The Organization of Nature:
Semiotic Agents as Intermediaries between Digital and Analog Informational
Spaces
ABSTRACT
This paper offers an ontological perspective to the notion
of Form and explores the organization
of nature in terms of processes of energy transfer and encoding that lead to
the creation of information records. It is proposed that form accounts for the basic unity of information processing,
inasmuch as it possesses a triadic nature that includes both the digital and
analog components of information plus the intrinsic activity of their
conversion process. Form expresses
the indissoluble semiosis of processes and structures, and provides an
interpretation of the mapping of the space of digitally encoded information
into the space of analog information. This relationship in natural systems is
made possible by ‘work-actions’ executed by semiotic agents. A discussion
inspired by these relations of informational spaces is employed to
illustrate how Peirce's categories that converge in the notion of form provide conceptual tools for
understanding the hierarchical organization of nature. These
informational spaces find their most outstanding example in the study of sequence
and structure correlations in RNA and proteins. The mapping between
sequence and shape spaces also shows the current need to expand the
central dogma of molecular biology.