Dear Kevin, Dear all! What I was thinking about, referring to Floridi's Informational Structural Realism is his claim that reality is an informational structure "A preferable alternative is provided by an informational approach to structural realism, according to which knowledge of the world is knowledge of its structures. The most reasonable ontological commitment turns out to be in favour of an interpretation of reality as the totality of structures dynamically interacting with each other." Floridi [11] p. 151. http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/12/4/878/pdf I could have referred to physicists Zeilinger, Lloyd, or Vedral and number of other authors who would say that reality fundamentally is informational.
Now, the question of objective vs. subjective levels (levels of organization vs. levels of abstraction). One may be interested in the first place in the epistemological aspect and then focus on what an agent can see from that informational reality. On the other hand one may put the focus on the ontological side and ask what informational reality an agent can see. Those two things are closely related. I agree with you that if we only focus on levels of abstraction we will miss something, as LOA only reflect epistemological side. Besides epistemology we need ontology, which is reflected in Levels of organization LOO. What I find interesting is the interplay of epistemological and ontological informational structures. Those informational structures should be seen in conjunction with computational processes. All of that is also closely connected to the question of it or bit, or the relationships between information and matter/energy. Present FIS discussion shows that there is an interest and a lot of things to do in order to elucidate our current understanding of the relationship. I would like to kindly invite you to contribute to the following special issue of the journal Information: . http://www.mdpi.com/journal/information/special_issues/matter/ With best regards, Gordana From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kevin Kirby Sent: den 29 september 2010 00:29 To: [email protected] Subject: [Fis] FW: Fluc replies - more All, It is fascinating to follow the trails here from fluctuons to the it/bit issue and beyond. As I read Conrad's theory, a fluctuon is not a prima facie informational object; it is not bit-like, or qubit-like for that matter. It is as "it" as any particle -- even a virtual particle, a vacuum fluctuation -- can ever be. (Joe and I agree here.) That being said, fluctuons could still find a home in a dual-aspect theory like that which Gordana has been developing (in the same way as electrons, protons, etc.) Is Conrad an idealist? A materialist? Well, in much of his work he emphasized the special nature of matter, how it is the material substrate that makes evolution work. It was not, pace Dennett, the dumb Darwinian algorithm of variation + selection, but the amazingly productive degeneracy and verticality of the organization of the physical world that made it work. On the other hand, he also believed in what he called "the principle of philosophic relativity" (in a paper of the same name in 1997) or later, the "principle of antinomic freedom". He said that he wanted to strive for a theory that was good in a variety of "philosophical coordinate systems." (The particular issue that motivated this position dealt with free will versus determinism.) Well, despite that stance, I still think he was a materialist of a sort. The overview by Kevin Clark on how he related Kaluza-Klein induced matter theories to biophysics is tantalizing, and it certainly strikes one as in the spirit of Conrad's work. He did believe that the Ricci tensor, for example, would be interpreted in terms of density in his masson seas, and I suppose this could be consistent with some sort of induction down from 5D space into ordinary spacetime. (But this quickly goes far beyond my expertise here.) I do wish we could get more gravitational physicists to tease apart Conrad's ideas -- separating what could work from what is pleasing but a dead end. But as Koichiro points out in his closing recollection, one need not look only to the graviton here. On flows across scales, this itself need not be mysterious. Take a single photon hitting a rhodopsin molecule in the retina of a vertebrate then [...long chain here...] triggering a fight-or-flight response. Is that a flow across scales? Sure. Fluctuons come in to biology because life relies on subtle conformation changes of proteins, the tactile dance of enzymes, and quantum superposition effects play roles here, as well as fluctuations in the vacuum seas. This is where Conrad daringly closes the loop: in this low-mass high-information regime of biomolecules we see a striking similarity to the high-mass regime near black holes: the chasing of unreachable self-consistency. Koichiro's posting captures the metaphysical pathos of all this with these beautiful sentences: " What is unique to the Fluctuon model is its emphasis on the participation of persistent and itinerant disequilibrium or a Fluctuon in implementing conservation laws internally, though there is no room for it in the mind of the standard physicist. This perpetual disequilibrium is all pervasive and reverberating up and down and from left to right and back." Now, pulling this back around to logic and Joseph Brenner. Dealing frankly with inconsistencies is paramount here. If our formalism of level is akin to Floridi's Levels of Abstraction, we will be missing something. (These LoAs are formalisms that capture things about the nature of abstraction, but capturing something in a formalism is not the same as illuminating it.) Joe's LIR is "inconsistency-friendly" which suggests that this is a meeting point with fluctuons perhaps? (I have run long, and will defer responding to Pedro's great new post on additional connections later.) -- Kevin P.S. As a side note, let me share my perplexity with the initial comment in Steven's post. Recursion is most frequently defined so that it has a bottom, thus ensuring finiteness, just as mathematical induction requires a base case, and just as standard set theory has an axiom of regularity (or foundation). Interesting things can be done with conceptually infinite recursion (e.g. fractal geometry), or non-well-founded set theory (e.g. Barwise's treatment of the liar paradox), but traditional well-founded recursion is, well, the "foundation" for computer science. _________________________________ Kevin G. Kirby Chair and Professor, Department of Computer Science Northern Kentucky University Highland Heights, KY 41099 [email protected] (859) 572-6544
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