Dear colleagues,
Yes, the foundations are trembling... as usual during quite long a time. Maybe
too many aspects have to be put into line in order to have new, more consistent
foundations for human knowledge. Until now the different crisis of Mechanics,
the dominant scientific culture, have been solved at the small price of
leaving conceptual inconsistencies until the rug of brand new fields or
subdisciplines while at the same time fictive claims of unity of sceince,
reductionism, etc. were upheld. Good for mechanics, as probably there were few
competing options around --if any. Bad for the whole human knowledge, as
multidisciplinary schizophrenia has been assumed as the natural state of
mental health.
My opinion is that information science should carefully examine the problematic
claims at the core of mechanical ways of explanation, as some (many?) of them
refer to the information stuff: unlimited communication (even between physical
elements), arbitrary partitions and boundary conditions, ideal status of the
acting laws of nature, ominiscient observer, idealized nature of human
knowledge (no neurodynamics of knowledge), disciplinary hierarchies versus
heterarchical interrelationships, logical versus social construction and
knowledge recombination, idealized social information, etc.etc. Probably I have
misconceived and wrongly expressed some of those problems, but in any case it
is unfortunate that there is a dense feedback among them and a strong
entrenchment with many others, so the revision task becomes Herculean even if
partially addressed.
The big problem some of us see, and I tried to argument about that in the last
Beijing FIS meeting, is that without an entrance of some partial aspect in the
professional science system, none of the those challenges has the slightest
possibility of being developed in the amateur mode/marginal science our studies
are caught into. Therefore a common challenge for FIS, the new ISIS society,
ITHEA, Symmetrion, INBIOSA, etc. is to take some piece or problem, with
practical implications, and enter it into the institutional system, it does not
matter where and by whom, and little by little expand the initial stronghold
with the collective support of all of us. There is a terrific collection of
individualities and scholars in the FIS enterprise and the germane entities, so
that any small oficializing attempt should prosper quite soon.
Let us think about that... there is hope for non-trembling foundations!
Provided we are institutionally clever.
best wishes
---Pedro
PS. by the way, I would like to hear in this list from our flamboyant Beijing
FIS Group, as without discussion they and the colleagues at Wuhan are the best
situated to try to respond institutionally to the above challenge. My special
greetings to all the Chinese FIS friends!
- Mensaje original -
De: Koichiro Matsuno cxq02...@nifty.com
Fecha: Sábado, 3 de Noviembre de 2012, 6:11 am
Asunto: Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
A: fis@listas.unizar.es
Folks,
Bob U said The foundations, they are trembling! I
have taken it to imply that propositional
calculus itself is also in a bad shape. This observation reminds
me of the hanging paradox first
invented by an American logician Arthur Prior more than 60 years
ago. It goes like this:
On a certain Saturday a judge sentenced a man to
be hanged on Sunday or Monday at noon,
stipulating at the same time that the man would not know the day
of his hanging until the morning of
the day itself. The condemned man argued that if he were hanged
on Monday, he would be aware of the
fact by noon on Sunday, and this would contravene the judge's
stipulation. So the date of his
hanging would have to be Sunday. Since, however, he had worked
this out on Saturday, and so knew the
date of his hanging the day before, the judge's stipulation was
again contravened. The date,
therefore, could not be Sunday either. The prisoner concluded
that he would not be hanged at all.
However, the official gazette issued on Tuesday reported that
the man was hanged on last Sunday.
The logician-prisoner (the externalist) was right
in his deduction upon the trusted propositional
calculus, while the judge (the internalist) was also right in
faithfully executing the sentence. But
both cannot be right at the same time. Despite that, the
internalist could finally come to preside
over this empirical world. I had a hard time to convince myself
of it. Strange?
Cheers,
Koichiro Matsuno
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