Dear Arturo and FISers
We will forgive your life! Some other people in this list also have
strong reservations to a single, canonical approach to information,
either from Shannon, Boltzmann, or Fisher backgrounds. In my case,
mostly biologically and socially grounded ("sociotype"), I see a complex
panorama of biological information, mostly "relative" concerning
communication with the environment (via cellular signaling systems), but
sort of "objective" concerning the inner self-production processes
(shared DNA and genetic/translation and many other codes). But both are
elegantly intertwined in the advancement of a life cycle. My hunch is
that this type of relative/objective duality culminating in existential
maintenance has some generality and could be "exported" to physics too.
It is curious that some oriental thinkers (Chu-Hsi or Zhu Xi, 9
Centuries ago) had already advanced sort of similar ideas... Well, above
all, info is "paradoxical" and has kept all of us amused in this list,
at least for the past twenty years!
Best--Pedro
PS. Let me remind that you have not answered yet my topo-evo comments in
the earliest messages. That point is, I think, very important in the
present discussion.
El 11/12/2016 a las 16:57, tozziart...@libero.it escribió:
Dear FISers,
I know that some of you are going to kill me, but there’s something
that I must confess.
I notice, from the nice issued raised by Francesco Rizzo, Joseph
Brenner, John Collier, that the main concerns are always
energetic/informational arguments and accounts.
Indeed, the current tenets state that all is information, information
being a real quantity that can be measured through informational
entropies.
But… I ask to myself, is such a tenet true?
When I cook the pasta, I realize that, by my point of view, the cooked
pasta encompasses more information than the not-cooked one, because it
acquires the role of something that I can eat in order to increase my
possibility to preserve myself in the hostile environment that wants
to destroy me. However, by the point of view of the bug who eats the
non-cooked pasta, my cooked pasta displays less information for sure.
Therefore, information is a very subjective measure that, apart from
its relationship with the observer, does not mean very much… Who can
state that an event or a fact displays more information than another one?
And, please, do not counteract that information is a quantifiable,
objective reality, because it can be measured through informational
entropy… Informational entropy, in its original Shannon’s formulation,
stands for an ergodic process (page 8 of the original 1948 Shannon’s
seminal paper), i.e.: every sequence produced by the processes is the
same in statistical properties, or, in other words, a traveling
particle always crosses all the points of its phase space. However,
in physics and biology, the facts and events are never ergodic.
Statistical homogeneity is just a fiction, if we evaluate the world
around us and our brain/mind.
Therefore, the role of information could not be as fundamental as
currently believed.
P.S.: topology analyzes information by another point of view, but it’s
an issue for the next time, I think…
*Arturo Tozzi*
AA Professor Physics, University North Texas
Pediatrician ASL Na2Nord, Italy
Comput Intell Lab, University Manitoba
http://arturotozzi.webnode.it/
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-------------------------------------------------
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 0
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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