(the list has been down during this weekend--I will re-enter the successive msgs. --Pedro)
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Fis] Information is a linguistic description of structures Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2015 17:23:55 +0200 From: Francesco Rizzo <[email protected]> To: Pedro C. Marijuan <[email protected]> CC: Günther Witzany <[email protected]>, <[email protected]>, fis <[email protected]>, Emanuel Diamant <[email protected]> References: <[email protected]> <[email protected]> <[email protected]> Caro Pedro e Cari Tutti, l'avere colto, anche per merito dello stesso Pedro, l'aspirazione a ri-conoscere l'importanza del rapporto tra informazione e significato, mi fa venire lo scrupolo di essere chiaro e semplice. Intanto ribadisco che informazione, per me, significa "dare forma" a qualcuno o a qualcosa, singolo o associato, cioè a tutti e a tutto. Il significato dell'informazione corrisponde al valore del bene (economico) informato o neg-entropico. Ciò che riguarda il valore di un bene può riferirsi alla verità di ogni altra scienza che non può non essere in-centrata sulla super legge della informazione. Anche un'equazione o funzione è un'informazione che ha almeno un significato -- perché ne può avere più di uno come le parole polisemiche -- matematico. Lo stesso dicasi per una cellula che è un'informazione che ha significato bio-fisiologico. Parimenti una simile logica semantica vale per un uomo, un gene, un animale, una pianta, una foglia, una gemma, un cristallo, etc., in quanto tutti sono informazione avente un significato particolare in ragione dei diversi fatti-specie o singoli riferimenti. Naturalmente e culturalmente, la complessità e la molteplicità dei problemi o dei sistemi di cui gli esempi precedenti fanno parte richiedono strumenti di misurazione e di descrizione più operativi che teorici o epistemologici. Senza informazione e significato non vi è conoscenza della "conoscenza" o conoscenza della "realtà" che non può essere solo mortale o entropica (in senso termodinamico), ma anche vitale o neg-entropica. Grazie e un abbraccio a Tutti. Francesco Rizzo. 2015-09-25 13:37 GMT+02:00 Pedro C. Marijuan <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>: Dear FISers and all, I include below another response to Immanuel post (from Guenther). I think he has penned an excellent response--my only addition is to expostulate a doubt. Should our analysis of the human (or cellular!) communication with the environment be related to linguistic practices? In short, my argument is that biological self-production becomes "la raison d'etre" of communication, both concerning its evolutionary origins and the continuous opening towards the environment along the different stages of the individual's life cycle. It is cogent that the same messenger plays quite different roles in different specialized cells --we have to disentangle in each case how the impinging "info" affects the ongoing life cycle (the impact upon the transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, etc.) There is no shortcut to the endless work necessary--wet lab & in silico. So I think that Encode and other big projects are quite useful in the continuous exploration of biological complexity and provide us valuable conceptual stuff--but looking for hypothetical big formalisms (I quite agree) is out sight. Molecular recognition which is the at the fundamentals of biological organization can only provide modest guidelines about the main informational architectures of life... beyond that, there is too much complexity, endless complexity to contemplate, particularly when we try to study multicellular organization. Anyhow, this topic of the essential informational openness of the individual's life cycle appears to me as the Gordian knot to be cut for the advancement of our field: otherwise we will never connect meaningfully with the endless info flows that interconnect our societies, generated from the life cycles of individuals and addressed to the life cycles of other individuals. Info sources, channels for info flows, and info receptors are not mere Shannonian overtones, they symbolically refer to the very info skeleton of our societies; or looking dynamically it is the engine of social history and of social complexity. Well, sorry that I could not express myself better. all the best--Pedro Günther Witzany wrote:
Dear all! What is the opposite of a linguistic description? a non-linguistic description? Please tell me one possible explanation of a non-linguistic description. So Im not convinced of the sense ofthe term "information".Concerning the "difference" of physical and semantic information: What would you prefer in the case of plant communication. Does the chemical Auxin represent a physical or a semantic information? Auxin is used in hormonal, morphogenic, and transmitter pathways. As an extracellular signal at the plant synapse, auxin serves to react to light and gravity. It also serves as an extracellular messenger substance to send electrical signals and functions as a synchronization signal for cell division. At the intercellular, whole plant level, it supports cell division in the cambium, and at the tissue level, it promotes the maturation of vascular tissue during embryonic development, organ growth as well as tropic responses and apical dominance. In intracellular signaling, auxin serves in organogenesis, cell development, and differentiation. Especially in the organogenesis of roots, for example, auxin enables cells to determine their position and their identity. These multiple functions of auxin demonstrate that identifying the momentary usage (its semantics) is extremely difficult because the context (investigation object of pragmatics) of use can be very complex and highly diverse, although the chemical property remains the same. Yes, mathematics is an artificial language. Last century the Pythagorean approach, mathematics represents material reality, (if we use mathematics we reconstruct creators thoughts) was reactivated: Exact science must represent observations as well as theories in mathematical equations. Then it would be sure to represent reality, because brain synapse logics then could express its own material reality. But this was proven as error. Prior to all artificial languages we learned how to interconnect linguistic utterances with practical behavior in socialisation; therefore the ultimate meta-language is everyday language with its visible superficial grammar and its invisible deep grammar that transports the intended meaning. How should computers extract deep grammar structures out of measurable superficial syntax structures? In the case of ENCODE project (to find the human genome primary data structures) this was the aim which got financial support of 3 billion dollars with the result of detecting the superficial grammar only, nothing else. Best Wishes Guenther Am 24.09.2015 um 07:47 schrieb Emanuel Diamant:Dear FIS colleagues,As a newcomer to FIS, I feel myself very uncomfortable when I have to interrupt the ongoing discourse with something that looks for me quite natural but is lacking in our current public dialog. What I have in mind is that in every discussion or argument exchange, first of all, the grounding axioms and mutually agreed assumptions should be established and declared as the basis for further debating and reasoning. Maybe in our case, these things are implied by default, but I am not a part of the dominant coalition. For this reason, I would dare to formulate some grounding axioms that may be useful for those who are not FIS insiders:1. *Information is a linguistic description of structures observable in a given data set* 2. Two types of data structures could be distinguished in a data set: primary and secondary data structures. 3. Primary data structures are data clusters or clumps arranged or occurring due to the similarity in physical properties of adjacent data elements. For this reason, the primary data structures could be called physical data structures. 4. Secondary data structures are specific arrangements of primary data structures. The grouping of primary data structures into secondary data structures is a prerogative of an external observer and it is guided by his subjective reasons, rules and habits. The secondary data structures exist only in the observer’s head, in his mind. Therefore, they could be called meaningful or semantic data structures. 5. As it was said earlier, *Description of structures observable in a data set should be called “Information”. *In this regard, two types of information must be distinguished – *Physical Information and Semantic Information*. 6. Both are language-based descriptions; however, physical information can be described with a variety of languages (recall that mathematics is also a language), while semantic information can be described only by means of natural human language.This is a concise set of axioms that should preface all our further discussions. You can accept them. You can discard them and replace them with better ones. But you can not proceed without basing your discussion on a suitable and appropriate set of axioms.That is what I have to say at this moment. My best regards to all of you, Emanuel.
-- ------------------------------------------------- Pedro C. Marijuán Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA) Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X 50009 Zaragoza, Spain Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 <tel:%2B34%20976%2071%203526> (& 6818) [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/ ------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Fis mailing list [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis -- ------------------------------------------------- Pedro C. Marijuán Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA) Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X 50009 Zaragoza, Spain Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818) [email protected] http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/ ------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Fis mailing list [email protected] http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
