Towards a science of informed matter

Over the last couple of decades, a call has begun to resound in a number of distinct fields of inquiry for a reattachment of form to matter, for an understanding of 'information' as inherently embodied, or, as Jean-Marie Lehn calls it, for a "science of informed matter." We hear this call most clearly in chemistry, in cognitive science, in molecular computation, and in robotics-all fields looking to biological processes to ground a new epistemology. The departure from the values of a more traditional epistemological culture can be seen most clearly in changing representations of biological development. Where for many years now, biological discourse has accepted a sharp distinction (borrowed directly from classical computer science) between information and matter, software and hardware, data and program, encoding and enactment, a new discourse has now begun to emerge in which these distinctions have little meaning. Perhaps ironically, much of this shift depends on drawing inspiration from just those biological processes which the discourse of disembodied information was intended to describe.