Dear Colleagues, Best wishes for a happy and productive New Year!
Now that the holiday "truce" is past, I respectfully enter my opposing view to the "numerical - combinatorial" turn to information I see appearing. Not having a stable definition is not some kind of shameful disease, but a characteristic of complex, dynamic and real processes. I would like somehow to allow intellectual room for numbers and mathematical relations that does not exhaust the explanatory space needed for information. Before seeing Karl's latest note, I had also drafted the following in relation to comments by Tian-qing: "The message from QTQ prompted me, as it perhaps did others, to read his full paper as presented at the Beijing Conference. I thus came to the conclusion that a perspective of arrays of three mathematical elements may be a necessary, albeit not a sufficient one for a characterization of information. For example, I do not totally agree with his content and boundaries of the elements. Here, in my opinion, too much has been abstracted away from the phenomena whose informational aspects Tian-qing correctly wants to formalize. QTQ also says: "If it comes into the domain of philosophy, information need not and should not have two definitions with different meanings, namely, defintion in the sense of ontology and definition in a sense of theory of knowledge." However, if the two definitions can be shown to be compatible, they need not be incompatible with mathematical expressions of information. Further, the idea that a thesis that must be discarded if it involves a "self-contradictory, interwoven concept" or has an enormous diversity of worthless instances needs more discussion. Through the addition of further variables, which might be the vectors describing the dynamic evolution of QTQ's elements, his mathematical perspective could constitute part of a theory of information. Another alternative might be to add Mark Burgin's temporal types of kinds of information. We are clearly not yet at the end of anything, but I can agree with QTQ's conclusion that a) the noun "information" has been abused and that b) we should put energy into "studying things (in) themselves"." Cheers, Joseph ----- Original Message ----- From: karl javorszky To: Pedro C. Marijuan Cc: fis@listas.unizar.es Sent: Tuesday, January 04, 2011 11:11 AM Subject: Re: [Fis] [Fwd: Karl is all right, too...but] Msg From QTQ Dear Qiao Tian-qing, (I hope that this address is both respectful and friendly). Thank you for an interesting statement and the opportunity to discuss in a deeper fashion the term "information". Our differences are not unbridgeable: you say that the term "information" can not be given a precise ontological meaning. I say that the term "information" can very well be given a precise - exact, numerically stable - ontological meaning and formal definition, but this work is long, complicated, tedious, full of details and decisions. The tool at your disposal - the set of 136 variants of a+b=c, being ordered in any of 72 defined fashions - shows the logical skeleton of the interdependence of "what" and "where". This is but a first step (discovery) along a long road of improved methods of additions. One may compare the small tool to the first primitive X-ray machine of Roentgen. One recognises that something revolutionary is on offer, which may change a whole science forever. The concept - the basic idea - is absolutely new and creative. It is true that utilisation needs lots of agreements (e.g. which way is upside down, how do we interpret the grey shades, how do we influence the transparency of tissue, e.g. by injecting contrast substances, etc.), and is therefore long, complicated and full of necessities of agreements, e.g. relating to the taxonomy. In the case of the improved methods of addition (where one considers more aspects of the addition than heretofore), it is e.g. obvious that the tool allows referencing to "forces" as mathematical facts. The long and complicated discussion begins now about which kind of readings of the Table is equivalent to "gravitation", which to "weak" and which to "strong" interaction, and which readings we call recognising the "magnetic" and which the "electric" fields. But this task is equivalent to searching for agreement, which shade of the X-ray is showing cartilago and which osteoporosis. No one would argue that it is conceptually impossible to catalogise the parts of the body, even if it appears to be a long and complicated process towards agreements. So, I may insist on my statement, that the term "information" can well be filled up with - ontological - meaning, where each and every meaning is attached to one specific reading of the Addition Table. This is of course a long and complicated process, because we have first to agree, what is a relevant reading and therefore which readings are irrelevant. Among the irrelevant readings there are some that can become relevant. In that moment, it will become "information" actualised=relevant. It is a pleasure to work through this long and complicated intellectual exercise with partners in discussion like you. Thank you again. Karl 2011/1/3 Pedro C. Marijuan <pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es> FIS Friends, first of all, Happy New Year! Herewith a delayed message from QTQ that was answering a previous posting from Karl. I cannot help but saying that in the history of some sciences (remarkably Thermodynamics) clearly stating WHAT CANNOT BE DONE was extremely fruitful for the disciplinary development --i.e., "what cannot be defined", in the present case. ---Pedro -------- Mensaje original -------- Asunto: Karl is all right, too. but Fecha: Wed, 22 Dec 2010 22:04:28 +0800 De: whhbs...@sina.com Para: Pedro C. Marijuan <pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es> Dear Pedro Karl is all right, too, because he said, The term 'information' can well be defined by stringent logical-mathematical methods. It will, however, need agreement on the classification of the kinds of information. The present fact is: the concept of information has become a self–contradictory and common term used confusedly, universally. Therefore, nowadays we will surely get into trouble if we try to give a philosophical or scientific definition of information. It is impossible to state the precise ontological meaning for “information”, just as one language, English or Esperanto, is unable to unify 4300 languages in the world. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year Qiao Tian-qing -------------------------------- QTQ -- ------------------------------------------------- Pedro C. Marijuán Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud Avda. Gómez Laguna, 25, Pl. 11ª 50009 Zaragoza, Spain Telf: 34 976 71 3526 (& 6818) Fax: 34 976 71 5554 pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/ ------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
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