CUNY SEMINAR IN LOGIC AND GAMES
Schroedinger and Turing on the Logic of Life: from the “coding” to the “genesis” of forms
Giuseppe Longo (CNRS & Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris)
Friday, September 27, 2013, 2:00 PM
Room 4421, CUNY GC
Abstract. Schroedinger’s and Turing’s analyses of life phenomena have a twofold aspects. They both follow, first, a “coding paradigm”, of embryogenesis or of human computations and deductions respectively, and then move towards a more “dynamicist” approach. Schroedinger, in the second part of his 1944 book, hints to biological organization as negentropy – a variant of Gibbs dynamical analysis of energy – that we revitalized as anti-entropy, see references. Turing, after stressing that “the nervous system is surely not a Discrete State machine” (1950), invents the mathematics for an action/reaction/diffusion process, a “continuous system” (1952), where chemical matter (a hardware with no software) organizes itself along morphogenesis. We will hint to the paths for thought opened by Turing’s dynamics as continuous deformations at the core of Turing’s pioneering paper of 1952, where symmetry breakings are a key component of the bio-chemical processes.
co-sponsored by the Computational Logic Seminar
Formal Philosophy 