Keller Evelyn Fox
Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Building E51-185, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci. 2011 Jun;42(2):174-9. doi: 10.1016/j.shpsc.2010.11.024. Epub 2011 Feb 5.
Over the last couple of decades, a call has begun to resound in a number of distinct fields of inquiry for a reattachment of form to matter, for an understanding of 'information' as inherently embodied, or, as Jean-Marie Lehn calls it, for a "science of informed matter." We hear this call most clearly in chemistry, in cognitive science, in molecular computation, and in robotics-all fields looking to biological processes to ground a new epistemology. The departure from the values of a more traditional epistemological culture can be seen most clearly in changing representations of biological development. Where for many years now, biological discourse has accepted a sharp distinction (borrowed directly from classical computer science) between information and matter, software and hardware, data and program, encoding and enactment, a new discourse has now begun to emerge in which these distinctions have little meaning. Perhaps ironically, much of this shift depends on drawing inspiration from just those biological processes which the discourse of disembodied information was intended to describe.
在过去几十年里，在一些不同的研究领域中，一种呼声开始响起，要求将形式重新与物质相连，要求将“信息”理解为本质上是具身的，或者，用让 - 马里·莱恩的话说，要求建立一门“信息物质科学”。我们在化学、认知科学、分子计算和机器人技术等领域最清晰地听到了这种呼声——所有这些领域都期望以生物过程为基础建立一种新的认识论。从一种更传统认识论文化的价值观中脱离出来，在生物发育的不断变化的表征中最为明显。多年来，生物话语一直接受（直接从经典计算机科学借用的）信息与物质、软件与硬件、数据与程序、编码与执行之间的鲜明区分，而现在一种新的话语已经开始出现，在这种话语中，这些区分几乎没有意义。也许具有讽刺意味的是，这种转变很大程度上依赖于从那些无形信息话语原本旨在描述的生物过程中汲取灵感。
