Cell Language Theory, The: Connecting Mind And Matter

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“6x9” b2861 The Cell Language Theory: Connecting Mind and Matter

between them (i.e., signifier) and their objects (signified). In English

language, the signifier “cat” refers to a fury animal with a set of ana-

tomical and behavioral characteristics, but this sequence of speech

sounds can be replaced with any other sequence such as “lat”, “tac”,

or “cag”, if they were accepted by members of the English-speaking

community.

It should be pointed out that the arbitrariness of signs does not apply

to the morphology of some of the Chinese characters, since they are

related to their objects by similarity, e.g., 川 signifies a river, and 山

signifies a mountain. Also, according to Merleau-Ponty (as cited in

Dilon [249]), there are reasons to believe that, at least in the early

phase of the evolution of the human language, the signifier and signi-

fied were not independent from each other but physically linked or

coupled.

4.3 Application of the Information Theory to Signal

Transduction in Living Cells

Although biological information has three distinct aspects, namely

amount, meaning, and value, only the first aspect can be mathematically

defined, using equations such as the Shannon equation [250]. When the

probabilities of different messages to be selected are all equal, the

Shannon formula, Eq. (2.7), reduces to

I = log 2 W (4.15)

where I (also often denoted as H) is the average information (in bits) that

is carried by one of the possible messages selected (if there is no loss

through the communication channel) and W is the total number of possible

messages in the message source that can be selected by the sender (and

received and decoded by the receiver). W depends on the number of letters

in the alphabet, and the lengths of words and sentences constituting a

message.

If we represent the number of letters in the English alphabet as a,

the average number of letters in an English word as b, and the average

number of words in an English sentence is c, then the number of all

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