Re: [Fis] Is Dataism the end of classical hypothesis-driven research and the beginning of data-correlation-driven research?

[Bruno Marchal]

Dear Alex,


> On 13 Mar 2018, at 08:38, Alex Hankey  wrote:
> 
> Dear Mark and Alberto, 
> 
> Let me propose a radical new input. 
> The Human intuition is far more 
> powerful than anything anyone 
> has previously imagined, except 
> those who use it regularly. 


I agree on this, and nowhere is this more made transparent than in the case of 
the digital machine. Indeed, by its very non standard mathematics of 
self-reference, we recover a knower attached to any digital universal machine 
in a canonical way, and, as I explain in many of my paper, that knower already 
know that it cannot identify itself with any machine, nor even anything 
describable in pure third person sense. The computations does not make 
consciousness into existence, as this one is related to a conjunction of 
provability and truth (which is highly not computable, not definable, etc.). 
The computations are only the channels through which consciousness can 
differentiate.


> 
> It can be strengthen by particular 
> mental practices, well described 
> in the literature of Yoga. 

I guess this is true. Some medicinal plant can also help in that respect.


> 
> Digital Computing machines are 
> not capable of this,

I have no clue why you say this, except that you might confuse the 19th century 
automaton, which is total computable, and totally controllable, with the 
(Löbian) “universal machine”’, which already know she has a soul, and already 
stop to confuse it with its body. Such machine can defeat all complete or 
normative theory about it. 



> and although 
> number crunching is a way for 
> Technology to assist, it is no substitute 
> for the highest levels of the human mind. 

The whole point of machine’s self-reference is that the “number crunching is 
only what happens at the low level description, but once the machine refers to 
itself, there is no real “number crunching” in play, and in the mode of first 
person description, the machine can refute all “number crunching” description 
of itself.

The Mechanist theory is the less reductionist theory of all. Indeed it saves 
the machine itself, and the numbers, or any terms of any Turing-complete 
theory, from any complete reductionist account.

On what the universal machine are capable and not capable, we have only the 
ability of using the transfinite numbers to gave us a glimpse of our ignorance. 

I agree with many of your intuition, but I think that you are seriously wrong 
by discarding digital machine to support a person having similar intuition. On 
the contrary, we get a precise theory of machine intuition, related to 
Brouwer’s own mystical theory of the creative subject. In fact we get a formal 
theory (S4Grz) meta-formalising the unformalisable, by the machine, intuition 
of the machine. The key of this possibility relies in understanding that we 
cannot know that Mechanism is true, nor which machine we are, nor which 
computations are most probably supporting us, but we can do the reasoning 
constructively for precise simpler (than us) small, but already Löbian, machine 
(like Peano arithmetic to name the most famous one).

Bruno

PS In another post, you seem to be skeptical on quantum computing. But there is 
a notion of topological quantum information, where the quit can be made very 
stable, and where the quantum computation are fault tolerant enough to sustain 
the quantum exploitation.Typically we need to squeeze charged particles in 
extreme electro-magnetic field, and this is not for tomorrow, but the math let 
me believe this will be practical some day. Now, in arithmetic we have the 
emulation of all computations, including the quantum one, and we have to see 
which one os “winning” the "physical appearance game”.




> 
> Alex 
> 
> 
> On 13 March 2018 at 01:10, Mark Johnson  > wrote:
> Dear Alberto,
> 
> Thank you for this topic – it cuts to the heart of why we think the
> study of information really matters, and most importantly, brings to
> the fore the thorny issue of technology.
> 
> It has become commonplace to say that our digital computers have
> changed the world profoundly. Yet at a deep level it has left us very
> confused and disorientated, and we struggle to articulate exactly how
> the world has been transformed. Norbert Wiener once remarked in the
> wake of cybernetics, “We have changed the world. Now we have to change
> ourselves to survive in it”. Things haven’t got any easier in the
> intervening decades; quite the reverse.
> 
> The principal manifestation of the effects of technology is confusion
> and ambiguity. In this context, it seems that the main human challenge
> to which the topic of information has the greatest bearing is not
> “information” per se, but decision. That, in a large part, depends of
> hypothesis and the judgement of the human intellect.
> 
> The reaction to confusion and ambiguity is that some people and most
> institutions acquire 

[Fis] Music : Noise = Meaning : Data

[Karl Javorszky]

Music : Noise = Meaning : Data





Dear Friends,



if one likes contemporary music, one is being well cared for in Vienna,
specifically during the November festival “wien modern”. The concert cycle
“klangforum wien” also introduces creative approaches to what is the state
of the art in creating acoustic data, which some will experience as music,
while for some the performance is partly outside of the boundary of what is
music. This year’s motto “grenzwert” (“limits”) is, once more, a head-on
confrontation with rules, traditions and conventions regarding the highly
subjective delineation between writing music and finding music generated by
the interplay among physics and neurology.



There is a science in religion, like there is music in some contemporary
concertos. It may not be easy to find, and for some orthodox critics,
science is something different to the transcendent aspects that have been
raised in FIS these last few weeks; just like many orthodox critics would
deny the inclusibility of some compositions under the term “music”, while
for people familiar with the style, the goal of the composer is evident:
work on the boundaries separating unrelated instances of noise from a
coherent musical phrase. Style of Cherubini they write not, the closure of
the phrase is not an over-determined, long foretold, affaire; yet – as they
have repeatedly demonstrated – there is a difference between a composition
and a sequence of random noises.



Similarly, in our discussions here, about what is information, we can come
up with ever newer delineations between incomprehensible and predictable.
We can point out Väinämöinen, who can sing into existence a copper boat,
touching on the principle of standing waves, or the Monkey King: Sun
Wukong, who creates clones of himself by blowing on hair from his fur,
being an ancestor to Sheep Dolly.



A more conservative approach would be to restrict ourselves to that, to
which all can agree being mainstream science of information. We do not need
yet to explore the limits of what is (or: what can be
understood/experienced as) information. There is enough to learn within the
confines of classical reasoning. We are not done yet with the Harmonielehre
of how data contain information. Why don’t we pick up Joseph’s low-key
observation: (colour emphasis added)

 “ … The problem of the entire concept of "data-driven" research can be
illustrated by referring to almost any recent copy of *SCIENCE*, which I am
sure you all do from time to time. There are articles in my original field,
chemistry, which describe incredibly complex multiply-sequenced reactions
which were unimaginable when I was in university. They cannot be followed
or their products exploited without the latest concepts in data handling.
But there is a usually a little phrase "in fine print" to the effect that
the system works "provided the reactions *lend themselves to sequencing*".
As long as there is possibility of studying the chemistry of some molecular
systems, literally, as individuals, it will be hypotheses about their
reality that drive the research, not the data. … “



To me, it does not appear necessary to make a distinction between “reality”
and “data”; just like there is no necessity for musicians to distinguish
between the note printed on the partiture, and the acoustic sound, or for
Chess champions to distinguish between the description of the position in
the protocol of the game and the actual pieces one can hold in his hands.



To summarise:



If we understand science to be something that All can talk about, then we
better keep referring to such facts, the existence of which is a common
knowledge: these facts are usually called “data”;



One can and will learn a lot from investigating relations among data. As
facts have educated us to the fact, that information transmission in the
course of genetics happens by the property of data *to be sequenced*, we
should better look into *variants of being sequenced*;



There is sufficient music and noise emanating from differing *sequences*
one and the same collection can have, so presently there appears to be no
need to involve such concepts that may or may not constitute information.
Let us stick to such arrangements of data that do contain information, like
the DNA. No need yet to ask Supranatural Beings for their help with
figuring out, how to transform the collection of pupils from being lined up
on their first name into being lined up on their last name. We can solve
this problem, taking into account the impressive academic achievements we
cumulatively possess.



Karl
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