Bio-Logic updates with Rich Doyle at Bios conf. this 15-17 Sept., 2006

On Beyond Zebra? Minding and Metaprogramming the Evolution of Novel Dissipative Systems

Richard Doyle

Bios: The Poetics of Life in Digital Media
West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV | September 15-17, 2006

http://biotelemetrica.pbwiki.com/OnBeyondZebra

by Rich Doyle>
Out of the [lamination of selves], Zebra, which is supra- or trans-temporal, came into existence: pure energy, pure living information.
Valis, Philip K. Dick

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This seminar will review the recent history of the life sciences and their re-encounter with mind - from Schrödinger to the present - in the hopes of informing diverse creative practices emerging at the nexus of consciousness and evolution, e.g. biotechnology.

Research and theorization over the past ten years on the thermodynamics of living systems suggests that such living ecologies are teleologically attracted to the increased dissipation of information. Consciousness, once viewed as an evolutionary oddity or epiphenomenon, can now be viewed as an "attention sink" integral to this telos, and can be defined as the perception of the differential thermodynamic futures of implicate ("potential") combinations of ecosystemic interconnections at scales ranging from the cosmic to the quantum. This perception, clustered or "laminated" together in patterns, is'' the unfolding of subjective experience and has transformed the planet, where a "thinking stratum" evolves: biologist V.I. Vernadksy dubbed it the "noösphere." Here collective self reference and its infinite regress emerges, enabling a massive increase in the processing of information: the process becomes holographic in nature, replicating the subjective unfolding of the implicate order in a larger scale dissipative structure of planetary and perhaps cosmic dimensions.