A Personal Profile
"Life Cycle"
Male.
Born in 1952, San Martin (La Rioja –Spain).
Married, with Isabel, one daughter --Alicia.
Fields of intellectual interest
Information science, bioinformation, symmetry, cognitive neuroscience, social communication, emotions (laughter), human bonds & social complexity, epistemology, philosophy of science, interdisciplinarity & overlapping of scientific fields, nature of art.
Hobbies
Books, music, promenades, gastronomy, wine... (wine aficionado? Yes, being born in La Rioja it is a must; however my favorite wines are from Campo de Borja. If you want to taste an amazing old Garnacha elaboration Bodegas Mareca is your place.) About books, Ortega y Gasset and Marcel Proust are authors with whom I have spent a lot of time.
Related Web Pages
http://www.cps.unizar.es/samca/samca3.html
http://www.forotecnologicoyempresarial.com/
http://www.cps.unizar.es/cargar_ateneo.php?modulo=ateneo/ateneo2.php&modo=1
Why?
Right at the beginning of my work as an engineer in industrial and commercial enterprises (middle 70's) I was really intrigued by the new scientific approaches emerging around computers, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, social information, etc. During the following ten years I tried to keep a difficult balance between both kinds of interests, professional and intellectual (and even "political", may I add), but finally decided that enough was enough: I left aside industrial and engineering work and returned to academia full time. Helas, my research proposal of a new approach to the nature of intelligence, biological or "natural" versus "artificial", as I encapsulated it, was not very well received by the peculiar establishment of Spanish universities around that time (middle 80's) --actually they have not changed very much,, have they? After some long years of "tribulation" as a forced and rather unpaid maverick I finally succeeded --or better, survived-- presenting a PhD Thesis in 1989: "On Natural Intelligence: The Evolution of Biological Information Processing". Afterwards, a two years postdoctoral grant with Adrian Horridge (Australia), and with James Shapiro, John Westley and Michel Conrad (USA), made me possible to start a little more standard scientific career. It was fun, particularly working in cooperation with Michael Conrad --such a lovable person! Our intense communication fructified in the creation of the FIS initiative (Foundations of Information Science)... And well, the rest of the story can be found more or less directly in the other sections of this Web site.
After these two decades of research, I would conclude that information is the most problematic concept of our time, where a lot of problems of different scientific disciplines (from quantum information, to the living cell or to human consciousness), and of the architectures of social complexity, and even of the "world order" sustainability, are concurring... It is a nice conundrum we are leaving, quite probably, to be solved by the next scientific generation.
Apologies if this place is not very sophisticated. You may find a few texts in Spanish too (I love it, but do not have many Spanish readers... so bye, bye Cervantes). I hope to improve the site during coming months, including more texts and links to my main research papers. In the interim, you are kindly invited to send me your comments if you casually land upon these pages.
Pedro C. Marijuán
Zaragoza (Spain), October 2008