Replying to Kevin --
On Tuesday, Sep 28, 2010 at 6:29 PM, Kevin Kirby <ki...@nku.edu> wrote: -snip- 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. No! Are you asserting that a brain will respond to a single tickled rhodopsin molecule? The retina needs to be regaled with more than that in order to trigger a biological response. The rhodopsin molecule exists at the chemical level in nature's hierarchy, and at that level electrons / photons (IN plural) can have effects because of the chemical organization, and so, these are not direct, unmediated effects. Biological synthesis mediates between these effects and consciousness. Put otherwise, a single photon carries no information for biology. The statement I defend is that ‘no information transits unmediated across scales’. The hierarchy in this case can be viewed either as [cell [rhodopsin [photonS]]] or as {energy flow {chemical reaction { biological organization}}}. Curiously, I am getting the feeling that hierarchy, after being ignored for decades, is now being taken as 'ho-hum' -- old hat! Replying to Joe -- On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 11:05 AM, Joseph Brenner <joe.bren...@bluewin.ch> wrote: Dear Gordana and All, -snip- 2. This judgment is confirmed :-) by the citations: a) One can agree (I do) with Floridi's interpretation of reality as the totality of structures interacting with one another, but we still do not know what a structure is, ontologically, and there is a *caesura *with the implication for information; b) Referring to "physicists who say that reality is fundamentally informational" is begging the question at issue. 3. It is not quite accurate to say that Floridi's Levels of Organization (LoOs) give access to an "ontological side" that will enable us to see an informational reality for two reasons: a) we have not established that reality is primarily informational nor what this might mean (see above); b) LoOs, to quote Floridi do "support an ontological approach, according to which systems *for analysis *(my emphasis) are supposed to have a structure in themselves *de re*, which is allegedly captured and uncovered by its description. For example, levels of communication, of decision processing and of information flow can all be presented as specific instances that can be analyzed in terms of LoOs." However, I submit that we are still dealing, here, with epistemological constructions. S: LoOs are hierarchical structures, are in fact compositional hierarchies (the ones that interdict unmediated information flow across levels separated by scale). Hierarchies are conceptual tools, allowing us to simplify our models of the world -- levels of OBSERVATION are obviously epistemological tools (he also uses "levels of abstraction"). No one can assert that the world itself has this kind of structure (though it does seem to in many aspects). -snip- 5. On the question of "it 'or' bit", I suggest that bits are the simplest, most abstract elements of information, constitutive of its lowest semantic level. Its are something more, for example, as Kevin Kirby said, fluctuons can perfectly well be looked at as "its", given their apparent interactive characteristics. Understanding the relationship (one or more ?) between information and matter/energy may be easier if we consider that we might be talking about the same thing from two perspectives. S: From a developmental point of view, 'bits', being crisp and digital, would be end points of material evolution, which could be modeled thus (using a subsumptive hierarchy): {vagueness -> {fuzziness -> {crispness}}} One could say that only some parts of the world could be modeled as fuzzy, and even fewer as crisp.
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