re: it is likely to be problematic to use language as the paradigm
model for all communication--Terrence Deacon
Terry makes interesting points, but I think on this one, he may be
wrong. Guenther Witzany is on to something. our previous approaches
to information have been what Barbara Ehrenreich, in her introduction
to the upcoming paperback of my book The God Problem: How a Godless
Cosmos Creates, calls "a kind of unacknowledged necrophilia."
we've been using dead things to understand living things. aristotle
put us on that path when he told us that if we could break things down
to their "elements" and understand what he called the "laws" of those
elements, we'd understand everything. Newton took us farther down
that path when he said we could understand everything using the
metaphor of the "contrivance," the machine--the metaphor of
"mechanics" and of "mechanism."
Aristotle and Newton were wrong. Their ideas have had centuries to
pan out, and they've led to astonishing insights, but they've left us
blind to the relational aspect of things. utterly blind.
the most amazing metaphor of relationality available to us is not
math, it's not mechanism, and it's not reduction to "elements," it's
language. by using the metaphor of a form of language called "code,"
watson and crick were able to understand what a strand of dna does and
how. without language as metaphor, we'd still be in the dark about
the genome.
i'm convinced that by learning the relational secrets of the body of
work of a Shakespeare or a Goethe we could crack some of the secrets
we've been utterly unable to comprehend, from what makes the social
clots we call a galaxy's spiral arms (a phenomenon that astronomer
Greg Matloff, a Fellow of the British interplanetary Society, says
defies the laws of Newtonian and Einsteinian physics) to what makes
the difference between life and death.
in other words, it's time we confess in science just how little we
know about language, that we explore language's mysteries, and that we
use our discoveries as a crowbar to pry open the secrets of this
highly contextual, deeply relational, profoundly communicational cosmos.
with thanks for tolerating my opinions.
howard
____________
Howard Bloom
Author of: /The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the
Forces of History/ ("mesmerizing"-/The Washington Post/),
/Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the
21st Century/ ("reassuring and sobering"-/The New Yorker)/,
/The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism/ ("A
tremendously enjoyable book." James Fallows, National Correspondent,
/The Atlantic/),
/The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates/ ("Bloom's argument
will rock your world." Barbara Ehrenreich),
/How I Accidentally Started the Sixties/ ("Wow! Whew! Wild!
Wonderful!" Timothy Leary), and
/The Mohammed Code/ ("A terrifying book…the best book I've read on
Islam." David Swindle,/PJ Media/).
www.howardbloom.net
Former Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute; Former Visiting
Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University.
Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; Founder, Space
Development Steering Committee; Founder: The Group Selection Squad;
Founding Board Member: Epic of Evolution Society; Founding Board
Member, The Darwin Project; Founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab;
member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the
Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of
Political Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International
Society for Human Ethology, Scientific Advisory Board Member, Lifeboat
Foundation; Editorial Board Member, Journal of Space Philosophy; Board
member and member of Board of Governors, National Space Society.
In a message dated 9/28/2015 11:47:26 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es writes:
From Terry...
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Fis] Information is a linguistic description of
structures
Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2015 22:13:14 -0700
From: Terrence W. Deacon <dea...@berkeley.edu>
To: Pedro C. Marijuan <pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es>
CC: Günther Witzany <witz...@sbg.at>, <fa...@howardbloom.net>,
fis <fis@listas.unizar.es>, Emanuel Diamant <emanl....@gmail.com>
References: <000201d0f68c$77d02b50$677081f0$@gmail.com>
<0d34f6ef-19e6-4c9c-a9d3-aba4f5f2e...@sbg.at>
<56053208.2000...@aragon.es>
As exemplified in Guenther's auxin example, and Pedro's worries
about the procrustean use of language metaphors in the discussion
of inter- and intra-cellular communication, it is likely to be
problematic to use language as the paradigm model for all
communication, much less as the foundation upon which to build a
general theory of information. From an evolutionary point of view,
language is a highly derived human idiosyncratic form of
communication that evolved only very recently in vertebrate
phylogeny, in only one species, and is supported by a vast
semiotic cognitive and social infrastructure. Communication in a
more general sense is vastly older and far more generic. For this
reason, it is wise to avoid talking in terms of the semantics of a
cough, the meaning of a piece of music, or the syntax of a skunk's
odor. The use of Carnap's approach to language semantics and
various other uses of linguistic categories in information
theoretic analyses needs to be understood as a special case, not
the generic form. I would recommend that presentations and
comments to them be framed with appropriate caveats, indicating
whether they address such special cases of human information or
are intended to be generic.
On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 4:37 AM, Pedro C. Marijuan
<pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es <mailto:pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es>> wrote:
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 of the 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)
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es <mailto:pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es>
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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--
Professor Terrence W. Deacon
University of California, Berkeley
--
-------------------------------------------------
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)
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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