Dear Joe and colleagues,
This seems counterproductive to me. The generative mechanism is
knowledge-based; notably based on discursive knowledge. The latter is
specific to the human species. Dolphins and dogs may be able to
language, but they cannot handle a credit card or understand the rule of
law. In my opinion, the generative mechanism is the generation of
redundancy by making further distinctions and thus options. Meaning
cannot be communicated, but it can be shared and be redundant.
Information is communicated and generates probabilistic entropy. Adding
redundancy extends the maximum entropy; we live in a different
(cultural) world after the next transition.
For example, transportation over the Alps was first restricted by the
passes such as the Gotthard and the Brenner passes. But using railways
tunneling under the Alps or airplanes flying over them, the number of
options is multiplied by orders of magnitude. The physical restriction
on the ground are overcome.
Redundancy generation can be measured in terms of (negative!) bits of
information.
The message is that there is no abstract "Logic in Reality" as a general
systems dynamic, but this is itself a knowledge claim. The substance
other than res extensa--that is, res cogitans--is not provided in data
and to be measured in bits, but in terms of absences to be measured in
-data. In other words, I disagree with Sungchul's positivism: meaning in
inter-human communications is not objective, but intersubjective. It is
provided with hindsight to the historical events and with reference to
horizons of meaning.
Best,
Loet
PS. Pedro, this is my first message in the new week. L.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Loet Leydesdorff
Professor emeritus, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)
l...@leydesdorff.net <mailto:l...@leydesdorff.net>;
http://www.leydesdorff.net/
Associate Faculty, SPRU, <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/>University of
Sussex;
Guest Professor Zhejiang Univ. <http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/>,
Hangzhou; Visiting Professor, ISTIC,
<http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html>Beijing;
Visiting Fellow, Birkbeck <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/>, University of London;
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en
------ Original Message ------
From: "Joseph Brenner" <joe.bren...@bluewin.ch>
To: "Terrence W. DEACON" <dea...@berkeley.edu>; "Alex Hankey"
<alexhan...@gmail.com>
Cc: fis@listas.unizar.es; "Emanuel Diamant" <emanl....@gmail.com>;
"Sungchul Ji" <s...@pharmacy.rutgers.edu>
Sent: 1/14/2018 8:36:10 AM
Subject: Re: [Fis] Response to Sungchul. Generative Logic
Dear All again,
Terry has introduced an absolutely essential concept on which we need
to focus, that of a generative logic of informational relationships. I
would just like to point out that we are not starting from zero. Some
of us, for example Mark J. and I have already recognized the need for a
new logic, in which understanding the dynamic relationships is central.
In Logic in Reality, for example, Terry’s suggestion of the need to
avoid “the tendency to use language-like communication as the paradigm
exemplar” is already achieved by focus on the non-linguistic dynamic
process properties of information.
If Terry could expand his concept of the contours of a ‘generative
logic’, it might be possible to show this even more clearly.
Thank you and best wishes,
Joseph
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Fis [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Terrence
W. DEACON
Sent: samedi, 13 janvier 2018 19:33
To: Alex Hankey
Cc:fis@listas.unizar.es; Emanuel Diamant; Sungchul Ji
Subject: Re: [Fis] I salute to Sungchul
Hi all,
I would be very encouraged if we are trying to develop beyond mere
lists of different uses of the term 'information' TO structured
taxonomies of distinct types of information TO a generative logic of
how these distinct modes of a complex information relationship are
interrelated.
Dualistically distinguishing intrinsic properties of an informing
medium from relational properties that determine its reference provides
an important first step in growing the concept to encompas its full
usefulness. But I hope that we will also eventually begin to attend to
the functional value that the coveyed reference provides, since this
too is often also implicitly part of the various uses of the term
'infomation' in colloquial and even scientific use. This requires more
careful parsing of the term "meaning" that is often invoked.
For instance, one can receive information that is unambiguously "about"
something but where that which it is about is already known and
therefore is "functionally redundant" (not to be confused with signal
redundancy). Or this information can be about something that is
irrelevant to a given function or end, while still being information
about something.
An example would be telling me the time when I already know what time
it is. The statement about the time does indeed "mean" something—i.e.
it is not meaningless as gibberish woiuld be. Similarly, if I ask to
know the current temperature and I am instead told the time, the
reference provided would be useless to me—i.e. it wouldn't "make a
difference" in the colloquial English sense of that phrase. The concept
of "meaning" tends to collapse or conflate these two
distinctions—reference and significance—which I think we should
endeavor to distinguish.
In this respect I like the suggestion by Alex Hankey that we consider
an example like the barely conscious "feeling" of being watched which
both conveys information about an extrinsic state of affairs and
additionally has a functional relevance which is implicit in the
discomfort it typically elicits. Both the aboutness and the
significance are relational, not intrinsic properties of information.
They are are distinct relations because they are asymmetrically
dependent on one another. Thus if I am entirely unaware of being
watched I am nnot discomforted by it.
Note also the difference in these relational attrributes: aboutness or
reference is "in relation to" some state of affairs, whereas
significance or value is "in relation to" some telos intrinsic to an
interpreting agent or system.
Exploring such nondiscursive examples can help us to escape the
tendency to use language-like communication as the paradigm exemplar.
The analysis of the information intrinsic to and conveyed by music
might in this respect provide a useful platform for future discussion.
Are there other critical distinctions that we additionally need to
highlight?
Happy New Year, Terry
On Fri, Jan 12, 2018 at 9:24 PM, Alex Hankey <alexhan...@gmail.com>
wrote:
And what about the Kinds of Information that you cannot put in a data
set?
The information that makes you turn your head and meet the gaze of
someone staring at you.
No one could do that, which we humans and all animals do constantly,
unless we had received such information at a subliminal level in the
brain.
We all have that capacity, it is vital for survival in the wild. All
animals do it.
The 'Sense of Being Stared At' is a common experience for most animals,
how far down the tree of life no one yet knows.
Whatever triggers it is definitely 'A Difference that Makes a
Difference',
so fits in your definition of 'Meaningful Information' - it has to!
BUT IT CANNOT BE DIGITAL INFORMATION.
Please Face Up to This Fact.
All best wishes,
Alex
On 13 January 2018 at 07:30, Sungchul Ji <s...@pharmacy.rutgers.edu>
wrote:
Hi Emmanuel and FISers,
Thank you, Emmanuel, for your generous remarks. It is heartening to
know that our ideas converge, although we carried out our research
independently of each other, a clear example of consilience.
(1) I like and agree with the Kolomogorov quote you cited in [1]:
"Information is a linguistic description of structures in a given data
set."
It seems to me that there are 4 key concepts embedded in the above
quote, which we may view as the definition of what may be called the
"Komogorov information" or the "Kolmogorov-Bateson information" for
the convenience of reference:
i) data set (e.g., ACAGTCAACGGTCCAA)
ii) linguistic description (e.g., Threonine, Valine, Asparagine,
Glycine)
iii) structure (e.g., 16 mononucdotide, 8 dinucldotides, 5
trinucleotides plus 1)
iv) mathematical description (e.g., tensor product of two 2x2 matrices
of 4 nucleotides) [2, 3].
The first three elements are obvious, but the 4th is not so obvious
but justified in view of the recent work of Petoukhov [2, 3].
(2) Based on these ideas, I have constructed Table 1 below of the
various names applied to the two kinds of information which I
described as I(-) and I(+) in my previous post.
Table 1. The arbitrariness of the signs referring to ‘information’.
It doesn’t matter what you call it, as long as your chosen label
refers to the right reality, thing, process, mechanisms, etc.
1
Type I Information
Type II information
2
Physical Information
Sematic information
3
Shannon information
Kolmogorov information, or
Kolmogorov-Bateson information
4
‘Meaningless’ information
‘Meaningful’ information
5
I(-) information, or simply I(-)
I(+) information, or simply I(+)
6
Quantitative information
Qualitative information
7
Mathematical information
Linguistic information (see Statement (1))
8
Formal information
Phenomenological information
9
Interpretant-less sign [4]
Triadic sign [4]
(3) One practical application of the dual theory of information under
discussion is in deducing the structure of cell language, or the
structure of the linguistics of DNA, in a much more rigorous manner
than was possible in 1997 [5].
It is the common practice in biology to use the terms "letters",
"words", "sentences", and "texts" without any rigorous definitions.
The general rule is to follow the rules of concatenations used in
linguistics literally and say that
i) just as 26 letters in the English alphabet are combined to form
words (the process being called the second articulation [5]), so the 4
letters of the genetic alphabets, A, C, G and T/U, combine in
triplets to form genetic codons. Similarly, just as words form
sentences and sentences form texts by the same concatenation procedure
(or tensor multiplication, mathematically speaking , i.e, linearly
arranging words and sentences, respectively (see the second column in
Table 2), so the 64 nucleotide triplets combine to form proteins and
proteins combine to form metabolic pathways by continuing the
concatenation process, or the tensor multiplication of matrices of
larger and larger sizes (see the fourth column, which is based on the
physical theory of information, i.e., without any involvement of
semantics or the first articulation).
ii) In contrast to the fourth column just described, we can justify
an alternative structural assignments based on the semantic theory of
information as shown in the fifth column of Table 2. Here the letters
of the cell language alphabet are not always mononucloetoides but
thought to be n-nucleotides, such as dinucleotides (when n = 2),
trinucleotides (when n =3), tetranucleotides (when n = 4),
penta-nucelotides (when n = 5), etc. That is, unlike in human
language where the letters of an alphabet usually consist of one
symbol, e.g., A, B, C, D, E, . . . , I am claiming that in cell
language, the letters can be mononucloetides (i.e., A, G, C, T/U),
dinucloeotides (i.e., AG, AC, . . . .) , trinucleotides (i.e., ACT,
GTA, . . . ), tetranucleotides (i.e., ACTG, CCGT, . . . .),
pentanucleotides (i.e., ACCTG, TCGAT, . . .) and, up to n-nucleotides
(also called n-plets [2, 3]), where n is an unknown number whose upper
limit is not yet known (at least to me). If this conjecture turns out
to be true, then the size of the cell language alphabet can be much
larger (10^3 - 10^9 ?) than the size of a typical human linguistic
alphabet which is usually less than 10^2, probably due to the
limitation of the memory capacity of the human brain.
(iii) From linguistics, we learn that there are at least 4 levels of
organization, each level characterized by a unique function (see the
second column). Without presenting any detailed argument, I just wish
to suggest that the linguistic structures deduced based on the
semantic information theory (i.e., the fifth column) agree with the
human linguistic structures (i.e., the second column) better than does
the linguistic structures based on the
physical/mathematical/quantitative information theory (i.e., the
fourth column), when the functional hierarchy given in the third
column is taken into account.
Table 2. Two versions of the linguistics of DNA based on (i) the
physical information theory, and (ii) the semantic information theory
[1]. M stands for a 2x2 matrix whose elements are the 4 genetic
nucleotides, A, C, G and T/U, i.e., M = [C A; T G] (see Figure 16 in
[2]). The symbol, (x), indicates tensor multiplication [2, 3]. The I
to II transition is known in linguistics as the second articulation;
the II to III transition as the first articulation [4]; the III to IV
transition was referred to as the third articulation [5].
Organization level
Human Language
Cell Language
Structure
Function/Semantics
Structure based on the Physical Information Theory (PIT) [1]
Structure based on the Semantic Information Theory (SIT) [1]
I
Letters
Basic building
blocks or basic physical signals
4 Nucleotides (A, C, G, T/U);
M = [C A;T G]*
mono-, di-, trinucleotides, 4-plets, 5-plets, . . . , n-plets of
nucleotides, . . .
II
Words
To denote
16 dinucleotides;
M(x)M or M^2
Any combinations of the n-plets/ genes/proteins
III
Sentences
To decide
64 trinucleotides /amino acids;
M(x)M(x)M or M^3
Assembly of genes/proteins; or metabolic pathways (MP)
IV
Texts
To argue/compute/
reason (e.g., syllogism)
254 tetranucleotides;
Metabolic pathways (?); M(x)M(x)M(x)M or M^4
Networks of MP’s
characterized by a unique function (see the second column). Without
presenting any detailed argument, I would like to suggest that the
linguistic structures deduced based on the semantic information theory
(i.e., the fifth column) agree with the human linguistic structures
(i.e., the second column) better than does the linguistic structures
based on the physical/mathematical/quantitative information theory
(i.e., the fourth column).
In other words, the structure of cell language deduced based on the
semantic information theory agrees better, functionally, with that of
the human language than the structure of cell language deduced based
on the physical information theory, thus further supporting the 1997
postulate that cell and human languages are isomorphic [5, 6].
If you have any questions or suggestions for improvements on the above
tables, I would appreciate hearing from you.
All the best.
Sung
References:
[1] Emanuel Diamant, The brain is processing information, not data.
Does anybody care?, ISIS Summit Vienna 2015, Extended Abstract.
http://sciforum.net/conference/isis-summit-vienna-2015/paper/2842
<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsciforum.net%2Fconference%2Fisis-summit-vienna-2015%2Fpaper%2F2842&data=02%7C01%7Csji%40pharmacy.rutgers.edu%7C89f81861ee684f05e46b08d559d86fe1%7Cb92d2b234d35447093ff69aca6632ffe%7C1%7C1%7C636513708497810284&sdata=bMlZ324OoEHA5XMQibKiEFsm75NhcpkfIcSRUJbQZNg%3D&reserved=0>
[2] Petoukhov, S. (2017). Genetic coding and united-hypercomplex
systems in the models of algebraic biology. BioSystems158: 31-46.
[3]Petoukhov, S. (2016). The system-resonance approach in modeling
genetic
structures. BiosySystems139:1-11.
[4] Ji, S. (2017).Neo-Semiotics: Introducing Zeroness into Peircean
Semiotics May Bridge the Knowable and the Unknowable. Prog. Biophys.
Mol. Biol. 131:387-401. PDF at
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610717300858?via%3Dihub
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610717300858?via%3Dihub>
[5] Ji, S. (1997). Isomorphism between cell and human languages:
molecualr biological, bioinformatic and linguistic implications.
<http://www.conformon.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Isomorphism1.pdf>BioSystems
44:17-39. PDF at
http://www.conformon.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Isomorphism1.pdf
<http://www.conformon.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Isomorphism1.pdf>
[6] Ji, S. (2017). The Cell Language Theory: Connecting Mind and
Matter. World Scientific, New Jersey. Chapter 5.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Fis <fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es> on behalf of Emanuel Diamant
<emanl....@gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, January 12, 2018 11:20 AM
To:fis@listas.unizar.es
Subject: [Fis] I salute to Sungchul
Dear FISers,
I would like to express my pleasure with the current state of our
discourse – an evident attempt to reach a more common understanding
about information issues and to enrich preliminary given assessments.
In this regard, I would like to add my comment to Sungchul’s post of
January 12, 2018.
Sungchul proposes “to recognize two distinct types of information
which, for the lack of better terms, may be referred to as the
"meaningless information" or I(-) and "meaningful information" or
I(+)”.
That is exactly what I am trying to put forward for years, albeit
under more historically rooted names: Physical and Semantic
information [1]. Never mind, what is crucially important here is that
the duality of information becomes publicly recognized and accepted by
FIS community.
I salute to Sungchul’s suggestion!
Best regards, Emanuel.
[1] Emanuel Diamant, The brain is processing information, not data.
Does anybody care?, ISIS Summit Vienna 2015, Extended Abstract.
http://sciforum.net/conference/isis-summit-vienna-2015/paper/2842
<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fsciforum.net%2Fconference%2Fisis-summit-vienna-2015%2Fpaper%2F2842&data=02%7C01%7Csji%40pharmacy.rutgers.edu%7C89f81861ee684f05e46b08d559d86fe1%7Cb92d2b234d35447093ff69aca6632ffe%7C1%7C1%7C636513708497810284&sdata=bMlZ324OoEHA5XMQibKiEFsm75NhcpkfIcSRUJbQZNg%3D&reserved=0>
_______________________________________________
Fis mailing list
Fis@listas.unizar.es
http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
<http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis>
--
Alex Hankey M.A. (Cantab.) PhD (M.I.T.)
Distinguished Professor of Yoga and Physical Science,
SVYASA, Eknath Bhavan, 19 Gavipuram Circle
Bangalore 560019, Karnataka, India
Mobile (Intn'l): +44 7710 534195 <tel:+44%207710%20534195>
Mobile (India) +91 900 800 8789 <tel:+91%2090080%2008789>
____________________________________________________________
2015 JPBMB Special Issue on Integral Biomathics: Life Sciences,
Mathematics and Phenomenological Philosophy
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00796107/119/3>
_______________________________________________
Fis mailing list
Fis@listas.unizar.es
http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
<http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis>
--
Professor Terrence W. Deacon
University of California, Berkeley
<https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=emailclient>
Garanti sans virus. www.avast.com
<https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=emailclient>
<#DAB4FAD8-2DD7-40BB-A1B8-4E2AA1F9FDF2>
_______________________________________________
Fis mailing list
Fis@listas.unizar.es
http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
