Dear Colleagues,
good that FIS is up again after this computer glitch. It is encouraging, that since the resurrection the focus of FIS appears to be sharpened. Let me quote Pridi: “… brainstorming session that would include pure researchers and application oriented guys … … business people may find it more than worthwhile to attend such meetings! …” FIS does have a solid background in mathematics and formal logic. In 1995, that is 19 years ago!, Pedro encouraged me to summarise my research in sequences and contemporary assemblies into a book: “Zaragoza Lectures on Granularity Algebra”. Since then, there was hardly one year that I have not contributed to FIS and its friendly organisations an input relating to the formal logic underlying Nature’s machinations, with specific regard to genetics, the archetype of interactions between a sequence and a non-sequenced entity. During the years, what was at first cumbersome and complicated to understand and to explain, has morphed into something that is easy to explain but requires flexibility to understand. The explanation, how the interaction between the DNA and the cell works – as an information deciphering exercise – is of course of the “no-na” category, as Nature cannot and will not use illogical or questionable methods. It is us who have built the fundaments of our thinking in such a fashion that our perception and cognition filter out the relevant details. One has to go down to pre-school, or kindergarten level to point out what is to be looked at so that this detail can then be used like any other tool of arithmetic. Presently, I work on a pre-school level teaching material that should help soften the ingrained inhibitions of perception. There appear to be extreme difficulties among well-educated people to believe it possible that it is useful to re-learn what we have learnt at elementary school about arithmetic. The dès-illusionnement appears to be comparable to that experienced by our forefathers learning that the Earth is round or that evolution means that we are sharing genetics with apes. The paradigm changes come after circumstances have changed, and in this case, they have: computers allow us to look at numbers in bulk, until we find patterns. This method was not accessible to researchers of previous generations. Be as it may, the fact is, that to understand a process, we need to be able to model it by using numbers. This is where scientific, serious, industrial accounting comes into play. This discipline has to agree both to the laws of logic and arithmetic, and also be useful and focusable on specific tasks. There is no nonsense in accounting: if the sequence is a different one, there has to be an identifiable conglomerate of non-linear consequences that are re-traceable to the change in the sequence. This task has now been solved, in such a fashion that the results and the mechanism is communicable and understandable. One wonders about Mendel, whose rules of genetics he himself knew and understood way before his death, which preceded by 17 years the general acknowledgement that he indeed has had outlined and explained Mendel’s laws. There will be a FIS symposium in Vienna, the city I live in, next year. Please let me organize a sub-workshop on Modeling Genetic Information Transfer By Using Extensions To Arithmetic. Maybe, no one will turn up, but then not much is lost. In www.oeis.org there are two sequences registered that define the central concepts quite well (A235647, A242615). There is an article in ITHEA *http://www.foibg.com/ijita/vol21/ijita-fv21.htm <http://www.foibg.com/ijita/vol21/ijita-fv21.htm>* called Essay on Order. The accounting mechanism is outlined in *www.tautomat.com <http://www.tautomat.com/>*. There, one will also find the contributions to FIS of last year, called Learn to Count in Twelve Easy Steps. Showing the nuts and bolts of how the translation linear-spatial-linear actually works is not a sexy subject. Accountants, watch-makers, hair-splitters and sudoku-lovers may find it hilarious, albeit maybe a bit risqué. There are some unusual approaches to additions presented there, many taboos are broken, and many hearts will be broken, but absolutely no laws of logic or data processing. But then, again, this is what pure research does for a living. If number theorists could not deliver a good punch every once a while, the profession would have died out. Let me hope that the commercial and application guys are willing to shop. There is, indeed, something on offer coming from pure science, from basic research into the formal properties of logical sentences. The invention is extremely practical, and – once one has familiarized the usage of the amount-place accounting assignment mechanism – not more complicated than trigonometry, e.g. Its usage includes information packaging and decompressing, as many ways of en- and decryption as there can exist natural languages, and lots of exact definitions for concepts that we derive from observing Nature, without as yet knowing how to define them, e.g. gravitation, magnetism, chemical bondages, etc. The numeric model is well suited to serve as a construction to agree or disagree on the meaning of the term “information”, as there is an interplay between order, amount, place, time: the individual strands of the web constituting the interplay may or may not be the case, and therein lies information. Which manifestation(s) of “is the case” is connected to which symbol(s) appears to be the essence of information, so there is ample room to forge agreements on what we, precisely, understand under the term. Thanks again for the resurrection and may FIS become stronger and healthier after the crisis. Karl 2014-07-15 18:25 GMT+02:00 John Collier <colli...@ukzn.ac.za>: > At 03:14 PM 2014-07-15, you wrote: > > Dear John, > > Thank you for this interesting perspective. Regarding the origin of the > "limited band width" of physical processes, could this have its origin in > some regularity other than circularity? For example, the "continuous going > back and forth" (the phrase is Botero's) between opposing attitudes or > states, alternately predominantly actual and potential? > > > My understanding of waves is that is how they work, also similar phenomena > like pendula and oscillating springs, not to mention orbits. > > > All natural processes, then, have a capacity for continuous information > bearing. The problem is then the origin of /discreteness/, not only in your > countercase, which involves quantum particles, but at higher levels of > interactions between complex entities! For me, the only solution is that > continuity and discontinuity are properties of information which are > not totally separate from one another. > > > I was thinking more of billiard ball collisions, not ones that depend on > quantum states. In my article, "Causation is the transfer of information" > (available on my web site) and expanded in > > - Information, causation and computation > <http://web.ncf.ca/collier/papers/CollierJohn%20formatted.pdf> (2012. * > Information and Computation:* > <http://astore.amazon.co.uk/books-books-21/detail/9814295477> Essays > on Scientific and Philosophical Understanding of Foundations of Information > and Computation, Ed by Gordana Dodig Crnkovic and Mark Burgin, World > Scientific) > > I use a formal notion of an information channel to deal with information > transmission in classical systems. There are special problems when the > dynamics are not computable, but I explain how the idea can work there as > well. I do, however, need more formal proofs of sufficiency at this time, > though. Fortunately, my approach does not require computation of the amount > of information transferred, so I suppose it could be infinite and still > work, but I doubt it is infinite in real processes. I suppose I will have > to work that out at some point, one way or the other. > > John > > ------------------------------ > Professor John Collier > colli...@ukzn.ac.za > Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South > Africa > T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031 > Http://web.ncf.ca/collier > <http://web.ncf.ca/collier> > > _______________________________________________ > Fis mailing list > Fis@listas.unizar.es > http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis > >
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