Re: [Fis] reactions to ...

[Pedro C. Marijuan]

Title: RE: [Fis] reactions to ...

Dear colleagues, I am responding to Satn and adding a few items. Stanley Salthe wrote: When the water droplet "decides" on its motion, it may be receiving several strong dynamic influences (from the very local, to the most general: a punctual splash, a wave, winds, a tide, a tsunami...). The case is that the concept of "force" running throughout all scales allows the integration or better the "averaging" of any dynamic influence impinging on the system.       S: I would opt for 'integrate; inasmuch as these forces are found at different scales in different strengths. Thus, I think that the average of 1000 and 0.01 will not contribute to anything.  If the local and general influences cancel among themselves, the droplet will just stay.      S: I think this is not quite just right.  The Second Law will invite something to happen to dissipate some of its embodied energies.  I think evaporation is the most likely. OK, I agree, the encounter of opposing influences will bring a lot of heat dissipation and turbulence, however the point I was willing to consider is that we follow more or less what happens at any scale, as "forces" and in general the mechanical analysis does acceptably integrate both "vertically" along scales and "horizontally" along places, and the boundary conditions can be moved almost arbitrarily. In the informational entities, conversely, one cannot move his analytical/integrative theater with the same freedom. (Maybe some fis old parties will remember an inconclusive discussion we had in Madrid FIS 1994, with Michael Conrad championing the "freedom" side and myself advocating on the "constraint" side). The argument I would bring now is that the informational analysis cannot be placed outside some natural "joints" --it makes no sense. Those info "joints" are specialized entities like cellular signaling systems, nervous systems, social institutions, markets, etc. They allow the bigger networked entities to keep their subtle self-production co-adaptation by signaling exchanges... So, the "meaningfully" loaded info is not germane in its methodology to physical info (talking about the classical world--quantum info might be closely related). The way meaningful info ascends and descends along scales or along parts has not been elaborated yet in a general perspective ---semioticians take for granted, in different ways, the solution to this very problem. Alas, providing the integrative guidelines for the merely mechanical response is pretty well established in our system of knowledge, but a similar construct for informational entities is missing yet. Maybe that quotation from Whitehead I stated days ago deserves more attention ("operations of thought are like cavalry charges...") in order to continue the discussion. Seriously, how science, the sciences, are affected by the limitations of the individual?      S: Completely.  Science cannot fathom individual cases.  It can only deal with ensembles using various statistical methods. Somehow we are returning to the beginning of the discussion. I defend that the limitations of the individual are crucial for the structures and trajectories science has developed historically, and that those limitations show up not just in an indirect way, maybe in a similar "natural" way to those limitations we encounter ourselves when are individually producing our meanings inside a network of social relations. Following quite many comments during these two months, it seems that our "categorizations"  (and even logic) are somehow problematic and may depend on previous assumptions on very obscure info matters... Unfortunately I cannot put it better, but the positions on the "categorization problem" (category theory?) and the different "info approaches" look densely interrelated. best wishes Pedro

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