[Fis] Occam's razor

[Karl Javorszky]

Occam’s Razor and Venture Capital



Arturo’s homepage is very instructive. The figure of a medieval scholar and
innovator springs to mind. Pedro has, in our long history, repeatedly
referred to the school of Salamanca as the interdisciplinary centre of
European intellectuality. We live in historic times (not only in matters of
information theory).



To have a self-employed creative mind, interdisciplinary thinker, in our
midst, is one more of the encouraging turns this august society has taken
over the years. As a self-employed clinical psychologist on the very edge
of retiring, in Vienna, this person may put forward an idea that needs the
competence of the membership of FIS.



Let us return to Occam’s razor. The idea is that between two possible
explanations that one is to be preferred, which is simpler. Wiki: "A
hypothesis with fewer adjustable parameters will automatically have an
enhanced posterior probability, due to the fact that the predictions it
makes are sharp."[33]


Jefferys, William H.; Berger, James O. (1991). "Ockham's Razor and Bayesian
Statistics (preprint available as "Sharpening Occam's Razor on a Bayesian
Strop")"  (PDF). American
Scientist . *80*: 64–72



You are invited to cooperate in the project of building mankind’s first
numeric Occam machine. This is a huge database, conceptually comparable to
all trigonometric values, or – in a different approach – to the Online
Encyclopaedia of Integer Sequences. It is huge task for one individual, but
a task force of 1-2 programmers, 1-2 mathematicians and 1 user interface
manager can have a very nice working system, not only for personal use, but
accessible and living, in a few days, maybe weeks. The sense of such a
general Table of Movements is to enable users to build their successive
tables that answer their individual questions. The rhetorical task is not
enviable, as one tries to sell the idea of building a tool that helps users
to look up answers to their questions, if – as it is at the present moment
unquestionably so – the prospective users do not yet know that they need
these data to verify or falsify their questions.



At this point, FIS comes in. The rhetoric task does have a fighting chance
of getting attention, because the composition of the audience is wide,
faceted enough; by coming from so many different backgrounds we have a
perspective of global approach to information theory. The invention that
transforms theory into a technological procedure does have a marketable
value. Unfortunately, although information shows itself, it is very
elusive, so we can’t present a prototype like Diesel, not even seeds like
Mendel. The principle is here also of novelty value and can be expressed
towards politicians and businessmen in simple words, vale Occam, like e.g.:

“We had difficulties understanding information because we have had a blind
spot in our education. We were so much fascinated by the ideas of equality,
similarity, uniformity and replaceability that we have between the lines
discouraged research into the positions of the logical arguments in a
logical sentence. Some Spanish professor has assembled an informal
interdisciplinary community of nerds, over 20 years ago. They have now come
up with an idea that seems to have some merit. The idea is to picture
logical conflicts within a logical system which is of course traditionally
a no-no. They figured out that we in fact exist only always a third of the
time in each of three planes (front, across, up) in a logically sound
fashion. By that trick, there is an accounting continuity from the sequence
to the more-dimensional object. It fits ideally well with the numbers. They
figured this out by sorting and ordering simple expressions like a+b=c, and
watching the patterns of displacements while being reordered from an order
into a different one. Pure Occam, a solid explanation built on sorting
natural numbers between 1 and 16.”



Such an expose could make some interesting response. Let me hope that
Occam’s followers find their common interest in presenting a development by
FIS of a computer-ready project that advances science. Such a project is a
Christmas present for any decision maker, because he can understand that
discovering the importance of a small detail and using the information
contained in the sequences can be no wrong.



Let me respectfully ask the dear FIS if anyone is about to begin
contemplating whether to show some interest in hosting the first
interactive version of a tautomat.



Thank you for your attention.

Karl
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[Fis] BBC Documentaries 2016: The Joy of Data [FULL BBC SCIENCE DOCUMENTARY]

[John Collier]

Not bad. Certainly entertaining. I got this link through Luciano Floridi, who 
is one of the interviewees. I think it is pretty high quality, though I doubt 
that anyone here will be surprised by anything in it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgp7BIBtPhk

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

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[Fis] Entia Non Sunt Multiplicanda

[tozziarturo]

Dear “germane” Pedro, 
Thanks a lot for your comments.
Entia non sunt multiplicanda.  It’s the Occam razor: 
it’s better to use the simplest explanation, rather than more complicated 
descriptions of facts and events. 
You talked about metabolic cellular networks, cellular life cycle, abstract 
processing of neural 
information, human behavior, learning biases, emotional reactions, and so on.  
Despite I hate the Occam razor, rejected by the most basic physical assumptions 
(see quantum entanglement and the vacuum that is able to produce matter and to 
display virtual particles), nevertheless it is very useful for the description 
of the brain function and biological systems.  Why is the Occam razor useful, 
in such cases? Because, I think, they are "desperate" cases: despite two 
centuries of true, galileian science, we do not know very much either of living 
beings or the brain function.  To maxe an example, we are not even sure whether 
emotions are completely splitted from higher "cognitive" activities, or are 
not.  
Therefore, in such case, I think that our only hope to try to assess such still 
elusive phenomena is to use an approach from "above" and from "afar".     In 
touch with you claims, brain activity can be assessed either at 
anatomical/functional micro-, meso- and macro- spatiotemporal scales of 
observation, or at intertwined levels with mutual interactions.  Every 
neuro-technique is an observational domain of the whole  neuro-scientific 
discipline,  each one evaluating an anatomical or functional scale different 
from the others. 
Dimensional scales, as well as multilevel brain activity, can be assessed in 
terms of algebraic topology, a general framework that holds for all the 
experimental approaches (and "specific" functions) to the central nervous 
system, independent of their 
peculiar features, resolution, magnitude and boundaries.  The Borsuk-Ulam 
theorem tells us that a single feature at a lower level can be mapped to two 
features with matching description at an higher level, and vice versa. 
Therefore, brain activities with matching descriptions embedded in higher 
anatomical or functional nervous levels map to single activities in lower 
scales.This means that activities described in higher observational levels 
necessarily display a counterpart in the lower ones, and vice versa.  Next, 
consider Brouwer’s fixed point theorem: no matter how you continuously slosh 
the coffee around in a coffee cup, some point is always in the same position 
that it was before the sloshing began. And if you move this point out of its 
original position in the sloshing coffee, you will eventually move some other 
points back into their original position.In neurobiological terms, not only we 
can always find a brain region containing an activity, but also every activity 
comes together with another.
This leads to a novel scenario, where different scales of brain activity are 
able to scatter, collide and combine, merging together in an assessable way.  
Therefore, different neuro-techniques and brain functions are dual under 
topological transformation.  The term dual refers to a situation where two 
seemingly different physical systems turn out to be equivalent.  If two 
techniques or phenomena are related by a duality, one can be transformed into 
the other, so that the one ends up looking just like the other.  A topological 
investigation reveals that brain activities always have some element in common: 
they do not exist in isolation, rather they are part of a large interconnected 
whole, with which they interact.The distinction among different coarse-grained 
levels of nervous activity does not count anymore, because nervous function at 
small, medium and large scales of neural observation turn out to be 
topologically equivalent and fully interchangeable. Topological paths elucidate 
how the tight coupling among different neural activities gives rise to brains 
that are in charge of receiving and interpreting signals from other cortical 
zones, in closely intertwined relationships at every spatio-temporal level.
Summarizing, whether you experience pain or pleasure, or chomp on an apple, or 
compute a mathematical expression, or quote a proverb, or remember your 
childhood, or read Heidegger's Being and Time, it does not matter: the large 
repertoire of your brain functions  can be described in the same 
topological fashion.
Arturo Tozzi
AA Professor Physics, University North Texas
Pediatrician ASL Na2Nord, Italy
Comput Intell Lab, University Manitoba
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