ØThey are unrepeatable: they will never be again what they are
right now. [...]
Very true.
They will never be again exactly the same and what is even more, we
will never be exactly the same. ????????- Panta rhei.
And yet, there is something in that chaos of the World, of the Ding
an sich which is stable, which makes us able to make sense.
In front of that dark window from which the World is gradually
fading away beyond recognizability there is an remarkable Other, a
distinct piece of the World which makes the difference (observation
& reflection).
This remarkable observer making an observation of not being able to
make an observation of the vanishing World of appearances, has
memory of the World in her body.
In the structures of her brain and morphology her body, there is an
expectation against which this wonder rises about the World
disappearing in the evening darkness.
What establishes (communicable) sense, structures and names, comes
in the morning.
The very same World will come back next morning and make usual
sense for an observer/agent.
She will repeat the same pattern of interaction, being reassured
that there is a structure in an ever-changing World.
Saying ?I have no name for this experience? presupposes knowing
about ?the name? and ?an experience?, both being a part of a
structured world of human/agents millennia long experience with
this World disappearing and appearing again, changing, yet keeping
basic structures time and time again.
That is why we understand pre-Socratic philosophers/thinkers/poets,
why we understand beautiful Octavio Paz "El mono gramático" and why
we are able to make any sense at all, including the sense that it
is not possible to make (usual) sense.
With best wishes,
Gordana
*From:*fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es
[mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] *On Behalf Of *Mark Burgin
*Sent:* den 5 maj 2011 05:04
*To:* raf...@capurro.de; fis@listas.unizar.es
*Subject:* Re: [Fis] Discussion on INFORMATION THEORY--Karl
On 5/4/2011 3:56 AM, Rafael Capurro wrote:
Dear Pedro
you write:
"There is a large risk of becoming
subjective, therefore unitelligible, if one leaves the
foreground-background convention of the unified, standard, invariable
against chaotic, unpredictable, varied."
Is it really like this? or is it like this as seen from the
perspective you give a
priority by qualifying the other perspective as "subjective"? Is
not not much
more the case that what seems "subjective" is the primarily experience of
the singularity of being in the world, this eery experience? The
predominance
of the common experience as described by you is what metaphysics (and
later on science!) has been saying for centuries.
Some days ago I sent this text to Joe that I forward it to the
other FIS members
Let me quote Octavio Paz "El mono gramático" (The grammatical
monkey) (Mexico 1974, pp. 97-98; 100) first in Spanish then in a
free (with a lot of mistakes!) English translation
"Por la escritura abolimos las cosas, las convertimos en sentido;
por la lectura, abolimos los signos, apuramos el sentido y, casi
inmediatamente, lo disipamos: el sentido vuelve al amasijo
primordial. La arboleda no tiene nombre y estos árboles no son
signos: son árboles. Son reales y son ilegibles. Aunque aludo a
ellos cuando digo: /estos árboles son ilegibles/, ellos no se dan
por aludidos. No dicen, no significan: están allí, nada más están.
Yo lo puedo derribar, quemar, cortar, convertir en mástiles,
sillas, barcos, casas, ceniza; puedo pintarlos, esculpirlos,
describirlos, convertirlos en símbolos de esto o de aquellos
(inclusive de ellos mismos) y hacer otra arboleda, real o
imaginaria, con ellos; puedo clasificarlos, analizarlos,
reducirlos a una formula química o a una proporción matemática y
así traducirlos, convertirlos en lenguaje - pero /estos/ árboles,
estos que senalo y que están más allá, siempre más allá, de mis
signos y de mis palabras, intocables, inalcanzables
, impenetrables, son lo que son y ningún nombre, ninguna
combinación de signos los dice. Y son irrepetibles: nunca volverán
a ser lo que ahora mismo son. [...]
La noche me salva No podemos ver sin peligro de eloquecer: las
cosas nos revelan, sin revelar nada y por su simple estar ahí
frente a nosotros, el vacío de los nombres, la falta de mesura del
mundo, su mudez esencial. Y a medida que la noche se acumula en mi
ventana, yo siento que no soy de a quí, sino de allá, de ese mundo
que acaba de borrarse y aguarda la resurrección del alba. De allá
vengo, de allá venimos todos y allá hemos de volver. Fascinacion
por el otro lado, seducción por la vertiente no humana del
universo: perder el nombre, perder la medida. Cada individuo, cada
cosa, cada instante: una realidad única, incomparable,
inconmesurable. Volver al mundo de los nombres propios."
"With writing we abolish things, we transform them into meaning;
through reading we abolish signs, we accelerate meaning and delete
it almost immediately: meaning goes back to the primordial chaos.
The small forest has no name, these trees are not signs, they are
trees. They are real and one cannot read them. Even when I refer to
them and say: 'these trees are not readable' they do not care about
what I am saying. They say nothing, they do not mean anything: they
are there, just there, nothing more. I can throw them down, burn
them, cut them, turn them into masts, chairs, ships, houses, ash; I
can paint them, carve them, describe them, turn them into symbols
of this or that (including of themselves) and I can make another
small forest, a real or an imaginary one. I can classify and
analyze them, reduce them to a chemical formula or to a
mathematical proportion and in this way translate them into
lenguage - but /these /trees, that I now mean and that are beyond,
always beyond my signs and words, untouchable, unreachable,
impenetrable, are what they are and there is no name, no
combination of signs that can say what they are. They are
unrepeatable: they will never be again what they are right now. [...]
Night brings deliverance to me. We cannot /see /without the danger
of getting mad: things reveal themselves to us without revealing
anything, just with their pure being there in front of us, the void
of names, the lack of measure of the world, its essential dumbness.
And as night comes closer and closer to my window I feel that I do
not belong to here but to there, to that world that just
disappeared and waits for the resurrection of the morning. I come
from there, all of us come from there and must go back there.
Fascination on the one hand, being seduced by the non-human slop of
the universe: loosing name, loosing measure. Every individual,
every thing, every moment: a unique reality, uncomparable,
unmeasurable. Go back to the world of the proper names."
The world of the proper names is the paradise in which there is a
name for each thing. The "small forest" is not such a proper name,
then there can be a lot of small forests that are incomparable in
their singunalirty. There is no possibility of getting this
singularity into a dialectics of the general and the particular
(which is not the same as the singular). Octavio Paz writes that
the critique of the paradise is called language which means the
abolition of the proper names to which we (or he) want to go back,
the world of singularities, beyond language (and "logic") that
deals with the general and the particular. But then, Paz says,
there is the critique of language which is done by poetry, deluding
names. In the first case the world turns into language and then
into logic (the one you and Lupasco criticize!). In the second
case, language turns into world, which is what you want, thus
becoming near to the poets than to the (Socratic and post-Socratic)
philosophers or to philosophy altogether. Thanks to poets (and
poet-scientists like you) the world looses names, and then, as Paz
says, "just for a moment, we can see it as it is - a beautiful
blue. And this vision turns us down and makes us mad; if things are
but have no name/there is no measure on earth/."
I think that the so-called pre-Socratic philosophers/thinkers/poets
came near to this dramatic and contradictory experience of tertium
datur, that things are there and are not there, I can point to
them, turn them into formulae, concepts, definitions, metaphors...
and they resist all my magic and still are there, presenting
themselves in the nackedness of their there-being, and making me
aware of my own singularity, of the singularity of being there in
front of them, letting them present themselves to me, a kind of
basic logic, if I may say, or a contradictory saying that says
nothing belonging to the logic of the universal and the particular.
I want to avoid this frightening experience of what appears coming
not from me, my language, my logic, my rationality, my... but
appears or unveils TO me, calls me without saying a word,
a-logically, without logos, so that I can feel the limits of my
logos and logic facing the singularity of the wholeness of what is,
not just the unmeasurable quantity of what is, in case it is
possible to count everything that is, but the wholeness of beings
as being which means as coming into being from beyond. The
pre-socratic thinkers called this process of unveiling of things
into being, nature / physis, having its unmeasurable measure on
what they believed to be the LOGOS (Heraclitus) as the unknown and
unthinkable measure of the whole in its unfolding process that the
Chinese wise (Lao Tse) called the DAO.
You write: "This implies that objects and events do not existe or
take place in time, but are the sources of, or 'unroll'
(déroulement) their own time." Excellent! This is not the
homogenous time of modern science, that is of great help as a
measure for what is universal and particular but not for what is
singular, such as the universe / physis / nature itself. The same
with regard to space. The space-time of physics also of quantum
physics, is an abstraction. We now take for granted (after
Einstein) that Newtonian space-time is such an abstraction. We must
go one step further! Which means also to go beyond modern mental
representationalism (Descartes) that transforms trees into mental
representations.
So I would say that Lupasco's (and your own?) predecessors are the
pre-Socratic, less Kant and Hegel (for whom all reality turns into
logic) and Peirce, for whom trees are signs
and.. in fact "away from language and toward what is" (p. 22) the
amazing experience of reality, of what Wittgenstein said that this
produces "Angst" in the Heideggerian sense:
which means astonishment that things ARE, nacked, without names,
before and beyond our names, logics, ethics, ontologies, religions,
sciences, politics, literatures... it is hard to stay there even
for a short moment, no words, facing the potentiality of being,
without any effort to giving reasons for it, or finding compromises
or looking for a better world or... Just a basic acceptance of this
eery message... that gives as a vague feeling of WHO we are (or can
be) facing beautiful blue that sometimes shines forth in painting
and music as well as in the free expression of mutual appreciation
- beyond words.
best regards
Rafael
Dear Joseph,
On Similarity and Differences
The human nervous system processes both the similarity and the diversity
properties of the world (of the sensous impressions the organs
transmit). We polarise in our mental concepts based on evolutionary
achievements.
For the animal, it brings survival and reproduction advantages, if it
remembers correctly. Remembering is based on the similarity property of
impressions (ex perception and ex memory are compared and matched). We
have deep cultural agreements that
* it is good to remember correctly,
* it is good to recognise the similarity property above the diversity
property,
* it is good to relate one's subjective impressions to a common,
objective factor,
* it is good to have one common experience each one is subject to in an
equal fashion,
* the common experience is transcendental, invisible, eternal,
ubiquitous, egalising
To talk about diversity is to leave the common ground. It is
unquestionably more civilised to talk about the common, the unifying,
the objective. Therefore, there are huge communicational difficulties to
be expected, if one talks about that what is not always there, may be
very much varied, is not uniform. There is a large risk of becoming
subjective, therefore unitelligible, if one leaves the
foreground-background convention of the unified, standard, invariable
against chaotic, unpredictable, varied.
To overcome this communicational danger, the accountant has created a
Table on which one can demonstrate the relation between foreground and
background, that is, between similarity and diversity. Here, one can
observe, what you write, namely: "Some things (the most interesting
ones) are partly similar to and partly different from others at the same
time, and the predominance of one can increase at the expense of the
other. Further, in the system of Stephane Lupasco (Principle of Dynamic
Opposition, up-dated in Logic in Reality), diversity, negativity,
inexactitude, vagueness, instability, etc. are given appropriate
ontological value vs. identity, stability, etc., their "positive"
partners. "
Maybe in Varna we can get around to find a toy-maker who will produce
136 pairs of wooden blocks and we can spend a morning or afternoon
ordering (and re-ordering) these. Then, the meaning of the terms you
refer to can be explicated by deictic methods.
It is not the intellectual level needed that makes it complicated to use
a two- or three-dimensional concept of order. It is rather the
convention of not doing such because such is not done. Once one has
overcome the feeling of "breaking taboos brings forth punishment" one
can break the taboo of talking about what diversity is to be found in
the collection {1+16, 2+15, 3+14, ..8+9} which to our conventions is all
alike. After the fundamental break with cultural conventions has been
achieved and fully, internally accepted (like waging the crises of
adolescence and daring to talk back to Teacher /parents, authority, dear
leader, brother no. 1, etc./), it will be easy to extend this experiment
to the collection {1+1, ...,16+16}. Then, one can discuss, whether an
order on the red building blocks is more pleasing to the eye than an
order on the blue building blocks. After this, one may discover the
concept of a "convoy", that is, of those pairs of buiding blocks that
have to move together during a reorder. From this point on, the
seduction will have worked and the participants of the workshop will
order and reorder like fallen angels.
There is a forbidden pleasure in paying attention to details no one
should pay attention to and disregard that what everybody is told to
look at. There are libraries about how not to behave like one should
behave. Some, like Robin Hood, Spartacus, Stauffenberg, and some others,
have a positive image. There are some others who are killed because they
are not so as they should be e.g. Giordano Bruno and some others. It is
not easy to leave the common understanding.
We can always pretend we investigate a problem of number theory,
category theory, information theory or so while we play with the
building blocks, if the System Stability Agency Special Forces take us
away in Varna for enhanced interrogations. In fact, we will have
overthrown the predominance of the Oneness over the Differences.
I do hope that these remarks will be helpful.
Karl
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--
Prof.em. Dr. Rafael Capurro
Hochschule der Medien (HdM), Stuttgart, Germany
Capurro Fiek Foundation for Information Ethics
(http://www.capurro-fiek-foundation.org)
Director, Steinbeis-Transfer-Institute Information Ethics (STI-IE),
Karlsruhe, Germany (http://sti-ie.de)
Distinguished Researcher in Information Ethics, School of
Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA
President, International Center for Information Ethics (ICIE)
(http://icie.zkm.de)
Editor in Chief, International Review of Information Ethics (IRIE)
(http://www.i-r-i-e.net)
Postal Address: Redtenbacherstr. 9, 76133 Karlsruhe, Germany
E-Mail:raf...@capurro.de<mailto:raf...@capurro.de>
Voice: + 49 - 721 - 98 22 9 - 22 (Fax: -21)
Homepage:www.capurro.de<http://www.capurro.de>
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Dear Rafael,
It is so reasonable that you attracted our attention to the
importance of names. In formation can exist without conventional
names but information theory cannot go without names - both proper
and common. When we are discussing a definition of information, it
means that we want to make a transition from the name "information"
as a label that has some intuitive meaning to a scientific name
that specifies this important phenomenon. It's interesting by
scientific names are usually theoretical counterparts of proper
names in natural languages. So, when we are discussing this
problem, it is important to understand where we want to go - to a
scientifically grounded exact terms full of meaning for
knowledgeable scientists or to names that reveal themselves to
everybody without revealing anything and creating a beautiful blue.
Sincerely,
Mark
P.S. The problem of names is also a tremendous scientific problem,
which finds its reflection in mathematics.
