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/
-------------------------------------------------

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