Dear Gordana,
On 20 Oct 2017, at 11:02, Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic wrote:
Dear Terry, Bob, Loet
Thank you for sharing those important thoughts about possible
choices for the definition of agency.
I would like to add one more perspective that I find in Pedro’s
article which makes a distinction between matter-energy aspects and
informational aspects of the same physical reality. I believe that
on the fundamental level of information physics we have a good ND
simplest example how those two entangled aspects can be formally
framed.
As far as I can tell, Terrys definition covers chemical and
biological agency.
Do we want to include apart from fundamental physics also full
cognitive and social agency which are very much dominated by
informational aspects (symbols and language)?
Obviously there is no information without physical implementation,
Hmm... I am not sure. Elementary arithmetic determines all semi-
computable relative information state (with Oracles). So, with the
numbers, once you accept the addition laws and the multiplication
laws, information "grows" from inside, and consciousness differentiates.
When the information get deeper and deeper, in Bennett sense of debth,
dreams can stabilize and physical reality are "correctly" inferred,
and eventually derived from arithmetic.
That might not make your point below invalid.
It is yet an important metaphysical point. The incompleteness theorem
entails the existence of a sort of canonical information flux, or
consciousness differentiation internal to elementary arithmetic, or
elementary combinators, or to any universal machinery (universal in
the mathematical Church-Turing-Post-Kleene sense).
We can decide to consider the arithmetical beings being zombies, but
this would entails a very special definition of matter to make it
differ from the testable "arithmetical distribution".
We can't have weak mechanism and weak materialism, and the evidences
might side on a mathematical (somehow theological or psychological)
origin of the physical reality.
Incompleteness entails that all (platonist, classical reasoner
machine) are confronted with many different, and conflicting, views
about itself. Indeed it enforces the Theaetetus' distinctions, between
true, provable, knowable, observable, sensible:
p,
[]p,
[]p&p,
[]p&~[]f,
[]p&~[]f&p
With p sigma_1 arithmetical (equivalently: partial computable) this
gives a proposition account of a theology, testable as it explains how
the physical laws emerges from some "dream percolation" in arithmetic.
The physical is very important, but like in Plato, it could be, and
seemed to be, the border of another non physical, more mathematical,
plausibly arithmetical, reality.
but when we think about epistemology and the ways we know the world,
for us and other biological agents there is no physical interaction
without informational aspects.
Can we somehow think in terms those two faces of agency?
Without matter/energy nothing will happen, nothing can act in the
world but that which happens and anyone registers it, has
informational side to it.
Without matter/energy nothing physical will happen. But if we assume a
very weak form of digital mechanism, arithmetic justfies limiting
dreams, with rich indexical, relative amount of information, from
"inside arithmetic". And what we take as the physical might be what
emerges from a first person statistics on those dreams.
The logic of which is testable, and up to now, it matches the data
(thanks to QM without coilapse of the wave).
It is just premature to conclude that information (in the 1p and 3p
sense) needs the physical. The physical might be an invariant in a
notion of normal sharable number dream. (A dream can be defined by a
computation containing the emulation of a Löbian machine (they know
they are universal) with respect to different or not universal numbers.
In arithmetic, the universal numbers infers that below their
substitution level, if it exists, they are confronted to a statistics
on infinity of universal numbers, and above, locally, only with a
finite (but huge) number of universal machine/number.
I am aware I ask a huge spiritual or theological effort, coming back
to Plotinus, and Parmenides, and Plato, if not Pythagoras.
But in epistemology, computable can be defined in very elementary
theories and languages. The deep reason is the closure of the partial
computable functions for cantor diagonalization (Gödel's called that a
Miracle), and its price: the non computability of most predicate on
most machines behaviors (like halting), and the loss of control and
the art of letting go the things which go without saying.
The universal (Löbian) machine can already defeat all normative or
reductionist theory about their first person. They know that their
soul is not a machine!
For human agency (given that matter/energy side is functioning)
information is what to a high degree drives agency.
OK.
Do you think this would be a fruitful path to pursue, with “agency”
of elementary particles and agency of social institutions as two
limit cases?
Agency of elementary particles? I am not sure this would not make all
the number relations into an agent. Social institution are closer,
perhaps even more the corporations, but none are really autonomous. I
don't know.
This was my second (and last) post of the week.
All the best and best to All,
Bruno
Gordana
______________________________________________
Gordana Dodig Crnkovic, Professor of Computer Science
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Chalmers University of Technology
School of Innovation, Design and Engineering, Mälardalen University
http://www.mrtc.mdh.se/~gdc/
General Chair of is4si summit 2017
http://is4si-2017.org
From: Fis <fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es> on behalf of Loet
Leydesdorff <l...@leydesdorff.net>
Organization: University of Amsterdam
Reply-To: "l...@leydesdorff.net" <l...@leydesdorff.net>
Date: Friday, 20 October 2017 at 08:40
To: 'Bob Logan' <lo...@physics.utoronto.ca>, 'fis' <fis@listas.unizar.es
>
Subject: Re: [Fis] What is “Agent”?
Dear Bob and colleagues,
I agree with the choice element. From a sociological perspective,
agency is usually defined in relation to structure. For example, in
terms of structure/actor contingencies. The structures provide the
background that bind us. Remarkably, Mark, we no longer define these
communalities philosophically, but sociologically (e.g., Merton,
1942, about the institutional norms of science). An interesting
extension is that we nowadays not only perceive communality is our
biological origins (as species), but also in terms of communicative
layers that we construct and reproduce as inter-agency (interactions).
The relation with the information issue is not obvious. I worked on
this a bit in the first half of the 90s:
"Structure"/"Action" Contingencies and the Model of Parallel
Distributed Processing, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour
23 (1993) 47-77.
The Production of Probabilistic Entropy in Structure/Action
Contingency Relations, Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems 18
(1995) 339-56.
Best,
Loet
Loet Leydesdorff
Professor emeritus, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)
l...@leydesdorff.net ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/
Associate Faculty, SPRU, University of Sussex;
Guest Professor Zhejiang Univ., Hangzhou; Visiting Professor, ISTIC,
Beijing;
Visiting Fellow, Birkbeck, University of London;
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en
From: Fis [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Bob Logan
Sent: Friday, October 20, 2017 6:11 AM
To: Terrence W. DEACON <dea...@berkeley.edu>
Cc: fis <Fis@listas.unizar.es>
Subject: Re: [Fis] What is “Agent”?
Dear Terry and FIS friends - I agree with all that Terry has said
about agency. I do wish to however to point out that an agent has
choice and a non-agent has no choice. I would suggest that the
defining characteristic of an agent is choice and therefore an agent
must be a living organism and all living organisms are agents.
Agents/living organisms have choice or are capable of choice or
agency and they are the only things that have choice or can
interpret information. Abiotic non-agents do not have information
because they have no choice. We humans can have information about
abiotic objects but those objects themselves do not have that
information as they have no mind to be informed. That includes this
email post, it is abiotic an has no agency. It has information by
virtue of you reading it because you are able to interpret the
visual signs with which I have recorded my thoughts. Marshall
McLuhan would add to my comments that “the user is the content” as
well as saying that Shannon’s work was not a theory of information
but a "theory of transportation”. I think of Shannon’s work in a
similar light. I also do not regard Shannon’s work as a theory of
information but it is a theory of signals. Shannon himself said his
theory was not about meaning and I say what is information without
meaning and that therefore Shannon only had a theory of signals.
Another insight of McLuhan’s that of figure and ground is useful to
understand why we have so many different definitions of information.
McLuhan maintained that one could not understand a figure unless one
understood the ground in which it operates in. (McLuhan might have
gotten this idea from his professor at Cambridge, I. A. Richards,
who said that in order to communicate one needs to feedforward [he
coined the term btw] the context of what one is communicating.) The
different definitions of information we have considered are a result
of the different contexts in which the term information is used. We
should also keep in mind that all words are metaphors and metaphor
literally means to carry across, derived from the Greek meta
(literally ‘across') and phorein (literally 'to carry'). So the word
information has been carried across from one domain or area of
interest to another. It entered the English language as the noun
associated with the verb 'to inform', i.e. to form the mind. Here is
an excerpt from my book What Is Information? (available for free at
demopublishing.com):
"Origins of the Concept of Information - We begin our historic
survey of the development of the concept of information with its
etymology. The English word information according to the Oxford
English Dictionary (OED) first appears in the written record in 1386
by Chaucer: 'Whanne Melibee hadde herd the grete skiles and resons
of Dame Prudence, and hire wise informacions and techynges.' The
word is derived from Latin through French by combining the word
inform meaning giving a form to the mind with the ending “ation”
denoting a noun of action. This earliest definition refers to an
item of training or molding of the mind.” This is why abiotic
objects have no information as I claimed above because they have no
mind that can be informed.
I hope that by informing you of the origin of the word information I
have shed some light on our confusion about what is information and
why we have so many definitions of it. It might even shed some light
for that matter as to what is an agent. Got the ticket? If so that
makes me a ticket agent. I hope you get the joke. all the best - Bob
______________________
Robert K. Logan
Prof. Emeritus - Physics - U. of Toronto
Fellow University of St. Michael's College
Chief Scientist - sLab at OCAD
http://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertKLogan
www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Logan5/publications
https://www.physics.utoronto.ca/people/homepages/logan/
On Oct 19, 2017, at 7:11 PM, Terrence W. DEACON
<dea...@berkeley.edu> wrote:
AUTONOMOUS AGENCY: The definition I propose for autonomous agency It
is open to challenge. Of course, there are many ways that we use the
term 'agent' in more general and metaphoric ways. I am, however,
interested in the more fundamental conception that these derived
uses stem from. I do not claim that this definition is original, but
rather that it is what we implicitly understand by the concept. So
if this is not your understanding I am open to suggestions for
modification.
I should add that it has been a recent goal of my work to describe
an empirically testable simplest model system that satisfies this
definition. Those of you who are familiar with my work will
recognize that this is what I call an autogenic or teleodynamic
system. In this context, however, it is only the adequacy of the
definition that I am interested in exploring. As in many of the
remarks of others on this topic it is characterized by strange-loop
recursivity, self-reference, and physicality. And it may be worth
while describing how this concept is defined by e.g. Hofstadter, von
Foerster, Luhmann, Moreno, Kauffman, Barad, and others, to be sure
that we have covered the critical features and haven't snuck in any
"demons". In my definition, I have attempted to avoid any cryptic
appeal to observers or unexamined teleological properties, because
my purpose is instead to provide a constructive definition of what
these properties entail and why they are essential to a full
conception of information.
CENTRALITY OF NORMATIVE PROPERTIES: A critical factor when
discussing agency is that it is typically defined with respect to
"satisfaction conditions" or "functions" or "goals" or other
NORMATIVE properties. Normative properties are all implicitly
teleological. They are irrelevant to chemistry and physics. The
concept of an "artificial agent" may not require intrinsic teleology
(e.g. consider thermostats or guidance systems - often described as
teleonomic systems) but the agentive properties of such artifacts
are then implicitly parasitic on imposed teleology provided by some
extrinsic agency. This is of course implicit also in the concepts of
'signal' and 'noise' which are central to most information concepts.
These are not intrinsic properties of information, but are
extrinsically imposed distinctions (e.g. noise as signal to the
repair person). So I consider the analysis of agency and its
implicit normativity to be a fundamental issue to be resolved in our
analysis of information. Though we can still bracket any
consideration of agency from many analyses my simply assuming it
(e.g. assumed users, interpreters, organisms and their functions,
etc.), but this explicitly leaves a critical defining criterion
outside the analysis. In these cases, we should just be clear that
in doing so we have imported unexplained boundary conditions into
the analysis by fiat. Depending on the goal of the analysis (also a
teleological factor) this may be unimportant. But the nature and
origin of agency and normativity remain foundational questions for
any full theory of information.
On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 12:47 PM, Stanley N Salthe <ssal...@binghamton.edu
> wrote:
Here is an interesting recent treatment of autonomy.
Alvaro Moreno and Matteo Mossio: Biological Autonomy: A Philosophical
and Theoretical Enquiry (History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life
Sciences 12);
Springer, Dordrecht, 2015, xxxiv + 221 pp., $129 hbk, ISBN
978-94-017-9836-5
STAN
On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 11:44 AM, Terrence W. DEACON <dea...@berkeley.edu
> wrote:
AN AUTONOMOUS AGENT IS A DYNAMICAL SYSTEM ORGANIZED TO BE CAPABLE
OF INITIATING PHYSICAL WORK TO FURTHER PRESERVE THIS SAME CAPACITY
IN THE CONTEXT OF INCESSANT EXTRINSIC AND/OR INTRINSIC TENDENCIES
FOR THIS SYSTEM CAPACITY TO DEGRADE.
THIS ENTAILS A CAPACITY TO ORGANIZE WORK THAT IS SPECIFICALLY
CONTRAGRADE TO THE FORM OF THIS DEGRADATIONAL INFLUENCE, AND THUS
ENTAILS A CAPACITY TO BE INFORMED BY THE EFFECTS OF THAT INFLUENCE
WITH RESPECT TO THE AGENT’S CRITICAL ORGANIZATIONAL CONSTRAINTS.
On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 6:00 PM, Koichiro Matsuno <cxq02...@nifty.com
> wrote:
On 19 Oct 2017 at 6:42 AM, Alex Hankey wrote:
the actual subject has to be non-reducible and fundamental to our
universe.
This view is also supported by Conway-Kochen’s free will
theorem (2006). If (a big IF, surely) we admit that our fellows
can freely exercise their free will, it must be impossible to
imagine that the atoms and molecules lack their share of the
similar capacity. For our bodies eventually consist of those
atoms and molecules.
Moreover, the exercise of free will on the part of the
constituent atoms and molecules could come to implement the
centripetality of Bob Ulanowicz at long last under the guise of
chemical affinity unless the case would have to forcibly be
dismissed.
This has been my second post this week.
Koichiro Matsuno
From: Fis [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Alex
Hankey
Sent: Thursday, October 19, 2017 6:42 AM
To: Arthur Wist <arthur.w...@gmail.com>; FIS Webinar <Fis@listas.unizar.es
>
Subject: Re: [Fis] What is “Agent”?
David Chalmers's analysis made it clear that if agents exist,
then they are as fundamental to the universe as electrons or
gravitational mass.
Certain kinds of physiological structure support 'agents' - those
emphasized by complexity biology. But the actual subject has to
be non-reducible and fundamental to our universe.
Alex
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--
Professor Terrence W. Deacon
University of California, Berkeley
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--
Professor Terrence W. Deacon
University of California, Berkeley
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