Re: [Fis] Concluding the Lecture?
Dear Bob (and colleagues), It seems to me that you drive the problem home by signaling that the use of the word information is very loose in many of our debates. Actually, you argue if I correctly understand that this is rich: words only obtain meaning within a sentence, and one can import information in differently phrased sentences. :) The concept that is missing in this context is codification. The word information cannot only be used loosely, but also as a reference to a concept with meaning from theoretical perspectives. I understood that in Chinese, one has two words for information: sjin sji and tsjin bao; the former being Shannon-type information, and the latter also meaning intelligence. It seems to that Terrys information concept in these discussions is rather Shannon-type. He adds the point that information is relative to maximum information (which can also be precisely defined using Shannon). The difference between maximum information and maximum information is redundancy. Weaver (1949) already noted that in addition to engineering noise, one may have semantic noise or equivalently semantic redundancy if, for example, the sources of noise are correlated; for example, in language. This refinement can go further in scholarly discourse where the use of language is restricted. Thus, I dont agree that the journey is the purpose in itself; the objective is to move information theory forward as a scientific enterprise. Wo Begriffe fehlen, fuegt zur rechten Zeit ein Wort sich ein. :) Best wishes, Loet _ Loet Leydesdorff Emeritus University of Amsterdam Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR) mailto:l...@leydesdorff.net l...@leydesdorff.net ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/ http://www.leydesdorff.net/ Honorary Professor, http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/ SPRU, University of Sussex; Guest Professor http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/ Zhejiang Univ., Hangzhou; Visiting Professor, http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html ISTIC, Beijing; Visiting Professor, http://www.bbk.ac.uk/ Birkbeck, University of London; http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYJhl=en http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYJhl=en From: Fis [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Bob Logan Sent: Friday, January 30, 2015 3:07 PM To: Pedro C. Marijuan Cc: 'fis' Subject: Re: [Fis] Concluding the Lecture? Thanks Pedro for your remarks. We have not reached our destination as you point out but the important thing is to enjoy the journey which I certainly have. It is inevitable that with such a slippery concept as information that there will be different destinations depending on the travellers but what I like about FIS in general and the dialogue that Terry prompted in particular is the interesting ideas and good company I encountered along the way. As for your remark about searching where there is light I suggest that we pack a flashlight for the next journey to be led by our tour guide Zhao Chuan. One common theme for understanding the importance of both information and intelligence for me is interpretation and context (figure/ground or pragmatics). Thanks to all especially Terry for a very pleasant journey. - Bob __ Robert K. Logan Prof. Emeritus - Physics - U. of Toronto Chief Scientist - sLab at OCAD http://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertKLogan www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Logan5/publications http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Logan5/publications On 2015-01-30, at 8:25 AM, Pedro C. Marijuan wrote: Dear Terry and colleagues, At your convenience, during the first week of February or so we may put an end to the ongoing New Year Lecture --discussants willing to enter their late comments should hurry up. Your own final or concluding comment will be appreciated. Personally, my late comment will deal with the last exchange between Bob and Terry, It is about the point which follows: ...there was no thesis other than the word information is a descriptor for so many different situations and that it is a part of a semantic web - no roadmap only a jaunt through the countryside of associations - a leisurely preamble. In my own parlance, we have been focusing this fis session on the microphysical foundations of information (thermodynamic in this case) which together with the quantum would look as the definite foundations of the whole field, or even of the whole great domain of information. But could it be so? Is there such thing as a unitary foundation? My impression is that we are instinctively working where the light is, reminding the trite story of the physicists who has lost the car keys and is looking closest to the street lamp. The point I suggest is that the different informational realms are emergent in the strongest sense: almost no trace of the underlying
Re: [Fis] Fwd: Re: Concluding the Lecture?
Hi Joseph, Indeed there is much more to discuss than I could include in this already too long discussion paper. The related absence issues are of course critical to my thinking. I value your continued feedback on these issues as well. I think you do a quite adequate job of restating the autogenesis hypothesis in your first paragraph. I also agree with your comment about the model of autogenesis being incomplete because it does not specify the necessary stereochemical properties of the interacting molecules, or for that matter the energy flux that is required to drive reciprocal catalysis, the shapes and charges of molecules that tend to self assemble into containers (like viral capsids), the rate-coupling required for reciprocal catalysis and self-assembly to be reciprocally supportive, and the entropy production of the whole process, etc., etc. Yes, much simulation and lab work lies ahead. I actually don't see a problem there, however, nor do I think this results in circularity. Nothing at the molecular level smuggles in properties that define information in the model. All that matters for my purpose is that I am not postulating any unrealistic atomic and molecular properties. When Ludwig Boltzmann used an idealized thought experiment for formulate his atomistic account of the 2nd law of thermodynamics with particles that didn't even interact, it was sufficient to model the general logic of entropy increase. No real atoms, no real physics, just the logic of time and random change in position. The model captured what was minimally necessary and no more. Yes, Gibbs and others fine-tuned the account, adding the role of free-energy and many dimensions of interactions, but Boltzmann's thought experiment laid the foundation. So I don't consider the abstraction involved in the autogenesis model to be an intrinsic fatal flaw. The question is whether or not it is too simple, or whether it violates some basic physico-chemical principles. I can't see how you can doubt that it is a realistic model, since both component processes are well-studied molecular phenomena with innumerable exemplars available. Only the linkage between them that constitutes autogenesis lacks a know empirical exemplar. It is an empirical question whether this can occur, and what conditions and types of molecules this would require. I see no physico-chemical reason to doubt this possibility. Your question about qualitative signification and my concept of work saving seemed to lead inexplicably into a comment about human and social history. Lost me there. But you also seemed to suggest that the autogenic model provided no fixed ground for making a qualitative assessment (significance). I believe that it does. In the autogentic model this depends on there being a fixed amount of chemical work required to reconstitute an autogenic complex from a specific state of disaggregation. This differential can be assigned a finite repeatable value (again not specifying specific molecules). This functionally defined threshold provides the reference value that I argue is required for assessing the significance of information. It is both a qualitative state difference (non-algorithmic in your terms) and yet the product of a quantitative work differential. This assessment is best exemplified by the second autogenic model system; i.e. with the shell that loses integrity with increasing numbers of bound catalytic substrates. The threshold value of its transition from intact-inert to disaggregated-and-dynamically reconstituting provides an assay of the environmental potential for re-achieving stability and preserving this same potential to be available for another work cycle. Different threshold values will result in different amounts of work required for reconstitution and different probabilities of persistence with respect to disruption. The threshold that determines this change of state is thereby representing a property of the environment that is of qualitative value with respect to the perpetuation of this system's assessment capacity into the future, irrespective of any outside interpretation. And since differences in thresholds will provide better or worse fits between work required and resources provided, there can be predictive value differences of the information provided by this change of state. Differences in its conveyance of information predictive of the nearby (though not just directly contiguous) environment's supportive or non-supportive value. OK. It's clearly too simple for modeling human knowledge, subjective awareness, the meaning of this sentence, etc., but I think it's a useful first step beyond Shannon. — Terry On 1/30/15, joe.bren...@bluewin.ch joe.bren...@bluewin.ch wrote: Terry, In your discussion paper, you state that an interpretive process can only be adequately defined with respect to a process that is organized to maintain itself by repairing and reconstituting its essential form and dispositions - a teleodynamic
Re: [Fis] Concluding the Lecture?
Hi Loet, I love your comment about the two Chinese terms, but I hope you haven't come away with the impression that I have remained in the realm of Shannon information. I have merely tried to take a small cautious step away from “sjin sji” and toward “tsjin bao” -- recognizing that there is much more work to do. — Terry On 1/31/15, Loet Leydesdorff l...@leydesdorff.net wrote: Dear Bob (and colleagues), It seems to me that you drive the problem home by signaling that the use of the word “information” is very loose in many of our debates. Actually, you argue – if I correctly understand – that this is rich: words only obtain meaning within a sentence, and one can import “information” in differently phrased sentences. :) The concept that is missing in this context is “codification”. The word “information” cannot only be used loosely, but also as a reference to a concept with meaning from theoretical perspectives. I understood that in Chinese, one has two words for information: “sjin sji” and “tsjin bao”; the former being Shannon-type information, and the latter also meaning intelligence. It seems to that Terry’s information concept in these discussions is rather Shannon-type. He adds the point that information is relative to maximum information (which can also be precisely defined using Shannon). The difference between maximum information and maximum information is redundancy. Weaver (1949) already noted that in addition to engineering noise, one may have semantic noise or – equivalently – semantic redundancy if, for example, the sources of noise are correlated; for example, in language. This refinement can go further in scholarly discourse where the use of language is restricted. Thus, I don’t agree that the journey is the purpose in itself; the objective is to move information theory forward as a scientific enterprise. “Wo Begriffe fehlen, fuegt zur rechten Zeit ein Wort sich ein.” :) Best wishes, Loet _ Loet Leydesdorff Emeritus University of Amsterdam Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR) mailto:l...@leydesdorff.net l...@leydesdorff.net ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/ http://www.leydesdorff.net/ Honorary Professor, http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/ SPRU, University of Sussex; Guest Professor http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/ Zhejiang Univ., Hangzhou; Visiting Professor, http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html ISTIC, Beijing; Visiting Professor, http://www.bbk.ac.uk/ Birkbeck, University of London; http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYJhl=en http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYJhl=en From: Fis [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Bob Logan Sent: Friday, January 30, 2015 3:07 PM To: Pedro C. Marijuan Cc: 'fis' Subject: Re: [Fis] Concluding the Lecture? Thanks Pedro for your remarks. We have not reached our destination as you point out but the important thing is to enjoy the journey which I certainly have. It is inevitable that with such a slippery concept as information that there will be different destinations depending on the travellers but what I like about FIS in general and the dialogue that Terry prompted in particular is the interesting ideas and good company I encountered along the way. As for your remark about searching where there is light I suggest that we pack a flashlight for the next journey to be led by our tour guide Zhao Chuan. One common theme for understanding the importance of both information and intelligence for me is interpretation and context (figure/ground or pragmatics). Thanks to all especially Terry for a very pleasant journey. - Bob __ Robert K. Logan Prof. Emeritus - Physics - U. of Toronto Chief Scientist - sLab at OCAD http://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertKLogan www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Logan5/publications http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Logan5/publications On 2015-01-30, at 8:25 AM, Pedro C. Marijuan wrote: Dear Terry and colleagues, At your convenience, during the first week of February or so we may put an end to the ongoing New Year Lecture --discussants willing to enter their late comments should hurry up. Your own final or concluding comment will be appreciated. Personally, my late comment will deal with the last exchange between Bob and Terry, It is about the point which follows: ...there was no thesis other than the word information is a descriptor for so many different situations and that it is a part of a semantic web - no roadmap only a jaunt through the countryside of associations - a leisurely preamble. In my own parlance, we have been focusing this fis session on the microphysical foundations of information (thermodynamic in this case) which together with the quantum would look as the definite foundations of the whole field,
[Fis] summit reminder
dear friends, just a remark and reminder. terry will have his talk at our summit on the opening day and bob will facilitate the discussion. the opening day is the 3rd of june, 2015. bob will have the last talk of the summit on the 7th of june, on the boat trip. so you are welcome to attend and there will be plenty of opportunities to discuss face-to-face. there are also many other possibilities to engage with the summit. just browse the website summit.is4is.org. if you consider a contribution by yourself, look at the calls for papers (only an abstract is needed) and don’t forget that he deadline is the 27th of february! i recommend to book your flight and stay in vienna asap (vienna will be crowded at that time). pls, register also now for the conference (there is no risk if for any reasons you might be forced to cancel your visit – look at our cancellation policies.) so hope to see you here in vienna, wolfgang www.hofkirchner.uti.at summit.is4is.org +43 1 58801 18730 (no voicemail) ___ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
