|
(Pedro:
Please post this to the FIS listserve. The spam filter is blocking it.
JLRC)
McLean, Virginia
June 19, 2008
To List, Pedro, Bob:
The posts on this topic have become
increasingly puzzling to me.
Frankly, Pedro, you post, along with
Bob's concurrence, pushed me into writing this response.
Is our concept of information /
communication to become merely the science of "info souls" working off
of our "taxonomic instincts" such that we become a Borges category of
the "embalmed ones"?
If I have my choice, I would prefer to
enter Borges "Celestial Emporium" with a mermaid or perhaps as one
"drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush!" ;-) :-) :-)
Of course, my effort at humor is not
to be taken very seriously, but it is not to be totally disregarded
either. The point is direct: the method of classification plays a
crucial role in our logics.
Allow me to use examples.
The 81 boxes of the 9 squares of a
successfully completed Sudoku puzzle are in perfect order.
The list of chemical elements is in
perfect order.
The list of integers is in perfect
order.
How do these examples of order
distinguish themselves?
Each of the examples follows a grammar
or rules or axioms such that the symbols convey meaning to the reader,
the recipient of the message.
The message in each statement is
encoded such that the regularity of the object can be decoded.
In other words, the concept of order
is integral to the possibility of exchanging information; the
possibility of information subsumes the notion of an order relation.
Thus, order, whether in one, two,
three, four, or more dimensions, is the antecedence of the concept of
information; information is a consequence of order or a belief in
order. The notion of a message presupposes (or subsumes) the concept
of a sender and of a (putative) receiver.
In all cases that I am aware of, that
is, the observable material universe, the source of the order is a
natural one.
****The natural order of our
material universe appears, from a cosmological perspective, to have
emerged from the natural order of the atomic numbers.*****
(The path from the "big bang" to the
"present" passes through the atomic numbers. While less stable
particles are associated with earlier cosmological events, I will leave
that "can of worms" to the physicists and the theologians and justify
this argument on the well established stable scientific theory of the
chemical origins of our surroundings.)
Why is this important?
The chemical sciences admit as a
foundational principle that highly irregular objects can be formed from
the chemical elements. Irregularity is intrinsic to chemical
relations. Regularity is the *exception* to chemical structural
relations and to dynamic biochemical relations.
The role of irregularity in chemical
structural relations is so profound that we lack methods to count the
number of isomers, the number of irregularities. In addition to
structural irregularity, irregularity that can be expressed as
sequence of logical operations that follow one from another, are common
in chemistry, biology, medicine and other biological disciplines.
+++This view of the chemical nature of
our environment, our situation on this earth, is radically different
from the typical assumption of order of our physical theories. In both
thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, the order and regularity of the
integers is subsumed directly into the message, directly into the
information, directly into the encoding and decoding processes.+++
Analogously, the order of a completed
Sudoku puzzle is excluded from both QM and TD!
Now, allow me to reflect this notion
of order on the assertions proposed by Pedro.
From: Pedro Clemente Marijuan
Fernandez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: June 17, 2008 11:40:55 AM EDT
Let me trickle some
further ideas on the multiple "streams/disciplines" motif.
Interdisciplinarity,
multidisciplinarity and the like are buzz words in today's science. New
"inter" research centers are created everywhere, particularly addressed
to bioinformatics & systems biology, neurosystems, climatic change,
sustainable development, etc. But poor justification accompanies the
emphasis on such type of science, just pragmatism or fashionability.
The reader is left in the dark as to
why all these justifications are poor.
Perhaps it is merely a different
approach and a different language of _expression_?
Could the "meaning"
conceptualization help to make sense of such a scientific practice?
As far as I am aware, "meaning" is
intrinsic to scientific practice. Perhaps not in the broadest
philosophical context of the term "meaning" but certainly to the
participants in the game.
The "taxonomic
instinct" has guided most of the approaches to Nature's order, in
primitive cultures, in classical thought and in modern science.
A vast amount of biological and
biomedical evidence supports the necessity of organisms to classify
their situation in order to survive. This is much stronger than
"instinct", it is an imperative of emergence!
Producing hierarchical
schems seems to be inscribed in our very cortical dynamics (Jeff
Hawkins, 2005, "On Intelligence"), however as Borges put in his
celebrated fiction The Celestial Emporium of Knowledge: "it is
clear that there is no classification of the Universe not being
arbitrary and full of conjectures." I mean, most approaches to the
order of the sciences have been guided by criteria of hierarchy,
reduction, systemism, unification, integration, etc.
If a new vision,
informational one, may be established, it should emphasize at the very
bottom adaptability by means of communication and self-production
activities, usually networking relationships which are continuously
altered under the changes of within and the signals from the external.
Societies (e.g., structures of social bonds), Brains (neural nets),
Cells (protein&gene nets) are the theaters where the "changes"
derived from the new "signals" extracted from happenstances are
realized as "meanings". Disciplinary netwoks would join too, as they
are dramatically altered in their (citations) structures when success
of a new approach following alien "recombination" methods multiplies
the possibilities to extract new meanings materialized in the new
interconnections.
Why do you assert the key phrase "at
the very bottom"? As noted above, the source of order resides in the
atomic numbers and this order is implicit in the biological structures
you invoke. In short, biochemical dynamics attempts to give an
accounting from the bottom up for the notions of adaptability. The
role of the atomic numbers and biochemical dynamics is well grounded in
evolutionary theory. The semiotics of chemistry are radically different
from the semiotics of mathematics. Thus, we have "biosemiotics". Why
not argue from antecedents to consequences rather than vice-versa?
Does it make sense?
As you have stated your position, I
would say, from the perspective of information theory and message
communication, very little.
At FIS we should not
renounce to produce the new doctrine or new fashion for sci. planners
and sci. practitioners of tomorrow...
I concur. But, this necessitates that
we enunciate a well ordered approach, a meaningful plan that offers
more than other persuasive approaches offer. In order to generate a
well-ordered approach, it is necessary to convey the concept of order
as it occurs in the irregularity of Sudoku puzzles as well as the
regularity of thermodynamics. It is not solely an issue of
quantification of patterns, although that is a critically important
tool in understanding irregularity, as Bob suggests.
Cheers
Jerry
|
_______________________________________________ fis mailing list [email protected] https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
