Note: a session on information theory is programmed just after the
current one. Info theorists discussants are kindle requested to wait a
little and keep on the present track. ---Pedro
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*Message from Jerry Chandler*
This email responds to Soren, Stan, John, Bob, Loet, and James Hannam:
Soren:
Thanks for posting the book reference. Several excellent articles. I
highly recommend several of them.
Stan:
The issue of ostension remains high on my agenda. The individual
sciences progress along individual paths, each asserting new knowledge,
often confirmed by new applications to basic and applied research. Yet,
between the sciences, the separation continue to grow. For example, see
John Collier's recent posts. Why is this separation so deep? My
inclination is that the source of the miss-communciation is the failure
to grasp the role of codes in all biological communications. It seems
that historically, philosophy operates only within the boundary of the
linguistic modalities of a tongue. Even if a philosopher can operate in
another modality, they do not as it is not permitted in their profession.
The simple fact of life is that the chemical sciences, over the past two
centuries, have created a new code for human communication that invokes
a new grammar, a logic and an a very ancient way of looking at number
with identity. The rhetoric of this new code is used in the life
sciences as the "lingua franca". This code is not understandable in
traditional physical philosophy, so the physics community remains out of
the loop, offering nothing new to the biological sciences, merely
singing the song of entropy off-key.
Of course, as the new lingua franca of biology and medicine describes
networks of relationships, much as your family tree describes an
historical network, and, as such, is not reducible to the simplistic
"yes/no" of a decision for a symbol of a Shannon bit, the physical
sciences community ignores the nature of information of life. A recent
paper by Paul Davies asserts from Bits to Its.
In an earlier message your wrote:
As well, I think that there is no objective
evidence that the world apart from us, is logical.
The objective evidence of the order of the atomic numbers, the order of
the molecules of life and the reproduction of the same ordering
relations in offsprings of parents point toward a vast reservoir of
natural order. But these are natural codes not artificial codes of the
real number system. Your faith in entropy is showing! :-)
Would your understanding of the ostension of artificial codes support an
assertion from Bits to Its to Tits?
Bob:
Thanks for the response and the article. The article is clear enough,
well done and even a bit shocking to see you use a category!
From your response:
Or, must the constraints be imposed through the action of continuous
variables?
No, the constraints I deal with in ecology are usually expressed in
discrete terms, although the probabilities (frequencies) derived from a
large collection of such discrete events do come to resemble continuous
variables.
In the case of your ascendency theory, the encoding scheme was
selected in such a manner that the exact discrete Daltonian /
Lavoisier / Coulombic constraints are suppressed from the
calculations. Why? I will not offer you any conjectures on why
ascendency theory is so suppressive.
Is "surpressed" really the word you want to use here? They are implicit,
true, but that's not the same as surpressed (unless you're using the
term in a particular mathematical sense.)
Yes, I mean "suppressed" in the sense that the natural events are
filtered through a colored lenses that vastly simplifies the causal
relationships that exist in nature itself. It appears to me that this is
intrinsic to the methodology that you have developed. Like
thermodynamics itself, the fine structure is absent. The famous remark
"there is a lot of room at the bottom" appears to be even more true for
mutual information in ecosystems than in its original context.
Interiority disappears.
John:
See my remarks to Stan above. The great success of physics is intimately
linked to the finding of useful mathematics as vast simplifications of
reality of natural systems. This recipe will continue to work for many
systems. Philosophy is what it is and I will leave it at that except to
ask if the recipe for the success of physics is equally good for the
success of a philosopher? Or, is it the inverse?
Loet: (Just to provoke some reflections...)
From your perspective, what is the role of identity in the social
sciences relative to information theory? Do you see the role of
reflexivity to be a substantial component of the conceptual frameworks
of identity in both information theory and the social sciences?
James Hannam:
A belated "Welcome" to FIS!
I enjoyed your introduction but can not say that I find your arguments
all that persuasive. May I suggest more examples to help us understand
your point of view? Your write:
Logic became little more than training for rational minds
and, I am given to understand, it took centuries for mathematicians to
regain the heights of their medieval forebears.
Perhaps you can provide examples?
With regard to the history of logic, I tend to follow the views of C S
Peirce. Logic developed as part of the trivium of the early University
system, not as an advanced subject. It was critical background for
rhetoric and grammar - for business as well as theology. Like Peirce, I
find the Modestae (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modistae)
to be a critical component for fermenting tensions among ostensions and
intensions.
This interaction between grammar and logic was critical to the ideas in
the Port Royal logic which, as I understand the events, was motivated by
religious values.
Cheers to All!
Jerry
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