Dear Bob (Ulanowicz), I hope I didn't come across as flippant about the political situation. The world is obviously in a very frightening and perilous state at the moment.
Regarding ecology, Shannon and IT, the common denominator is "counting". This is far from trivial. The disastrous economic policies which have delivered inequality and austerity... along with Brexit and Trump... have relied on approaches to measurement and information which we must now question. In my understanding of your work in ecology, you count event regularities in the ecosystem. A change to our understanding of number and counting would change the way we see the world in a fundamental way (the recent discussion about Joe Brenner's work on Lupasco is fascinating and it's my Christmas job to dig into it). There's something important about a logic which transcends binary distinctions (Spencer Brown and Lou Kauffman, category theorists, etc all seem to be poking at this). I remain optimistic. Governor Jerry Brown (Bateson student) gave a wonderful defiant speech a couple of days ago. "sometimes people need to have a heart attack to get them to stop smoking. We've just had a heart attack." Some fundamental root and branch rethinking is required. Best wishes, Mark On 18 December 2016 at 23:34, Robert E. Ulanowicz <[email protected]> wrote: >> Thank you Bob! >> >> The medium is a very restricted form of communication on the internet, of >> course... >> >> Are our circular deliberations about information victims of the so-called >> "information technology" which enables them? Is this a variety of >> Wittgenstein's realisation that the problems of philosophy were problems >> of language? Perhaps we cannot see the constraints that communications >> technology itself has on our discourse. How might we try to see them? > > Mark, I have long argued against identifying IT with communications > theory. You're right, doing so does place needless restrictions on the > discourse. As an ecologist, I use IT to quantify constraint and freedom > inherent in ecosystem trophic webs, which has nothing to do with > communication theory. In fact the whole discipline can be treated as > homologous to probability theory in total abstraction of communications. > >> Maybe this goes some way towards accounting for the strange political >> situation we find ourselves in at the moment! > > Almost everyone I know is feeling depressed and dreadful in anticipation > of what will happen after Jan 20. The feeling is that the Republic is very > much at risk. > >> Best wishes, >> >> Mark > > Cheers, > Bob U. > -- Dr. Mark William Johnson Institute of Learning and Teaching Faculty of Health and Life Sciences University of Liverpool Phone: 07786 064505 Email: [email protected] Blog: http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com _______________________________________________ Fis mailing list [email protected] http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
