<1>
A new book, titled, 'The Touchstone of Life', subtitled: Molecular Information, Cell Communication, and the Foundations of Life, by Werner R. Loewenstein, Oxford University Press, was reviewed last Sunday in the New York Times.

The author describes the vast array of chemical messengers which activate networks of molecular signals operating within a single cell.

The reviewer describes how the information processed in computers is handled by representing voltages below an arbitrary threshold as 'zeroes', and above that threshold as 'ones'.

From this point of view, he says, one might surmise that information is an interpretation imposed by human minds - yet some scientists also speak of information as if it were an entity of nature, and as elementary as mass and energy.

<2>
Re-reading 'Artificial Life', by Steven Levy (published in 1992), I came across a statement to the effect that biologists, at that time, held different opinions as to whether or not biological viruses are 'life'. Their replication depends on the host cells they attack.

I think a similar situation is characteristic of computer viruses. Both are dependent on a 'host' for replication.

<3>
Similar in a way to the centuries-old mind-body duality, the difficulty of analyzing the function of organs outside living bodies, or analyzing organisms of any species outside their natural environment.

The environment seems to be always a 'host', and species are ecologically interdependent.

<4>
The author gives Aristotle credit for describing the form-giving 'essence' which shapes the embryo, saying it: 'contributes nothing to the material body but only communicates its program of development'.

This has the familiar sound of elan vital, vitalism, or soul.

For some time now, continental philosophers and students of consciousness, have been deconstructing the self, the soul, as psychological and religious concepts.

<5>
However, in science, the students of complexity and chaos who analyze such phenomena in both animate and inanimate manifestations, speak of 'self-organization' as a fact.

So much for what the external world/cosmos is/was.

Pandora's Box of genetic manipulation is now wide open for a future of designer humans.

<6>
Yet selves and souls will persist in individual lives, and live in minds and memory of generations of offspring so long as humans maintain the ability to communicate 'information' with words and with the other languages of the senses and the arts.

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Hugh Bone
e-mail <hughbone@worldnet.att.net>