Dear Pedro and colleagues,
On 02 Mar 2012, at 14:16, Pedro C. Marijuan wrote:
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").
But cellular automata are particular case of universal system. The
theory of von Neumann can be see as an application of the usual
diagonalization in computer science. If the duplicator D apply on x
gives 'XX, then when applied to itself, DD, it gives 'DD.
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).
That difference is important for the short term applications indeed. I
am only a modest theologian :)
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.
I agree. Actually I might agree too much. If Darwinian "theology" is
based on the computationalist theory of mind, eventually we have to
explain the whole of physics from "darwinism" and computationalism. If
we are machine, I can explain that the physical sciences describe only
the "border" of reality, not the fundamental reality itself like many
physicists are thinking (well like most people tend to intuitively
believe, for natural reasons).
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.
That's very interesting. I hope my remark have not be seen as a
critics of this.
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.
Information science, when information is taken in its broader sense,
might need to be looked from all angles, I think it is both
interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary.
Best,
Bruno
PS I just got a link to a paper confirming experimentally the
Landauer's analysis of the Maxwell Daemon. Only amnesia needs energy.
Note that since a work by Hao Wang, logicians knows that we can do all
computations without ever erasing information. This confirms
"mechanism" by making mass, energy and information partial angle view
of arithmetic from inside. Again this is interesting only from a very
fundamental points of view. In practice and locally we do have to
forget many information, like when deleting spam, which ask for some
energy.
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/
-------------------------------------------------
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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