On the Origin of Information in Biology — Complementarity of Nucleotides as Objective Tokens and as Objective-Semantic-Information Carrying Symbols
摘要
We begin by tracing in detail how historically Crick’s central dogma enabled the reduction of “biological information” to a metaphor in two steps: by treating the physical succession of nucleotide triplets as identical to the genetic code and then treating the nucleotides themselves as what we call unilateral “tokens”, using current physics and chemistry. While biosemiotics aims to avoid the metaphor-view of biological information by avoiding the first of these two steps, in this paper we introduce the possibility to also avoid the second of the above two steps, by reconceiving the ontology of signs at the level of physics non-classically, via a new post-quantum theory (PQT) in physics being separately developed by the first author. We call such a potentially new conception of signs in physics as objective-semantic-information carrying “symbols”. In this context, we further discuss how the features of superposition and entanglement in quantum mechanics resonate with the demands of treating a code as constituted by objective-semantic-information carrying symbols but nevertheless requires us to go past current physics ontology. We then point out that quantum mechanics itself does not provide this needed new ontology in physics. Tokens under current physics and symbols under the new PQT are envisaged as complementary views of the same external world object serving as a sign such that biosemiotics can have either ontological foundation at the level of physics. This possibility is in line with Crick’s own suggestion in the central dogma that the flow of biological information will not involve flow of matter/energy.