From: Ted Goranson <[email protected]>
Date: May 4, 2011 1:01:31 AM EDT
To: [email protected]
Subject: Reply to John Collier
John --
I know the feeling of being overwhelmed. In addition to my own usual
chaos, I find myself in China for a few weeks.
Your response copied below intrigues me, because it seems contrary to
some things I understood from you some time back. The particular
ordering of your spaces interests me less than the fact that you have
assumed complete subsumption. In other words, your Venn diagram has each
area completely within a parent. Do you really believe this to a useful
characterization? I get the big picture, both as the notion of a big
picture and with some concurrence on the extremes.
But surely there is a more leverageable parsing of this space than a
simple hierarchy, no?
--Ted
On Apr 29, 2011, at 6:37 AM, Pedro C. Marijuan wrote:
> Message from John Collier
>
> Hello all.
>
> I've been quiet as I have not had enough time to keep up on this discussion,
> though I find it interesting. I just quit my job as Head of School, though,
> and hired someone to do my teaching, so all of a sudden I have more time. I
> could not get behind the insane reorganization going on at our university,
> which is pointless, costly, demoralizing to staff, and heading for a train
> wreck. As Head I had to get behind it, and it was not nice for me. Enough of
> that.
>
> Gordana's formulation also works, as physics is more general (though people
> like Wheeler, Gell-Mann and a lot of other very good physicists would say it
> is {information {physics ...., but of course they don't know what they are
> talking about ;-)). Stan wants to include thermo as he wants to bring in
> entropy (as would I in many cases, certainly where there is semiotics).
> However, there are reversible physical processes, and it is possible to build
> a reversible universal Turing machine equivalent out of particles in
> classical Newtonian physics, which is close enough for engineering purposes.
> Given this, it is a short step to say that all physical processes, reversible
> or not, have Turing machine equivalents, and hence are equivalent to
> computations. And then we are back to something approaching those eminent
> physicists who are so obviously wrong. In any case, I think it is safe to say
> that {thermo {semiotics}}, though I do not have a proof, like I do for
> {information theory
{physics}}. Why not information theory = physics? Well, I don't want to rule
out as a matter of meaning that there is no non-physical ectoplasmic but causal
realm.
>
> Please excuse my facetious attitude, but I am getting fed up with people not
> making clear (or at least being sensitive to) which manifestation of
> information they are talking about. As a crude guide, I attach a diagram that
> I find helpful.
>
> In any case, I think that both Gordana and Stan have points, but both miss
> the larger, more inclusive picture.
>
> My best,
> John
> ---------------------------
_____
Ted Goranson
[email protected]
http://www.sirius-beta.com
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