Giuseppe Insana - 墨白

Constructed languages

In 1997 I began indulging in the "secret vice" (as Tolkien lovingly defined it) of designing languages. A constructed language will always be a work in progress: first of all because the scope is both complex and extremely vast and secondly because of the endless number of refinements and improvements that can be applied to it. I am hence concurrently at work - when time allows - on the four languages I designed.

Three are artistic languages: constructed languages designed for aesthetic pleasure. Each of them takes a very distinctive approach to convey meaning and embodies unique features rarely found in existing natural languages. For example one is an "inverted" or "vocalic" abugida with only 7 phonemes, while another one disregards the order of phonemes to represent a word, considering only the phonemic content as significant.

For each language I designed and developed the grammar, the vocabulary and etymologies, the phonetics and phonology, the script, the styles of speech, the calligraphy. More information is provided under the Language design section. They are inspired by and conceived as gifts to my three children. They also have a prominent role in the novel I am writing.

The other language I designed has a series of related goals: firstly it aims to be an unbiased medium for international communication and language preservation, employing icons as words and offering interactive computer assisted translation. It hence belongs to the group of the so called auxlang: international auxiliary languages. Furthermore it is conceived to be a machine translation interlingua (intermediate language) and a platform for AI research in knowledge representation, reasoning engines and machine understanding. It forms the basis of the MediaGlyphs Project.

The little prince in many languages

1. I love the tale "Le petit prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, considering it one of the best books ever written.
2. I love languages, all of them.
3. "Le petit prince" is one of the most translated books in the world (more than two hundred translations).
4. It was then only natural for me to decide to collect all the possible translations of this masterpiece.

This page contains a list of versions, with those I own and the names of the people that helped me obtain the various translations.
As you can see I still have a LONG way to go....

Can you contribute to my collection?
Please write me if you can and want to. Thank you!
If you are also collecting this book and you'd like to exchange copies, please check my list of doubles.

Languages I learned so far and degree of fluency

	READ	WRITE	SPEAK	LISTEN
Italiano	9	9	9	9
English	9	8	8	8
中文, 普通話	6	6	8	8
Español	9	6	7	8
Français	7	5	5	6
Български	3	1	4	3
日本語	4	3	6	4
Русский	2	1	5	4
Lingua latina	5	2	1	3
Português	5	0	1	1
Deutsch	2	0	1	1
العربية	1	0	1	0

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart (Nelson Mandela)

I started learning English since primary school, studied French for three years when I was 11-13 years old and Spanish for one year when I was 17.

I've learned some Bulgarian since 1998, during my visits to Bulgaria.

In April 2001 I've started studying Mandarin Chinese.

In December 2001 I've begun studying Japanese. I also attempted studying a little Arabic in 2003.

I lived four years in England, two months in Germany and five years in China, plus several periods spent in Bulgaria and in Japan. While I was in China I had daily contact with Russian customers and - thanks to the Bulgarian I already knew - quickly learned basic communication in that language. Now I am back living in England.

Languages

I started learning my first foreign language when I was 5 years old and I immediately fell awe and love realizing the immense new world that was opening up, in front and inside of me. A new way of thinking! A new way to structure thought and convey meaning! Different sounds, different schemes!

To have another language is to possess a second soul
--Charlemagne

Since that time I never stopped being avidly interested in understanding more and more about language:

• studying as many languages as I can;
• learning how languages work (linguistics);
• planning and designing my own;
(the language grokking trifecta).

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them!
They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute.
Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
--Oscar Wilde, The picture of Dorian Gray

Essays

Science & Society: Science should not meddle with Society and vice versa (Nov 2000)

Ph.D. in Bioinformatics - dissertation on Codon Usage

In 2004 I was conferred the Ph.D. degree from Cambridge University after the successful completion of almost four years of research at the European Bioinformatics Institute, in the Ensembl group, under the supervision of Heikki Lehväslaiho, Liisa Holm and Michael Ashburner.

From the links below you can download or browse the dissertation.
No authorization is necessary to use its contents for research purposes, although due credit would be very much appreciated.

DNA Phonology: Investigating the Codon Space

Abstract

The main part of the thesis is concerned with large-scale studies of codon usage in completely sequenced genomes. A new compositional analysis scheme is presented, complete with a number of computation and visualisation tools. The thesis addresses the benefits of this very general scheme, named codon profiling, with comparisons to the very similar synonymous codon usage. Codon profiling is applied to the analysis of several domains of interest, with the scope of addressing several questions related to the compositional constraints of coding sequences.

The heterogeneity of codon usage in the coding sequences of each genome was examined and presented, noting the consistency of intra-genomic distributions of codon similarity and atypicality. Such distributions provide the grounds on which to elaborate practical applications that make use of these properties.

A computationally inexpensive methodology was developed to detect Horizontal Gene Transfers (and for the first time to identify donor genomes), exploiting measures of codon similarity and combining a compositional identification approach with a phylogenetic verification process.

The thesis also presents a detailed procedure for the characterisation of coding sequences with atypical codon usages, exemplified in a study conducted on a group of human RNA binding proteins whose codon usage has striking similarity to that of some human infecting retroviruses.

Finally, the concept of codon usage space, the space of all the possible codon usages, is discussed. After calculating the theoretical extension of this space, the part visited by known biological sequences was mapped and its dimensionality computed. The comparison with the results obtained using several algorithms for random generation of codon usages quantifies the constraints imposed on biological sequences and allows the investigation and characterisation of the unexplored regions of the space.

Citation

Insana, G. (2003). DNA Phonology: Investigating the Codon Space (University of Cambridge — Doctoral thesis). DOI 10.17863/CAM.74942

Files and external mirrors

1. insana_phdthesis.pdf (3.9 Mb)
2. Apollo (Cambridge University repository)
3. giuseppeinsanathesis.pdf (hosted by EBI)
4. EThOS (british library e-theses service)

Master in Biotechnology - dissertation on Molecular Modelling

On July 1999 I was awarded the Italian title of "Laurea" (equivalent to a Master of Science degree) after succesful completion of 30 exams - relative to the lectures followed in 5 years of courses at the University of Verona, Italy - and preparation and defense of a dissertation arising from 20 months of bioinformatics research in the laboratory of NMR and molecular modelling of professor Henriette Molinari.

From the links below you can download or browse the thesis (written in Italian).
No authorization is necessary to use its contents for research purposes, although due credit would be very much appreciated.

Molecular modelling of plant light-harvesting proteins

Abstract

The research thesis focuses on the molecular modelling of the light-harvesting complexes of photosystem II based on informations from all the available sequences of the protein family Lhcb, on datas from site-directed mutagenesis experiments and on the partial crystallographic structure of LHC-II (obtained at a resolution of 3.4 Å) [Kühlbrandt et al. 1994, Nature 367: 614-621].

LHC-II is a transmembrane protein, inserted in the thylacoid membranes of plant chloroplasts, and binds half of the photosyntetic pigments of plants.

A plausible placement for the amino acid side chains has been given and some hypothesis for the configuration of charged aminoacids - possibly involved in salt bridges - have been formulated by the use of algorithms and methods of bioinformatics, computational chemistry and statistical mechanics, some of which developed personally.

Molecular simulations (minimization, simulated annealing) and sequence analysis (multiple alignment, measures of covariance) have been performed, developing new tools and adapting existing protocols and algorithms.

The research shows the possibility of a different conformation for proteins LHC-II, CP29, CP26 and CP24 (light-harvesting complexes of photosystem II) even if these show extremely high sequence homology. This different conformation could be responsible of the differences in function.

Citation

Insana, G. (1999). Studio di modelli di proteine antenna di piante mediante simulazione molecolare al calcolatore (Università di Verona — Tesi di laurea).

Files

1. insana_tesi_di_laurea_reformatted.pdf (6.8 Mb)
2. Colour images from the thesis.
3. HTML version (totalling 1.6Mb)

Science has been with me since the early childhood. As soon as I was able to read I started reading just about everything, and there I got my first taste at the scientific thought. Books about the human body. Books about physics, about astronomy, about mathematics, about biology.

I remember asking excitedly to the teacher, one morning in the first of second year of primary school, to be allowed to present something to my classmates, something dramatically important that I had just learnt the day before. I then proceeded to the blackboard and drew the atom model (Rutherford's, ⚛), explaining all about protons and neutrons and electrons and the great empty VOID pervading all things... and I also remember how I then turned my face to discover 28 pairs of puzzled eyes staring fixedly at me and wondering wtf I had just tried to tell them... and me, chastised, with low head returning to my seat.

Nevermind, some time later I was back at it again, this time introducing my poor classmates :) to the Netwon color disk!

Science also played a great part in saving me from religion: Science sprouted quickly in my mind, fertilizing it with good thoughts and hence immunizing me to those other debilitating memes. At 8 years old - or around that time - I debated with the local priest, who was responsible for our mandatory (and hated) catechism, that I just couldn't believe in both Science and Religion. They painted a very different and incompatible picture, for example on Genesis and how this world came about. And while both pictures were equally colourful and interesting, only one made sense to me, because it proceeded through logical passages, which could be researched and demonstrated, and even discarded (!) to make way to a better understanding. While the other way was just a fixed set of norms, to be believed just because someone said we should. No thanks.

Fascinated by many disciplines, I dipped my toes in almost all of them, but especially dived deeply into three of them: Biology (in particular Genetics and Biotechnology), Computer Science and Linguistics. And then in the combinations of these: Bioinformatics and computational linguistics.

I've also studied Organisation theory and wrote a dissertation on the Crowdsourcing model.

Other fields I am very interested into, but in which I have not received advanced academic training: Archaeology, Astrophysics, Cryptography, Game theory, History, Mathematics, Mythology, Nanotechnology, Sociology.

Note: press the left-right arrow keys, click the top buttons or select among the index below to read on...

2. M.Sc. in Biotechnology - dissertation on Molecular Modelling
3. Ph.D. in Bioinformatics - dissertation on DNA Phonology
4. Essays about Science

I thus melted all the teachings from the greek and the chinese schools of thought that most resonated with my essence... and my mental crucible produced what I termed "Zen Hedonism".

This was later an important foundation for the birth of my own Omnibelir Philosophy (in 1998).

Later on, combining scientific and in particular biological thinking with biology, I arrived to Biosophy (2000).

One important instrument to hone your mental path finding abilities and to do philosophy is travelling: exploring, meeting people and communicating with them. Observing. Learning and Feeling.
And still keeping in mind that ....

When I started studying Asian philosophies I was profoundly moved by Daoism and Zen. In particular I fell in love with their blend of poetry and philosophy.

This is found firstly in the content of the message, reminiscent of the above mentioned greek philosophies: living simply, honestly and in harmony with nature.

And then in the form: preferring a poetic (or even enigmatic, like in the case of the koan) rather than a logical approach to express the ideas makes these inherently ambiguous and thus intimately, individually adaptable and interpretable...

Many have been the theories and -isms that I have explored, approaching each of them with sharper discernment borne of the previously studied ones. In particular, I often used methods learned in the study of one of those schools of thought, which I still hold very dear: that of the sophists.

Questioning everything, with an extremely open mind and a relativistic approach to cognition and knowledge. Trying to prove and disprove all and its opposite, in constantly shifting fluid conceptual frameworks. Making statements and then proceeding to both demonstrate them and falsifying them. Critical creative thinking to avoid dogmatic stagnation. Losing and discovering one's self among paradoxes.

Since a very early age I had embraced Cynism, in its principal tenets of pursuing ἁτυφιαatyfia (mental clarity, absence of false beliefs, freedom from delusion) and εὐδαιμονίαeudaimonia (flourishing, doing well and living well). In other words to see things as they really are and to live to the fullest. I always loved the sagacious definition given by Ambrose Bierce in his Devil's Dictionary:

CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.

After the infusions of knowledge and science at an early age (akin to when Achilles was dipped into the Styx) gave me effective immunization against that dangerous, insidious (and often hideous and even vicious) memetic infection commonly known as religion, I discovered that there were many diverse avenues of critical thought, many different ways to reason about the world, and especially.. to reason about reasoning!

Note: press the left-right arrow keys, click the top buttons or select among the index below to read on...

2. greek
3. asian
4. own

More on Volvox

Volvox has developed the concept of death as a result of a highly efficient developmental cycle.

Unicellular organisms, like Amoeba, that reproduce by simple cell division (or budding) are potentially immortal. When one of these organisms divides, neither of the two resulting cells can be considered either as ancestor or offspring. They are siblings.

The life of Volvox begins with synchronous and almost symmetrical divisions of one cell. After four divisions, a small hollow sphere of about 16 cells has developed. These 16 cells divide asymmetrical into a small and a much larger cell. The 16 large cells are the new gonidia, the founders of the daughter colonies.

The 16 small cells divide another 6 times, giving rise to about 2000 somatic (body) cells. Having gone through these division cycles, the young Volvox colony has 16 germ (reproductive, the founders of the next generation) cells (the gonidia) at the outside of the sphere. It is now necessary to bring these cells into the center of the spheroid to protect them from the environment and ensure their safe development into daughter colonies.

This is accomplished by the so-called inversion. The colony tears apart at a special small opening. It is then turned inside-out by a tightly controlled deformation of the somatic cells.

After the inversion, the gonidia are located inside the mother colony. The daughter colonies are released by a controlled destruction of the mother colony. About 6 hours after release, the gonidia of the daughter colonies start to divide and the developmental cycle starts again. This cycle of one generation takes exactly two days.

The somatic cells of the parent, once the young have "left home" (i.e. after the release) are incapable of further reproduction and die. In effect they commit suicide, synthesising a set of proteins that cause the death and dissolution of the cells that make the proteins. In death these cells release for the use of others, including their own offspring, all the nutrients they had stored during their life time.

Thus emerges one of the great themes of life on planet earth - some die that others might live.

"The amoeba and the paramecium are potentially immortal.... But for Volvox, death seems to be as inevitable as it is in a mouse or in a man. Volvox must die because it had children and is no longer needed. When its time comes it drops quietly to the bottom and joins its ancestors".
-- Joseph Wood Krutch, 1956

Death and Evolution

When I was a child I owned - as many children from my generation onwards - a book about prehistoric Earth. It was my book # 47 [G.Zanini, Prima e dopo i dinosauri, 1971, Piero Dami editore].

Differently than many children though, dinosaurs were not my favourites.
Surely dinosaurs (the terrifying lizards, from the Greek "deinos+sauros") did hold a great fascination on me and I spent a long time learning about them, drawing them, discussing their relative qualities. I remember I liked a lot Triceratops and Stegosaurus, together with the more obvious Rex.

But what really shocked me, probably influencing so many aspects of my life, was at page fourteen and was not as tall as a building. On the contrary, it was microscopic.

Its name was VOLVOX. The description went like this:

The mysterious VOLVOX that knows how to die
[...] the fundamental moment in the history of life is marked by the appearance of the volvox, a spheric hollow flagellate that, together with being organized more perfectly than other similar organisms, has a new capability, of immense importance: that of dying.
It may appear paradoxal, but the history of life on Earth begins truly only when death appears. And the volvox is the first being that dies. Before, protozoa didn't die, dividing and reproducing ad infinitum. With volvox, life knows the uncrossable limit of death.

I was completely charmed. Mesmerized watching its beautiful shape, I felt drawn and drowning inside the drawing.

The implications of the sentence were astonishing. It stated that Death was necessary. That Death was not a curse but a blessing. It implied that we are what we are thanks to death, the perfect complementary counterpart of life.

Like the opposite sides of Yin and Yang, Death and Life are forever locked in a conceptual TaiJi, the infinite which contains

"all that which is,
and all that which is not".

It's also interesting to note how "evolution" and "volvox" share the etymological origin. Evolution comes from Latin "evolvere", to unroll, from "e- + volvere". An unfolding in time of a potential. The word "volvox" was coined in 1798 (according to Merriam-Webster dictionary) and comes from the same Latin word: "volvere", to roll (most probably because of its spherical shape).

more on volvox..

Genetics, the Linguistics of Life.

Genetics studies the means by which biological information is transferred through successive generations and how this information can change, giving rise to different organisms and different species: the wonderful process of evolution, intrinsecally bound to our concept of Life (even if evolution is mainly a product of Life's sister: Death).

This biological information (to the best of our knowledge) is enclosed in the nucleic acid molecules, long strings of "bases". We can think of them as long sequences of letters.
These letters are: A T C G (actually the three-dimensional structure that the sequence of bases assumes in the whole molecule can sometimes be more important, but we concentrate on the sequence because from the sequence it should be possible to infer the structure).

DNA is the name of the molecule responsible for this genetic information. DeoxyriboNucleicAcid.
DNA can be thought of as a language. The language in which all the informations "for making (and running) a new organism" are written. The blueprint of a living being.

Understanding this language is a complex but fascinating goal. Deciphering its phonetics (this was accomplished in the 1960's, a process that was named "cracking of the Genetic Code"), its phonology, its syntax and morphology. Its semiotics and semantics.

My ambitious but also limited - in relation to the whole picture - goal is to unveil the process behind (to continue with the metaphor) DNA phonology.

In linguistics, phonology is the study of how sounds are used in a language (as opposed to phonetics that studies what are the possible sounds of language). For example phonology studies constraints against particular combinations of sounds.
You perceive that druping and grink could be possible words, even if they don't actually exist, but kter or ahizlatr could never (well, "never say never") be English words.

In biology, I am interested in DNA "phonological constraints". That is, what rules the sequential array of bases must obey. The DNA has to encode the informations for making living beings. But it should have precise constraints to follow, in order to encode the message. Constraints coming from the need to preserve a particular structure (e.g. bendability, super-coiling....), a particular composition of bases (e.g. more biased toward a lot of Gs and Cs or a lot of As and Ts), or a particular choice of "frequent" or "rare sounds" (i.e. codons for abundant or rare tRNAs).

Parleremo con il DNA nel suo linguaggio.
Lui ci raccontera' il passato.
Noi gli insegneremo il futuro.

We'll speak to DNA in her language.
She will tell us the past.
We will teach her the future.

-- G.Insana, April 2000

Biology, in particular Molecular Biology and Genetics, has always been the discipline I've been most interested on... the study of Life.
I've combined my interests in Biology, Linguistics and Computer science into Bioinformatics as both research and life work. I've also combined Biology with Philosophical thought to arrive to Biosophy.

In the next pages a little introduction on Genetics as the Linguistics of Life and what maybe was the key event in my life which influenced me the most into these fields.

Note: press the left-right arrow keys, click the top buttons or select among the index below to read on...

2. Genetics, the Linguistics of Life
3. Death and Evolution
4. More on Volvox

Goals of Biosophy

by Jong Bhak (aka Park Jong H.)

The goals of biosophy, or of biosophers, are not trivial. We aim to establish the foundation of a world where biological beings reason, are awake and aware, struggle to grow, be secure and challenging, and caring to the universe.
We try to make a transition in our biological society which existed for billions of years.
We want to revolutionise silently with scientific isms and tools.

It is about an intellectual, cultural, scientific, mature, loving, gentle, powerful, steady and challenging revolution in our biological selves.
People whose minds reside more in the time ahead should have seen the revolution we describe as biosophical world.

First appearance: Sat Mar 3 20:12:12 GMT 2001

Definition of Biosophy

by Jong Bhak (aka Park Jong H.)

The definition of Biosophy can be dynamic in different context of the biosociological problems in mind. A skeletal definition can be:

Way of constructing metaphisically a philosophical, scientific and biological paradigm for all the life forms in the universe to be aware of all the fundamental problems associated with their existences, including (not excluding) possible purposes.

It is a new philosophical paradigm from theoretical, computational and metaphysical aspects of science. It tries to mix and synthesize new, creative and scientific ideas to achieve technical developments to formulate the most insightful, beautiful and realisitic scheme of mind to understand life and eventually the whole universe. It is an active intellectualism.
Its main emphasis lies on the physical and informational process of life phenomenon and the extention of them to philosophical realm. This is because life is defined, in one way, as the complete (not necessarily whole) reflection of different layers of the physical world it exists upon.

Biosophers
Biosophers depart from classical philosohers and discard their basic materials and knowledge of thinking while they accommodate their methodological products such as logical thinking, debates, ways of thinkning, analysing minds and importantly the passion to understand the self and the universe.

Biosophers are technically scientists with philosophical and artistic imagination and creativity.

Classical philosophy was disrespected and abandoned by many of its own philosophers in the 19th and 20th centuries. They sensed the vacancy and uselessness in tackling problems they wanted to solve. The vacancy resulted in social and cultural confusion and a loss of direction all over the world. Biosophy fills this gap and provides an answer to the questioners not giving them answers but giving them the possibility for them, so that they could understand themselves biologically, philosophically (biosophically) and scientifically.

Biosophers rather arbitrarily sets the funeral date of the classical philosophy when the first generation life forms started to transcend to the next generation through biological science and engineering. This is the moment where life forms on earth, collectively, achieved to become unconsciousness conscious, self-evolving, self-engineering and finding the relationship between the universe and themselves in the biological facts and principles.

The transition
The transition of the generation took place over at least for 5,000 years.
We define the biosophical transition from the materialistic and classical philosophy as the apogee of life evolution on Earth. It is another big stage in the development of existence in the whole universe.

Generations of life
The development of life which is tightly associated with the development of the universe as a reflection of it, has distinct stages as biologists often find in the evolution of organic beings on earth. Some are very conspicuous while some others are more gradual and hidden. Unlike scientific detection of a biological transition from one complex state to a more complex system stage, the neuronal or philosophical recognition of such stages are less clear.
The largest scale level transition is the one defined by biosophy as 'the generation' of life.

First appearance: Sat Mar 3 20:02:20 GMT 2001

Generations of life entities

At some point in Time, on planet Earth (and we suppose in many other places in this Universe), something acquired the capability of self-replication. We still don't know what and how. We have a rough idea of when and where (3.5 billion years ago, a pond by the sea). We leave aside the "why?" question for now.
Regardless of what and how, it ended up with a CELL. A membrane defined space in which nucleotides and aminoacids re-enact continuously the magic of self-replication.

Many different mechanisms evolved out of it but to the level of detail in which we are now interested, we can consider them all alike. No real fundamental difference between the primordial cell, a tree, a virus, a shark, a mushroom, a 20th century man.
They all self-replicate, in one way or another, transfering a legacy of genetic information, protein machinery, membrane protected environment, forward the Time axis through subsequent generations.

We can define these organisms as "first generation life forms".

Evolution provided some of these life forms with such a complex ability to think that they can mirror all the universe they can experience inside their brain. They can mirror themselves inside their brain. In so doing, they achieve self-referentiality, in this particular case called "self-consciousness". They can think about themselves. They can project insideward an image of themselves, playing with the mental object that refers to themselves. Descartes "COGITO ERGO SUM" (I think therefore I am) can be an appropriate thought process that can be generated by these life forms.

We define these organisms as belonging to generation 1.5

(the use of fractionary numbers to name the levels allows for subsequent fine tuning and easy addition of new generation types without the need of changing all the upper-level ones. The important property of the fractionary numbers here exploited is that there is always one number in between any two numbers).

What man is about to achieve, most probably in the 21th century a.D., is self-engineering. This is a new leap in the evolutionary scale of life entities. A life form that consciously engineers itself. An organism that understands the process of evolution and tries to ride it to its purposes, modifying itself directly instead than letting itself being shaped by evolution. The knowledge of Biology and of its mechanisms is allowing this step.

We think of this process as a new leap in the type of life entities, and we call these organisms: "second generation life forms".

That is the nearmost future, almost the present. What can be the future?
The advances in cognitive sciences, neurology, computer sciences, electronics, will ultimately lead to the creation of AI, Artificial Intelligence.
A life form will consciously create a new life form that has not evolved out of simpler forms but which evolution or creation has been the complete volitive act of another organism/species.
To be an AI it must have self-referentiality (generation 1.5) and it will probably be capable of self-engineering (generation 2). But the fact that its creation has been the conscious result of another life form, we define AI entities as belonging to generation 2.5.

Of course this raises an interesting point. If one day we'll discover that the first cell had not evolved out of inorganic components in the primordial broth but had been consciously engineered by a life entity (we can think to it as an alien race or as a god), then we'd have to redefine our position in the generation level, but the list wouldn't need modification.

Speculating on what could be a third generation life form is very difficult. A tentative try: we can think to a life form as a shared consciousness that would be able to retain its individuality only as a recognition of the individual parts it is composed by, but that links together all life forms in the universe. An organism that can feel itself at all levels, as the single cells its body is composed of, as the multitude of beings composing its society, as the society itself seen as a superorganism, as tightly bound to all other forms, of all generation types. It would feel its presence and consciousness inside all plants, all bacteria, all AIs, all organisms in the universe.
It would be a universal Gaia-like being, composed from all life forms, it would be Life itself.

Scheme of the generations of life entities

• 1
       Self-replication: the entity is capable of replicating itself. Imperfectness of replication causes differentiation that can be channeled by Death into Evolution.
• 1.5
       Self-referentiality (self-consciousness): the organism has a combination of sensory stimuli and internal processing of such complexity that it can map inside itself the entire world it can sense. This mapping includes the mapping of itself, i.e. there is at least one symbol inside this mapping that refers to the organism itself (self-consciousness). The organism can "think" about itself, refer to itself.
• 2
       Self-engineering: the life form understands the shaping principles (evolution) and the mechanism it works by to such a degree that it is possible for the life form to engineer itself in a conscious/directed way. The organism slows, accelerates or deviates evolution of itself by engineering its own self-replicative elements.
• 2.5
       Artificiality: a self-replicative and self-conscious organism (possibly even self-engineering) arises out of a volitive act of another organism (and knows/understands it).
• 3
       Total communion: universe-spanning shared consciousness that can flip effortless between the levels (from the simplest, lowermost to the higher order complexities of life-aggregation) and encompasses all life entities.

First appearance: Fri Dec 22 14:43:51 GMT 2000

Post CloudSmoke Reflections

I was waiting under the sun. I was in a very relaxed state and looking at the clear blue sky and these soft clouds.
I started recognizing figures in the clouds. The elephant. The snail....
And I realized it had been so long, probably years, since I hadn't "systematically" done this. Sporadically, yes. Dedicating one minute, maybe, to it. But not like that, spending long time, like when - as a children - I used to lay on the grass and have hours of cloud observation.
I glimpsed at how many things we give for granted every day. How many things we don't spend a moment on, because "known" or "passed". Because other more "important" matters are pressing.
We don't look at the blocks on which we have built everything else, observing only the tip, the present, the actual.
And I decided to dedicate more time to these "childhood games" and other aspects of life that I am forgetting and letting slip away.

Living is so beautiful. From our animal point of view we need so little to be happy. Breathing and eating and some human warmth.
And in childhood, without many external pressures, we can let our life drift in that way. Content. Serene. Growing, learning, observing, feeling.
Then, increasingly, we get pushed and stimulated. To get a good education. To achieve a respectable position, a rewarding job. Productivity. To go shopping. To watch television. To be bought or sold, buying or selling. Real needs and (very often) fake needs. The need for a sports car....
If we take away all this, we just live. Serene and without oppression.
Why then aren't we all hippies?

I think it has to do with the fact that we belong to a super-organism.
We are organisms made of an incredible number of cells. But we are also cells of an organism referred to as "society".
Good cells specialize to carry on various tasks. Cells are born, grow, die. We are parts of a bigger thing that controls us, to a certain extent.
Hence, too much individualism is to be contrasted for the wealth of the whole. Societal instincts are well fed. Societal forces are used to help maturation of the cells to the scopes of the super-organism.

I see myself now under a different light. I identify this feeling of "uneasiness" and "unfitting". The ancient "what is wrong with me" and "why I don't fit" get a possible answer, through biosophy (biological philosophy). I'm a poorly evolved cell, from the social point of view. I don't really belong. This feeling of being strange, diverse, crazy, that I harbor and nurture inside me since childhood.
I think to those people, sitting in front of the TV, going out shopping.... and I don't understand them. I think they must be crazy.
They look at me, at my staring eyes and babbling mouth, and shrug. They think I must be crazy. Why all those questions? Why don't I adapt, conform? Why do I behave like that? What is wrong with me?

I cannot really despise them. They are good cells. I cannot really despise myself. I am a good unicellular organism. A possibly totipotent cell. Or "nullipotent". Another species maybe. Or an unevolved old cell. Or an evolved future cell.

But I also like the other cells. I feel lonely without my interaction with them. I am very picky but I love those I choose. Those that choose me.
Sometimes I don't understand why I act in a particular way. It's the subconscious shift and delicate balance between social and individual opposing forces.

I am a cell that doesn't like to cooperate nicely with the other cells for the super-organism. But I am a cell that likes to interact with similar "detached" cells. Maybe we'll form a different multicellular super-organism. Maybe we'll just wither away and die. Maybe we'll be integrated, one day, somehow. Maybe we are already integrated, and we don't realize it. Maybe we'll just get fun, for a while, from our interaction. From our love.

I am in search of my companion cells. Those I can fuse with.
And I won't ask "what is wrong with me". And I won't ask "what is wrong with them". I'll delicately accept and live my individual and societal life. I'll just LiVE and LoVE.

First appearance: Tue Dec 5 17:10:49 GMT 2000

Biosophy is the new perception of philosophy subsequent to the scientific and especially biological awareness.
Biosophy is Biology<->Philosophy.

Philosophy is (or should be) equivalent to science, being "love for knowledge" its etymological meaning. Biosophy re-anneals philosophy to science, trying to mend the wound, close the gap between the two disciplines.

In the next pages some essays Jong Bhak and I wrote on the argument.

Note: press the left-right arrow keys, click the top buttons or select among the index below to read on...

2. Post CloudSmoke Reflections
3. Generations of life entities
4. Definition of Biosophy 5. Goals of Biosophy