Hi Ian
ian glendinning wrote:
> 1 being "inorganic" - ie reducible to "physics" - relations
> (subject-quality-object triples) based on communication of physical
> forces and effects amongst things.
Agreed. One of the most famous formulas (E=mc^2) is more or less a dead
giveaway. Even if energy and mass seems to be very different, they are actually
the same, inorganic patterns.
> 2 being "biological" - ie reducible to "life" (but not physics) -
> relations based on communication of "genetically encoded" information
> amongst things.
Mmm, I try to stay away from words such as "life" because it carries so many
ramifications. And I'll also like to keep a door open for artificial senses,
such as artificial noses, seeing cameras etc.
And I'm not sure about the genes, I would especially keep the word
"information"
out of level 2. But I guess the gene reading/copying process could be seen as a
kind of biological sense. Or... nah.. I'll just go all-in and confess that I
consider a cell to be a society of different things performing different
functions for their mutual benefit.
> 3/4 being "socio-intellectual" - ie reducible to "culture" - relations
> based-on communication of abstract ideas amongst things - but not
> reducible merely to life (or, god forbid, physics). [The
> socio-intellectual spectrum is a matter of degree of authority vs
> free-thought in a given cultural environment.]
If you take your "relations based-on communication of abstract ideas amongst
things" and remove the "of abstract ideas", you get "relations based-on
communication amongst things" which is pretty close to my idea of level 3.
Abstract ideas, information, reference, meaning, represent, those are all words
that belong to my view of level 4.
> (Hence in my world "quality" is pretty well equivalent to communicable
> information - where information is encoded in ever higher emergent
> patterns, not reducible to the lower substrate patterns.)
Not sure it's a good idea to use information as quality in lower levels. The
word implies interpretation and as you say "encoded" and then that information
is (or at least seems to be) exposed to "cultural differences" even if such
differences doesn't exist below the 3rd level.
> So 2 is distinguished from 3&4 by the absence of abstract (symbolic)
> information communication.
>
> How's that for starters ?
I didn't change too much, or maybe I did?
Magnus
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