Dear Bruno and colleagues,
Thanks a lot for the well raised points. However, is it a good idea
taking the info/abscence discussion to Turing machine equivalents?
Sharing most of your arguments a serious concern for me is that the
fundamental arena is not "computability" but "constructibility". For
instance, it is not von Neuman's computing scheme what matters in this
context, but von Neuman's self-constructing machine (finally derived
toward the concept of "cellular automata").
At the risk of being too obscure, let me briefly state that when
consider realization and constructibility versus modelling and
computability, what we find is the relevance of "closure" and of
"adaptability" versus "halting problem" and "algorithmicity" (formal
describability). Even more, the only instance found until quite recent
historical times of self-constructing entities was life itself.
Unfortunately the theoretical descriptions of life are dominated by
another "theology", the Darwinian one... and most alternative approaches
are focused in trying to connect it with the physical realm, rather than
advancing toward informational constructibility. Anyhow, the emergence
of complex brains, societies, cultures, and above all the modern system
of companies and markets, plus the Networks of our time, have multiplied
the instances of self-constructing entities via
info/communication/absences, etc., and thus made possible the
Comparative Info Studies I was mentioning in last messages.
It is a personal point, but I believe that looking from the above angle,
much of my own work during last years is devoted to such comparative
info studies.
best wishes
--Pedro
Bruno Marchal escribió:
Hi Pedro,
On 21 Feb 2012, at 18:02, Pedro C. Marijuan wrote:
Dear FIS colleagues,
John's comments below on that book are quite interesting. Most
approaches to information rely on "stuff" and "organization of stuff"
--information is inevitably physical, as Rolf Landauer put long ago.
OK. But this can be shown inconsistent with the idea that our brain
can be emulated by a Turing machine. The argument use only a notion of
generalized brain (the portion of the universe needed to emulate to
have the corresponding conscious experience). That sums up my main result.
However, "non stuff" and "organization of "non stuff" might be taken
as central ideas too, e.g. in Deacon's approach --through the notion
of absence. Deacon is one of the main contributors of that book, and
author of another very recent info book that has already been
referred in this list, by Joseph I think.
My further point, to connect with an unfinished message on info
science teaching some weeks ago, is that genuine informational
entities, those capable of making "distinctions" that are used for
self-constructing in permanent communication with the medium, deserve
a special status within the whole info science studies.
Key point. I use the notion of universal (Turing) machine for that
task. Or better "universal numbers". All this can be formized in a
tiny part of arithmetic, by using the most classical notion of
knowledge (axiomatized by the modal logic S4). The incompleteness
phenomenon is enough to extract a difference between first and thrid
person view from that notion of knowledge in the frame of mechanism.
These distinctional entities are but the great players of the absence
game... Therfor info science teaching should cover "central themes",
"multidisciplinary recombinations", and the comparative study of
"informational-distinctional entities."
I think it is important to distinguish quantitative measurable notions
of information, like in Shannon's theory, or like in quantum computing
science, and qualitative semantic information which is indeed more a
distinctional ability, which can be explained in term of the semantics
of universal machine or program.
Nevertheless this adds a big conceptual price, which is the abandon of
the "theology of Aristotle" (used by atheists and the mainstream
Abrahamanic religions) and the "theology of Plato", which I realized
is still a taboo for many. Stuff simply does not exist. But the
physics of stuff can be explained as being how arithmetical truth can
appear to machines/numbers from inside arithmetic, with the notion of
"inside" captured by the classical theory of knowledge.
"God created the natural numbers, all the rest are numbers' dreams
..." (paraphrase of a famous statement made by Kronecker). The nice
thing is that "mechanism + Quantum facts" provide evidence that we
belong to a multi-users dream/video-games in arithmetic. This discards
the solipsist trap of the mechanist idealism/immaterialism.
Best regards,
Bruno
--
-------------------------------------------------
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
[email protected]
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
-------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
[email protected]
https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
