Dear FIS colleagues, The comments, days ago, by John H on "information states" were intriguing. In my view, the differences he addresses between physical states and informational states could be compacted as the "primacy of the intrinsic" regarding informational entities. The physical state (in my limited understanding) contraposes the extrinsic (boundary conditions) and the intrinsic (state variables and "identity" parameters), and reunites them by means of a set of dynamic equations that express the laws of nature pertinent to the whole context. In the information state, the intrinsic and the extrinsic cannot be separated so easily (only some selected parts of the extrinsic become external "information", those upon which the info entity will perform distinctional operations), but the intrinsic is not really reducible to a collection of variables and parameters, it is a life cycle in progress. Then, how can we express a life cycle in a compact way so to interact lawfully with the extrinsic? Socially we consider this new kind of informational-subject-happenstances as "biographies", and refer to their coupling with the extrinsic as "events."
Echoing Koichiro Matsuno (as we wrote together in 1996, after the second FIS event in Washington 1995, in Symmetry Culture and Science, 7,3, 229-30). "This mutual upholding between symmetry and information in theoretical science suggests a unique perspective addressing how the description of both 'states' and 'events' could be integrated in a unified manner." Or in other words, the very need of a new abstraction procedure about the social process of knowledge accretion and recombination... best Pedro _______________________________________________ fis mailing list [email protected] https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
