Re: [Fis] A provocative issue

[John Collier]

Shannon declared in his original book that constraints are information. I don’t 
get the distinction you are trying to make. Also, Shannon information applies 
to continuous systems. If they have a form (are constrained), then they have 
finite information. Infinite information applies only if there are no 
constraints. I don’t see how that could be true in a world that has 
regularities.

John Collier
Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Associate
Philosophy, University of KwaZulu-Natal
http://web.ncf.ca/collier

From: Fis [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Bob Logan
Sent: Sunday, 11 December 2016 10:21 PM
To: tozziart...@libero.it
Cc: fis 
Subject: Re: [Fis] A provocative issue

Bravo Arturo - I totally agree - in a paper I co-authored with Stuart Kauffman 
and others we talked abut the relativity of
information and the fact that information is not an absolute. Here is the 
abstract of the paper and an excerpt from the paper that discusses the 
relativity of information. The full papers available at: 
https://www.academia.edu/783503/Propagating_organization_an_enquiry

Best wishes - Bob Logan


Kauffman, Stuart, Robert K. Logan, Robert Este, Randy Goebel, David Hobill and 
Ilya Smulevich. 2007. Propagating Organization: An Inquiry. Biology and 
Philosophy 23: 27-45.

Propagating Organization: An Enquiry - 
Stuart Kauffman, Robert K. Logan, Robert Este, Randy Goebel, David Hobill and 
lIlya Shmulevich

Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle Washington

 Abstract: Our aim in this article is to attempt to discuss propagating 
organization of process, a poorly articulated union of matter, energy, work, 
constraints and that vexed concept, “information”, which unite in far from 
equilibrium living physical systems. Our hope is to stimulate discussions by 
philosophers of biology and biologists to further clarify the concepts we 
discuss here. We place our discussion in the broad context of a “general 
biology”, properties that might well be found in life anywhere in the cosmos, 
freed from the specific examples of terrestrial life after 3.8 billion years of 
evolution. By placing the discussion in this wider, if still hypothetical, 
context, we also try to place in context some of the extant discussion of 
information as intimately related to DNA, RNA and protein transcription and 
translation processes. While characteristic of current terrestrial life, there 
are no compelling grounds to suppose the same mechanisms would be involved in 
any life form able to evolve by heritable variation and natural selection. In 
turn, this allows us to discuss at least briefly, the focus of much of the 
philosophy of biology on population genetics, which, of course, assumes DNA, 
RNA, proteins, and other features of terrestrial life. Presumably, evolution by 
natural selection – and perhaps self-organization - could occur on many worlds 
via different causal mechanisms.
Here we seek a non-reductionist explanation for the synthesis, accumulation, 
and propagation of information, work, and constraint, which we hope will 
provide some insight into both the biotic and abiotic universe, in terms of 
both molecular self reproduction and the basic work energy cycle where work is 
the constrained release of energy into a few degrees of freedom. The typical 
requirement for work itself is to construct those very constraints on the 
release of energy that then constitute further work. Information creation, we 
argue, arises in two ways: first information as natural selection assembling 
the very constraints on the release of energy that then constitutes work and 
the propagation of organization. Second, information in a more extended sense 
is “semiotic”, that is about the world or internal state of the organism and 
requires appropriate response. The idea is to combine ideas from biology, 
physics, and computer science, to formulate explanatory hypotheses on how 
information can be captured and rendered in the expected physical 
manifestation, which can then participate in the propagation of the 
organization of process in the expected biological work cycles to create the 
diversity in our observable biosphere.
Our conclusions, to date, of this enquiry suggest a foundation which views 
information as the construction of constraints, which, in their physical 
manifestation, partially underlie the processes of evolution to dynamically 
determine the fitness of organisms within the context of a biotic universe.

Section 4. The Relativity of Information
 In Sections 2 we have argued that the Shannon conception of information are 
not directly suited to describe the information of autonomous agents that 
propagate their organization. In Section 3 we have defined a new form of 
information, instructional or biotic information as the constraints that direct 
the flow of free energy to do work.
The reader may legitimately ask the question “isn’t information just 

Re: [Fis] A provocative issue

[John Collier]

Arturo, List:

This is a view that was fairly common, especially associated with Edwin Jaynes, 
but the other view has also been put forward by people like Brillouin and, more 
recently, John Wheeler, Murray Gell-Mann and Seth Lloyd, for example. 
Cosmologist David Layzer is another example. Interesting that they are all 
physicists.

My PhD student, Scott Muller, published a book based on his dissertation, 
Asymmetry: The Foundation of Information, (Springer 2007) that uses Jaynes’ 
notion of an IGUS together with group theory to define the amount of 
information in an object (I have a different way of doing that). Jaynes held 
that each IGUS had its own measure of information in something, and there was 
no common measure. Scott argued that you can combine the information measured 
by all possible IGUSs (sort of like observers or interactors, but more strictly 
defined) to get the information in the object. I define it as the minimal 
number of yes-no questions required to completely describe the thing. The two 
should be equivalent. So you are siding with Jaynes, I think. I think Scott 
nailed the idea of objective intrinsic information on solid ground.

By the way, Shannon’s measure is of the information capacity of a channel. 
There are better ways to define the information in a real situation (e.g., the 
computational notion of information), but Shannon’s approach can be adapted to 
give the same result with some relatively intuitive assumptions.

John Collier
Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Associate
Philosophy, University of KwaZulu-Natal
http://web.ncf.ca/collier

From: Fis [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of 
tozziart...@libero.it
Sent: Sunday, 11 December 2016 5:57 PM
To: fis@listas.unizar.es
Subject: [Fis] A provocative issue


Dear FISers,
I know that some of you are going to kill me, but there’s something that I must 
confess.
I notice, from the nice issued raised by Francesco Rizzo, Joseph Brenner, John 
Collier, that the main concerns are always energetic/informational arguments 
and accounts.
Indeed, the current tenets state that all is information, information being a 
real quantity that can be measured through informational entropies.
But… I ask to myself, is such a tenet true?
When I cook the pasta, I realize that, by my point of view, the cooked pasta 
encompasses more information than the not-cooked one, because it acquires the 
role of something that I can eat in order to increase my possibility to 
preserve myself in the hostile environment that wants to destroy me.  However, 
by the point of view of the bug who eats the non-cooked pasta, my cooked pasta 
displays less information for sure.  Therefore, information is a very 
subjective measure that, apart from its relationship with the observer, does 
not mean very much…  Who can state that an event or a fact displays more 
information than another one?
And, please, do not counteract that information is a quantifiable, objective 
reality, because it can be measured through informational entropy… 
Informational entropy, in its original Shannon’s formulation, stands for an 
ergodic process (page 8 of the original 1948 Shannon’s seminal paper), i.e.: 
every sequence produced by the processes is the same in statistical properties, 
or, in other words, a traveling particle always crosses all the points of its 
phase space.  However, in physics and biology, the facts and events are never 
ergodic.  Statistical homogeneity is just a fiction, if we evaluate the world 
around us and our brain/mind.
Therefore, the role of information could not be as fundamental as currently 
believed.

P.S.: topology analyzes information by another point of view, but it’s an issue 
for the next time, I think…




Arturo Tozzi

AA Professor Physics, University North Texas

Pediatrician ASL Na2Nord, Italy

Comput Intell Lab, University Manitoba

http://arturotozzi.webnode.it/

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Re: [Fis] A provocative issue

[Bob Logan]

Bravo Arturo - I totally agree - in a paper I co-authored with Stuart Kauffman 
and others we talked abut the relativity of 
information and the fact that information is not an absolute. Here is the 
abstract of the paper and an excerpt from the paper that discusses the 
relativity of information. The full papers available at: 
https://www.academia.edu/783503/Propagating_organization_an_enquiry

Best wishes - Bob Logan

Kauffman, Stuart, Robert K. Logan, Robert Este, Randy Goebel, David Hobill and 
Ilya Smulevich. 2007. Propagating Organization: An Inquiry. Biology and 
Philosophy 23: 27-45.

Propagating Organization: An Enquiry - 
Stuart Kauffman, Robert K. Logan, Robert Este, Randy Goebel, David Hobill and 
lIlya Shmulevich

Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle Washington

 Abstract: Our aim in this article is to attempt to discuss propagating 
organization of process, a poorly articulated union of matter, energy, work, 
constraints and that vexed concept, “information”, which unite in far from 
equilibrium living physical systems. Our hope is to stimulate discussions by 
philosophers of biology and biologists to further clarify the concepts we 
discuss here. We place our discussion in the broad context of a “general 
biology”, properties that might well be found in life anywhere in the cosmos, 
freed from the specific examples of terrestrial life after 3.8 billion years of 
evolution. By placing the discussion in this wider, if still hypothetical, 
context, we also try to place in context some of the extant discussion of 
information as intimately related to DNA, RNA and protein transcription and 
translation processes. While characteristic of current terrestrial life, there 
are no compelling grounds to suppose the same mechanisms would be involved in 
any life form able to evolve by heritable variation and natural selection. In 
turn, this allows us to discuss at least briefly, the focus of much of the 
philosophy of biology on population genetics, which, of course, assumes DNA, 
RNA, proteins, and other features of terrestrial life. Presumably, evolution by 
natural selection – and perhaps self-organization - could occur on many worlds 
via different causal mechanisms.

Here we seek a non-reductionist explanation for the synthesis, accumulation, 
and propagation of information, work, and constraint, which we hope will 
provide some insight into both the biotic and abiotic universe, in terms of 
both molecular self reproduction and the basic work energy cycle where work is 
the constrained release of energy into a few degrees of freedom. The typical 
requirement for work itself is to construct those very constraints on the 
release of energy that then constitute further work. Information creation, we 
argue, arises in two ways: first information as natural selection assembling 
the very constraints on the release of energy that then constitutes work and 
the propagation of organization. Second, information in a more extended sense 
is “semiotic”, that is about the world or internal state of the organism and 
requires appropriate response. The idea is to combine ideas from biology, 
physics, and computer science, to formulate explanatory hypotheses on how 
information can be captured and rendered in the expected physical 
manifestation, which can then participate in the propagation of the 
organization of process in the expected biological work cycles to create the 
diversity in our observable biosphere.

Our conclusions, to date, of this enquiry suggest a foundation which views 
information as the construction of constraints, which, in their physical 
manifestation, partially underlie the processes of evolution to dynamically 
determine the fitness of organisms within the context of a biotic universe.


Section 4. The Relativity of Information

 In Sections 2 we have argued that the Shannon conception of information are 
not directly suited to describe the information of autonomous agents that 
propagate their organization. In Section 3 we have defined a new form of 
information, instructional or biotic information as the constraints that direct 
the flow of free energy to do work.

The reader may legitimately ask the question “isn’t information just 
information?”, i.e., an invariant like the speed of light. Our response to this 
question is no, and to then clarify what seems arbitrary about the definition 
of information. Instructional or biotic information is a useful definition for 
biotic systems just as Shannon information was useful for telecommunication 
channel engineering, and Kolmogorov (Shiryayev 1993) information was useful for 
the study of information compression with respect to Turing machines.

The definition of information is relative and depends on the context in which 
it is to be considered. There appears to be no such thing as absolute 
information that is an invariant that applies to all circumstances. Just as 
Shannon defined information 

[Fis] Brenner and Lupasco logic. Emergent Simplicity

[Joseph Brenner]

Dear Arturo,



Thank you for your encouraging comment. Please see responses in blue.



You wrote:

“as every kind of logic (…including maths, to be honest…) is based on axioms 
that stand just for who believe they are true.  I give you an example, by 
examining Luparsco’s postulates.  

http://apcz.pl/czasopisma/index.php/LLP/article/viewFile/LLP.2010.009/967 


"The key postulate, as formulated by Lupasco, is that every real phenomenon, 
element or event e is always associated with an anti-phenomenon, anti-element 
or anti-event non-e, such that the actualization of e entails the 
potentialization of non-e and vice versa, alternatively, without either ever 
disappearing completely. The logic is a logic of an included middle, consisting 
of axioms and rules of inference for determining the state of the three dynamic 
elements involved in a phenomenon (“dynamic” in the physical sense, related to 
real rather than to formal change, e.g. of conclusions).

4.2. Axioms

The three fundamental axioms of classical logic, in one version, are the 
following:

1. The axiom of identity: A is (or =) A.

2. The axiom of non-contradiction: A is not (or 6=) non-A.

3. The axiom of the excluded middle: there exists no third term ‘T’ (‘T’ from 
third) that is at the same time A and non-A.


Based on his “antagonistic” worldview, according to Basarab Nicolescu (see 
Nicolescu 1996), 

Lupasco “rewrote” the three major axioms of classical logic as follows:

1. (Physical) Non-Identity: There is no A at a given time that is identical to 
A at another time.

2. Conditional Contradiction: A and non-A both exist at the same time, but only 
in the sense that when A is actual, non-A is potential, reciprocally and 
alternatively, but never to the limit of 100%.

3. Included Middle: An included or additional third element or T-state (‘T’ for 
‘tiers inclus’, included third).


The evolution of real processes is therefore asymptotically toward a 
non-contradiction of identity or diversity, or toward contradiction. The 
mid-point of semi-actualization and semi-potentialization of both is a point of 
maximum contradiction, a “T-state” resolving the contradiction (or 
“counter-action”) at a higher level of reality or complexity.

Lupasco deserves the historical credit for having shown that a logic of the 
included middle is a valid multivalent logic, with the indicated terms. At a 
single level of reality, the second and third axioms are essentially 
equivalent. In Nicolescu’s extension of the logic, the T-state emerges from the 
point of maximum contradiction at which A and non-A are equally

actualized and potentialized, but at a higher level of reality or complexity, 
at which the contradiction is resolved. His paradigm example is the unification 
in the quanton (T) of the apparently contradictory elements of particle (A) and 
wave (non-A). In contrast to the Hegelian triad, the three terms here coexist 
at the same moment of time. The logic of the included middle does not abolish 
that of the excluded middle, which remains valid for simple, consistent 
situations. However, the former is the privileged logic of complexity, of the 
real mental, social and political world.

The logic of the included middle is capable of describing the coherence between 
levels of reality. A given T-state (which operates the unification of A and 
non-A) is associated with another couple of contradictory terms at its higher 
level (A^1, non-A^1), which are in turn resolved at another level by T^1.  

According to Nicolescu, the action of the logic of the included middle induces 
an open structure of the set of all possible levels of reality, similar to that 
defined by Gödel for formal systems"









Lupasco’s  “linguistic joke” (forgive me this expression, but, in this context, 
is something positive, not negative!) is very intriguing and well done, but the 
problem is always the same, as every kind of logic (…including maths, to be 
honest…) is based on axioms that stand just for who believe they are true.  I 
give you an example, by examining Luparsco’s postulates.  


1.   (Physical) Non-Identity: There 
is no A at a given time that is identical to A at another time.

It is not true: an atom of hydrogen today is identical to an atom of hydrogen 
tomorrow.  I would also say that a square is always a square, or in my mind a 
centaur is always a centaur, but I suppose that you are talking in a physical, 
not mathematical or psychological sense, therefore I prefer the example of the 
atom.  And do not say that the hydrogen atoms of today and of tomorrow are two 
different atoms, because, according the definition of hydrogen atom, I cannot 
distinguish the one from the other!

  

2.   Conditional Contradiction: A 
and non-A both exist at the same time, but only in the sense that when A is 
actual, non-A is potential, reciprocally and alternatively, but never to the 
limit of 100%.  

Actual and potential reminds too much the