Abstract ♦ The article states the multiplicity of options for scientific interpretation of the term "information" — from its definition as one of the fundamental principles of the material world (along with the matter and energy) to its recognition as a phenomenon that exists only in the minds of sentient beings. The author makes an attempt to explain the reasons of the identification of the concept of information with management and the measure of the structural organization of material objects. There is a difficulty of research on information, which circulates in the human society and exists in the forms of images and thoughts in human consciousness. This can be substantiated by the fact that the consciousness as an information model of the external world has a distorting influence on the information coming from the outside. The same transformations take place in the process of social communication.
In order to reduce the distorting effects, the author suggests to examine the features of information by the example of genetically modulated process of adaptation of trees’ cells to future winter cold. Considering that the process of life activity is an adaptation to the interrelation of the organism with the environment in the future, the summer reorganization of the model of cell activity is an adaptive activity, or an anticipatory adaptation. This process is initiated from two to three months before the coming of cold spells. A physical phenomenon — the reduction of daylight period — is the information indicator of the future fall of temperature. This suggests that the cells of the tree: 1) are sensitive to physical phenomena not similar to the phenomena that are relevant for the organism's survival, but related to them through a non-obvious causal relationship; 2) interpret and use this relationship correctly for efficient adaptive activities; 3) make a reorganization of their genetic system of intracellular processes control equal to a future situation after the interpretation of this physical impact as information. In this case: 1) information is a feature of a physical parameter, which has an impact on the organism, to stimulate a reorganization of its life activity control system for the expression of those genes that will prepare it for the future relationship with the environment to the best advantage; 2) the physical impact acquires a feature of information just because it is displayed on the organism’s information system (in this case — on the cell's genome); 3) the cell’s genome is an integral information model for eventual "subjective future" conditions of the organism’s components; 4) the time, "from the point of view" of the genome, which acts as a "manager" of the cell’s activity, is a series of discrete transformations of information about possible subjective future into the material “corporeal” and functional present.
Keywords: information, subjective mental reality, anticipatory adaptation activities, program of vital activity, genome, gene expression, possible subjective future.
Solnyshkov Alexey Yurievich, Candidate of Science (sociology), associate professor of the Sociology Department, Moscow University for the Humanities. Postal address: 5 Yunosti St., B. 3, Moscow, Russian Federation, 111395. Tel.: +7 (499) 374-60-21. E-mail:
al_sol@list.ru
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