sturdy joins, like a subtle mediation.

- Glues are generally a violin-maker's secret ; they include organic components ; they must merge with wood without losing their own plasticity.

- The resistance of the forward sounding board is strengthened by the harmonic-bar ; they are sticked together, but they have not exactly the same curvature : according to a very cybernetic principle, this difference of curvature creates a dynamic set of forces, which is more able to vibrate than an addition of resistance forces.

-The soundpost must not be sticked, nor the bridge : they must freely transmit the sound by a perfect adjustment. If a violin has lost its soundpost, instrument-makers say that they must "rehabilitate" it, that is to put in place very very slowly a new one : the operation can last six months. (By giving the screw a quarter of turn three times a week...).

These details already show, by analogy, the general principles of living regulation, as a mediation : a manageable difference, a mediatized distance between elements. Furthermore, we see that we are in a new field, because time arises, the incompressible and irreversible time of living organizations. If one wants to teach or to cure this kind of systems, he cannot go faster than the own internal time of the system itself.

As described, we can now understand another beautiful property of a violin : it learns to sound. The more you play a violin, the best it sounds; instead of wearing out, it improves by playing, it learns to vibrate by means of vibrating. It is the first draft of a "permanent- memory" system, that is a structure whose present qualities result from its history.

No surprise then if I conclude with noticing that a violin foreshadows the main feature of living systems : it actively reacts to environment. If you speak in the room, the violin answers, even thin-voiced. It echoes with sonorous events from surroundings.

I just played with this example in order to argue : a lot of phenomena which surrounds us every day are more than mechanical. Cybernetics is an intermediate, showing how we plainly and quickly go beyond the mechanistic paradigm, when organization increases.

The next step is the logic of information.

5. Imagery of the Passage

"In the laboratory of chemistry, the specialist had been assigned to analyse black blotches on a piece of yellowing paper. On the fixed day, the headman of department came, accompanied by a Chinese man dressed up to the nines. The specialist explained to the head of department all the characteristics concerning the nature of the sheet of paper and the blotches; besides, using the newest techniques, he was even able to determine scientifically how old it was. Thus done, he modestly concluded that he knew everything that there was to know about these blotches.

At that moment the Chinese gentleman came forward ; he bowed respectfully , praised the depth and scope of the knowledge of the analyst ; then he apologized profusely for a strange coincidence : these black blotches fulfilled exactly the esteemed chemical formulas of the scholarly eminent Doctor ; but, over and above their black and perishable substance, they could equally be seen as antique Chinese letters whose combination stood for an old love song."

(Translated from David Shahar, 1978).

6. What is Information ? General Principle

The general principle of information is "a difference which makes a difference". (Bateson, 1972).

We can consider living beings like "internal environments", a specific organization of matter. It constitutively deals with an external environment, on several levels of exchanges. The difference between the two environments has been overestimated, or misunderstood, because of the fantastic overevaluation of our precious self. But the two environments are made of the same material element, and they could not be defined one without the other : it is just a local specification of elements' relationships. However, the actual difference is in the set of elements,which gives a determined and relative place to each element in each type of organization ; the difference between a molecule of calcium in nature or in body is only a difference of relation with a context.

Precisely, the world of information is the determinism of context : the original role that a given element plays according to the structure in which it appears. Exchanging information will consequently be a meeting between two environments : a difference in a first environment makes a difference in a second one ; but this second difference is not the same than the previous one, because the context is not the same.

These environments must have some affinities, in order that the event in one of them can concern the second one. They must also be different, in order that some event in one of them can take a different place in the network of relations for the second one, that is to become significant. Information is a mediation, linking but also maintaining distance. "The mere presence of a living being transforms the physical world, makes appear here foods, there hiding places, and imparts to the stimuli a meaning they had not." (Merleau-Ponty, 1945). One could say that this changing of sense is only subjective. But precisely it is time to take into account that living beings behave as subjects.

What we must emphasize there is that a piece of information is not an object, though having generally a medium. It can also be a simple meeting, and the plain changing of context of an element. A lost jigsaw-piece in a children's room has no meaning, except making the difference between a tidy or untidy home. Putting it in its jigsaw's frame with the other pieces makes arise a new meaning : it was this pretty star which lacked in the sky in the left corner... Sense is an emigrant, the new and impalpable dimension which arises not from objects, but from the network of woven relations around objects.

7. From Signal to Representation

The term of information is now commonly used in scientific litterature, generally without any precise definition. Actually, very different phenomena are mixed up in this use, and we must discriminate between them.

7.1. SIGNALS

The notion of signal is widely used, for example in studying animal's behaviour, or in general cybernetical regulation. It is very relevant in these areas but does not exceed the limits of a cybernetical logic. An element, in a range of linked elements, is first missing (quantitative level of some component, specific chemical element, etc..). Its appearing makes the system move, and produces wide chain-reactions. This element then acquires a specific role, which gets it different from another one : a pheromone amongst butterflies has a determinist power. But it works like the soundpost in the violin, on the level of things. The last straw that breaks the camel's back is the same as any straw, as an isolated object ; when we focuse wider, including the camel, this straw acquires a determinist power that others have not.

These are signals : already a piece of information, to a certain extend, in the sense that an element plays a part different from its material properties as an isolated substance, because it is linked with a specific context. But it would be worthy to reserve the term information for other facts : we remain there on a pure level of objects, given as present and material elements. (It explains why cybernetics has been often reduced to mechanism, and used in a narrow sense).

Entering the informative area introduces a new kind of differences : the image-function. Image introduces a new dimension, the notion of a representation, and consequently of an interpretation, as simplistic as they could be at the primary levels of communication.

7.2. IMAGES: THE POSITIVE HAND

The world of information begins when dealing not with the thing, but with a representation of things. For us, human beings, representation is so naturally included into symbolic language that we forget to consider other ways, more primary but strongly significant. There we must precisely build a bridge between what belongs to the body and what belongs to mind, in order to understand another kind of things : the area of semantic sensitivity, beyond mechanistic organization and short of psychological sensibleness. It is the world of mimetic representation, in which the nature becomes "a set of private messages."(Wiener, 1930).

As an illustration, let us follow for example the different images of hands, painted by prehistoric cavemen. They show -at least- three different ways of representation. We can organize them into a hierarchy, not suggesting that it is a chronological order that we have no means to know, but assuming that it shows a logical order, following a more and more complex way of representing: the most simple representation of something is its positive image, identical to the model. On this level, we find the positive hands : the form of a hand is painted and filled with colour, according to the most simple and realistic process.

Which of us, childlike, has never felt like putting his hand in the paint and applying it to the wall? It corresponds with the pleasure we all know in imprinting the bare feet in the fresh sand, rejoicing in seing our marks on the beach... (although the hollow made by the foot, inverting volume, yet suggests something more elaborated).

This kind of signifiers constitutes the most primary level of representation. It opens a first level of informative phenomena, in which images yet are signifiers, that is a concrete sign of the thing, but stand for an equivalent of the thing ; there is no transformation, just as an alleviation of the presence of the thing. We see this hand, and we just know that a man dropped in there. The positive hand is meaningful for us, and just says that a human presence had been. It is worth stating at this point that the informative ability of such an image is dependent up on a previous and already known lexical register : the receiver, the reader of the image must have a referent to understand it. Each image is different, and does not inform about anything else than itself ; the receiver must already have encountered the thing, or must have a memorized referent to be able to read it.

Analogically, very low doses in biology are not images, but behave as if they were : they seem to be dealt with by organisms in a similar way. Organisms are able to be advised about toxic substances, and react positively to a very low dose, up to a limited extend.

For example, we can situate the phenomenon of hormesis at this level of information. Everything happens as if the pre-treatment gave to the organism an image of the toxic substance, and provided a referent ; then the organism learns how to react to, as according to a miniaturized experience of toxic effect. But having being informed about some toxin does not protect against another one : the informative effect is limited to the identity between image and thing.

The ancient mesopotamians were in the same situation with their ideograms : the sign is worth the same as the thing. And it entails ambiguity. Mesopotamian scholars ended up as confusing images for things, dedicating their interest to worship writing, and so initiating a long tradition of intellectual idolatry. More concretely, the same thing can happen when a living structure, instead of being informed, takes an image at the first degree, as if it was the substance itself : images can be ambiguous. The delicate use of nosodes by homeopathic physicians can illustrate it. The substance is the very pathological object, just alleviated from an intrusive weight. It can work as a piece of information about disease, which invites to a positive regulation. On the other hand, according to the circumstances of the receiver, it can lead into a worsening, as if it were received like an excess load of disease. In this case, the image is not interpretated but literally taken as object, in a process of passive mimesis. Then, identity between thing and sign was too strong. In the case of hormesis, the external origin of substance and its distancing from natural organism protects more against confusion.

We can conclude that images must be mediations : similar to the thing, but maintaining a constitutive difference with things.

Organizing information must include a difference, a distance between object and semantic object. Something must be indicated about the difference of levels, in order to discriminate level of objects and level of information.

It gives a new look at the notion of signifier . A signifier, even an analogic one, can be an image ; but it must involve something about the way it takes to signify, about its own representative nature. It must include a formal feature. The same demonstration is done about signs of language: the meaning of a sentence is dependent up on the relation of representation, the modality of signs, which carries indications about their ways and means of being signifiers (Wittgenstein, 1921).

The composition of more complex systems of communication will include this condition. And the other prehistoric hands still show the way.

7.3. THE INTRODUCED OBJECT: THE OUTLINED-HAND

An interesting intermediate is given by the outlined-hands as shown in some prehistorical painting in caves. There we have the outline of a hand, like these we all designed by simply following the form of our hand put on the paper. The line of the silhouette is black. By a curious mean, upon this outline is often superimposed a spot of red colour, roughly hard by applied without regard to the form of the hand. History teaches us that explaining in terms of primitive clumsiness is seldom fruitful. It would be better to see there a kind of exhibition of representation in itself. The prehistoric artist delivered us a message about the very fact of representing by means of lines and colours, in a kind of intellectual kit-form. This outlined hand is a kind of introduction into the world of representation, a way to show to the receiver that he can be concerned about signs.

It is a kind of frame given to the object, which makes it meaningful as a sign, like in a film's picture which gives a clue by framing an object. It picks the object out of manifold trivial reality.

And it happens also in biology. The surroundings and presentation of a molecule can induce a special dealing with it. In this way the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) seems to be the introducer for the immune system : it displays antigen, and so leads the system to react. The idiotypic network looks like a semantic set which reacts provided that things are presented in a semantic way, that is introduced by the MCH, representative of the self.(Bastide and Lagache, 1992) And we unfortunately know that if this introducing is missing, the system cannot react in a relevant way.

This kind of systems work by means of framing networks, which give to the elements some properties they would not have out of this frame. We really enter the complete level of active information at the stage of the negative hand.

7.4. PRINCIPLE OF TRACKS: THE NEGATIVE HAND

Negative hands are seen also on prehistorical cave walls; they are stenciled : the artist laid his left hand on the wall, he spread out over and around a fine pounce of colour, and then he removed his hand. Thus mankind's history is edged with two similar images : at the beginning, this negative hand paves the road for thought and arts ; at the end, for us, this Man of Hiroshima, whose corpse is transfered to the wall he protected a moment from burning, is the failure of thought and arts ; if new seeds don't grow...

Anyway, the original informative power of tracks comes from the function of absence, included into the signifier. That is why this kind of information is less ambiguous, and leads to infinite possibilities of communicating by means of analogic signifiers. The piece of information is not an object : it is the track of an object into a medium. This mediatization involves not only the designation of the content of information, but also indicates its absence as object. The signifier is settled up as indicating a level of information. We don't see a hand, we see an absent hand, that is the mere genius of semantic objects.

We can understand now why these negative hands are ready to step across a new stage : they become symbolic signs when the artist has painted them while folding some fingers, in a kind of finger-alphabet which refers to abstraction and linguistic communication. They go back to a function of signal, but at a new level of information.

Writing-signs followed the same evolution, from ideograms to alphabet. Letters are completely symbolic : they are no more images ; they refer to the register of verbal language as supporting the whole necessary referents. The signal-function of a letter is the element of symbolic level of written communication, capitalizing on the whole process of informative representation.

But before this break-up between signified and signifier, before entering language, there is a fascinating intermediate level of communication : the level of analogic signifiers. Evolution of writing can still help us : before becoming an alphabet, written signs went through an intermediary state of syllabication. The ideogramm, noun of a thing, has been taken as a sound, which refers not to the thing but to the vocalization of its noun. There is an analogical transfer from the reference to the thing, to the corporal event of vocalizing its noun. (Herrenschmidt, 1990). Voice is a corporal event, which binds body and mind. It is the exemplary form of a corporal signifier, as it works in aesthetics, intuitive understanding, unconscious communication and so on. We are now led to concrete communication by means of analogic signifiers. Analogic signifiers have a genuine ability of informing, provided their own structure and the patterns of communication which arise from.

They point out the content by being an image of it, a track, not so much as identical than moreover as similar to the structure of it. But they have undergone some formal shapening : alleviation, dilution, artificiality or theatricality as a stylistic trick , which prevent them from being mistaken for things, and indicate that they are pieces of information.

For the relevant receiver, this track of thing can be dealt with, and induces positive reactions of active mimesis (Lagache, 1988). One of the most beautiful achievements of human culture is to have invented their management in a therapeutic purpose, as well by theater as by medicine. This informative reaction of active mimesis actually can be described as well as by the catharsis theory of tragedy by Aristotle as by the effect of remedy in homeopathy.

Aristotle explains the cathartic power of tragedy : people are purged of passions by the representation of it. It would be a misinterpretation to consider catharsis like a quantitative flushing out, releasing some energy of passion for a while. It would not be so efficient!

On the contrary, the actual meaning of theater's catharsis is that tragedy informs about passions, calling for an upper level of information. It issues a knowledge about passions. The same dose of passion, if acted out in reality, would destroy people's relationship and society. The theatrical representation inverts this effect : it moves an integrative level of regulation. Without being especially conscious of it, the members of the audience receive an enlightenment which introduces a critical distance between symptomatic acting-out and regulation, a dynamic mediation. Then there is an active mimesis : information about psychological and social disorder induces to deal with it and to regulate it towards a new order. (There is the difference, says Aristotle, between art and the spectacular, which on the contrary leads to a passive imitation of the show, that is a worsening of passion : where we find again the ambiguity of images. So a criterion of good art would be its informative effect on art lovers. We also feel there the reason why Freud abandoned hypnosis, in order to evolve from return and repetition of passion towards an active resumption and recovery in psychoanalysis). This is a general way of art : to inform, beyond things and short of intellectual thought, by means of concrete signifiers which are elaborated tracks of objects. It invites to a sensitive experience of meaning.

In biology, homeopathic high dilutions seem to work on the same way. Even being not psychological but material, they are described as tracks of substance into a medium. Whatever they would physically consist in, they work according to the rules of analogical communication, and the paradigm of signifiers makes possible to understand their way to a certain extend and to have a look at possible experiments. (Bastide and Lagache, 1992).

Homeopathy can be devised as a ruled use of signifiers. It devolves on the law of similarity to choose the designation of the content ; the remedy is the image of disease, an anologous picture of the whole symptoms : their representation, on a corporal level of information. There is no identity between disease's poisoning and curative substance, and it is a very good requirement in order to discriminate between things and images ; the analogic relation is settled between two networks which are already corporal expressions : the whole pathogenetic symptoms according to the whole natural ones.

Nevertheless, the designation must be the most acute, in order to give rise to an actual meaningful resonance between remedy and organism.

Then it devolves on the dilution to alleviate the substance and to mediatize it so as to set it up as a signifier.

Therefore, active mimesis, this process of dynamic analogy, is worthy in many ways of therapeutics. In the Western culture, we find it in aesthetics, psychoanalysis and homeopathy. However, many traditional cultures use it in very diverse therapeutic theaters. Beyond its therapeutic interest, the benefit of it is to speak to our sensitivity as well as to our sense, addressing to this place whence body and mind are fused and together answer to meaning and beauty.

8. "To Whom it May Concern"

However, nothing is information by itself ; information is not an object, and doesn't subsist in itself and for itself, according to the classical definition of substance. That is the reason why it is often so difficult to speak about information. Our words and our conceptual habits are all patterned on the model of object. But we cannot speak about a piece of information as an isolated species, it would be absurd. What we actually observe is the informative effect on a receiver. To describe tracks tacitely implies that they have yet been recognized by someone, for whom they were significant.

Information is in the receiver. Sartre said that paintings in an art gallery don't exist during the night and closure : at these moments, they are only canvas, oil and such stuff. They exist as paintings when they are watched. In the same way, ideograms or letters don't exist as signs without a reader. The matter of fact, in this case, is the very meeting between a track and a relevant receiver.

The receiver is necessarily active : information arises from his reading. He creates it. Because of that, achieving to deliver information is always extremely dependent up on the circumstances of the receiver. Receivers of information are living structures, so they change in time, memorize the previous events, and carry information according to their present aims.

For example, homeopathic physicians know that their patients are not the same ones all along their life, and not the same if they received a remedy before. Organisms are permanent informed-informing structures ; they take the past into account, but always with regard to the original synthesis of the present moment. Everything is important for a living being : his past, what he is at the moment, but also the present mood and the colour of the sky today.

That is why repetability cannot be ensured in the same easy way as for mechanistic systems, concerning experiments. The informable systems are very sensitive, opened to any variation, and more parameters have to be controlled. The conditions of experiment are more demanding. It doesn't mean that there is no law. On the contrary, nothing happens by chance with information and it doesn't admit the lesser margin of error ; it is a strong determinism, and you cannot stop an informative effect when it decided to work.

Yet it means that laws are subtle, and widely unknown. They require new paradigms of reasoning, and some delicacy of reason. But there is no reason for them to remain obscure : it is just a fantastic challenge for the future.

9. The Frame of Reference: Principle of Levels

The second principle which always covers information is that we must reason upon two different levels. The materialistic thought has not this constraint. Material elements are all on the same level. They exist all in the same way, amongst the same frame of reference where elements are ruled by the same observed parameters : mass, size, speed, energy and such elements that are measurable.

Yet there is the observer, with his thought and methods. But the famous separation of the phenomenon and the observer (though questionable) ensures their exteriority, in such way that elements of phenomena are pure things. The method of measurement is supposed to ensure the best conformity between mental representation and things, so as we could substract the method from the result and consider reality as the material facts themselves.

But information cannot fit in this pattern. The semantic object is a double nature : it belongs to the level of things as drawing, voice, written letters, dilution, but it belongs to the level of interpretation in front of the living structures it informs. Therefore, although it does exist, information is not a substance : it is this very event which happens between levels, which goes from things to reading, the very passage itself. Sense is an emigrant : process and result are the same.

Anybody who speaks about information is leaded to think in terms of levels, even without especially intending it. It is obviously the case in the present reflections about biology. The choice of a dilution in homeopathy is often described as adressing to a certain level of organism, by the way suggesting the idea of an organic organization into physiological levels of information. These integrated levels would be different from a simple hierarchy of objects.

In philosophy, the analysis of thought and language by Russell and Wittgenstein is a sound example of this topic. Considering the conceptual possibility of language, Russell was led to the theory of logical classes as an informative hierarchy. And the inspiration of Wittgenstein's Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1921) works around the irreducible distance between thing and state-of-things, and also between what is shown in language, and what is said in fact. Then the philosophical journey consists in going over from the forest of things to the point of view of eternity.

If we want to understand how living structures are informed-informing, we must admit that they also seem to be double nature (at least !) : a sum of material elements, and an informative synthesis of them.

A level of information is a class of facts which appear in the same way, and inform us through the same channels of operating logics. It is not so much a class of objects than a class of manner of being, a typical way of interacting with us. It is noticeable that we cannot simultaneously take the chinese characters as blotches and as signs (see above the D.Shahar's story). We can consider the two aspects one after the other, but we are obliged to deal with them separately. However we cannot say that a level of information does exist in reality. As Einstein said, science says how facts work, never what they are.

May be this constituent difference between level of matter and level of information, or better the difference between the ways they work, is not actually a fact of the world but an epistemological constraint. Everything happens as if the brain itself refused to move on into two different logical ways together. Perhaps our traditionnal split between body and mind, matter and sense, imposes it on the thought.

My own proposal about this question would be as following : everything comes together with everything in the reality, and things rub shoulders with significance. Nature does not care about our distinctions. Reality is just an infinite wealth of possibilities. And every possibility is always close to us.

Then, understanding information according to a difference of levels between things and tracks is just to put some order in phenomena. We see that something happened, and we can organize its understanding according to a difference of levels, as rational markers. In this way, information as an event creates the difference of levels : process equals result.

Ultimately, we can conceive that several ways of thinking lead to several types of organization ; in fact, yet amongst the same nature, because there are always mediations between them, and the mediation of a mediation...

10. The Continuity of the Paradigms

This fantastic semantic capacity of living beings cannot remain for ever relegated out of science. There is no reason to think that it is an unruly world, given over to the whims of fate. On the contrary, there is a logic of it to be explored.

And there is no reason not to succeed in enlightening on it, because

"nosque partem totius naturae esse, cujus ordinem sequimur."

"so are we a part of the fullness of nature, whose measure we share."

"nous aussi, sommes une partie de l'ensemble de la nature, dont nous suivons l'ordre."

"parte somos de naturaleza entera, y su ordenanza compartimos."

"siamo anché noi una parte della natura complèssa, il mètro dalla quale seguitamo."

Spinoza, Ethics IV, Appendix, capit.32.

11. References

Bastide, M. and Lagache, A.(1992) The paradigm of signifiers, Atelier Alpha Bleue, Paris.

Bateson, G. (1972) Steps to an ecology of mind, Chandler Publishing Company, New-York.

Herrenschmidt, C.(1990) Le Tout, l'énigme et l'illusion, Le Débat n°62, Gallimard ¨Publisher, Paris.

Lagache, A. (1988) Echos du sensible, Atelier Alpha Bleue Publisher, Paris.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945) Phénoménologie de la perception, PUF Publisher, Paris.

Prigogine, I. and Stengers, I.(1988) Entre le temps et l'éternité, Arthème Fayard Publisher, Paris.

Shahar, D. (1978).Un été rue des prophètes, Gallimard Publisher, Paris.

Wiener, N. (1930) Cybernetics, MIT, Cambridge, Massachussetts.

Wittgenstein, L.(1961) Tractacus logico-philosophicus, Gallimard Publisher, Paris.

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