HKUST HPS Research Seminar - A biosemiotic understanding of genetic information

Information concepts are predominant in molecular biology. How to understand the informational implication of these terms has been heavily debated between biologists and philosophers. Some argue that information related concepts in biological are truly semantic and representational while others deny. People who deny the claim argue that biologists just use these terms in a metaphorical way or would be misleading (for examples, Sterelny et al.1996; Sarkar 2000; Griffith 2001; Levy 2011). People who support the claim agree that genetic information is semantic but understand the conception of information in different ways. Some understand it in the telesemantic way (Maynard Smith 1999; Shea 2007; Kõiv 2020) while others think of it within the framework of information transmission in which interpretation plays a central role (Jablonka 2002; Bergstrom and Rosvall 2009). I think information does play a substantial role in biology but not in the sense of of teleosemantics. Although some appeal to interpretation system of receiver or observer, they do not provide an account of interpretation and answer the question why the translation, transcription, transduction, and replication of genetic information are interpretive processes. In this talk, I argue that a mechanistic understanding of genetic information is not enough and provide an account of operational interpretation to understand it.