Re: [Fis] FW: fis Digest, Vol 570, Issue 2
Dear All, I visited the von Foerster / Pask Cybernetics Archive in Vienna (which includes many MacKay texts) and went into depth related to MacKay in the spring of last year. It is very interesting to read his ideas about information as compared to the Shannon and Weaver's approach/definition. Does anyone know of a paper that systematically compares and contrasts their work - MacKay with SW ? Perhaps this is yet to be done... Sincerely, Bill Seaman On Apr 14, 2013, at 8:24 AM, John Collier colli...@ukzn.ac.za wrote: I am afraid that it was my fault. I thought I recalled a quote, but actually it is an interpretation of Mackay. Sorry about that. Amazing that it spread so much, but that probably reflects that it is endemic in Mackay's work. John -Original Message- From: fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Xueshan Yan Sent: 14 April 2013 10:53 AM To: fis@listas.unizar.es Subject: Re: [Fis] fis Digest, Vol 570, Issue 2 Dear Pedro, Dear Joseph, About the Milton Keynes Conference, i.e., about DTMD definition, we saw this quote long long ago, but there two different sayings: One is Information is a distinction that makes a difference from Donald M. MacKay in his Information, Mechanism and Meaning (1969), and another is Information is a difference that makes a difference from Gregory Bateson in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972). Although I have checked it page by page in Donald M. MacKay's book but can't found it, whereas it is easy to find Information is a difference that makes a difference in Gregory Bateson's Steps to an Ecology of Mind at page 230, 361, 339, etc., who can tell the accurate priority about DTMD? Best wishes, Xueshan 16:49, April 14, 2013 Peking University -Original Message- From: fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of fis-requ...@listas.unizar.es Sent: Sunday, April 14, 2013 12:00 AM To: fis@listas.unizar.es Subject: fis Digest, Vol 570, Issue 2 Send fis mailing list submissions to fis@listas.unizar.es To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to fis-requ...@listas.unizar.es You can reach the person managing the list at fis-ow...@listas.unizar.es When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than Re: Contents of fis digest... Today's Topics: 1. Re: FIS News (Moscow 2013) (joe.bren...@bluewin.ch) 2. Re: FIS News (Moscow 2013) (PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ) 3. Re: FIS News (Moscow 2013) (Gyorgy Darvas) -- Message: 1 Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:11:58 + (GMT+00:00) From: joe.bren...@bluewin.ch joe.bren...@bluewin.ch Subject: Re: [Fis] FIS News (Moscow 2013) To: pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es, fis@listas.unizar.es Message-ID: 15776686.90091365786718476.javamail.webm...@bluewin.ch Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Dear Pedro, Glad to hear from you. Your silence was, of course, expressive, containing much information . . . Now all of us will be waiting impatiently to learn about the the new, exciting themes that were discussed at the Milton Keynes Conference. Best wishes, Joseph Message d'origine De: pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es Date: 12.04.2013 11:02 À: fis@listas.unizar.es Objet: [Fis] FIS News (Moscow 2013) Dear FIS Friends, Apologies for my long silence. As I have already said several times, my science management duties are killing not only my time but also my nerve (well, not completely!). Imagine what is happening with the financing and organization of Spanish science these years... Anyhow, a couple of good news about our common Information Science endeavor. First, there has been an excellent conference in Milton Keynes, organized by the Open University, about Information (the difference that makes a difference). Quite exciting discussions on our most dear themes, and some new ones that we have rarely addressed here. The organizers, a very active team indeed, are cordially invited to lead a discussion session in our FIS list to continue with the conceptual explorations addressed in their conference. And the second news is about an imminent FIS CONFERENCE, MOSCOW 2013, the Sixth FIS, and the 1st of the ISIS organization. It will be held this May, from 21 to 24 in Moscow. This time the Russian organizers have followed a singular procedure, a relatively closed conference centered in the diffusion of information science in the Russian scientific community. At the time being, to my knowledge (I could not follow very well the process), only the members of the ISIS board have been enlisted as foreign participants. But given
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow - Transcending the Turing Limit
From Bruno: But the word mechanism cannot have the same sense before and after the discovery of the universal machine and its limitation. As my work illustrates in detail, universal machine have already two internal aspects which conflict with each other, and are close to the analytical/intuitive distinction. This suggests the need to transcend the Universal machine as articulated by Turing. It suggests the need for us to articulate a ultracomplex mechanism that is of a different variety. Otto Rossler in conversation with Seaman suggests the employment of transfinite numbers --- Cantor and transfinite accuracy This paper may be of interest: The motives behind Cantor's Set Theory - Physical, biological, and philosophical questions. http://personal.us.es/josef/Cantor.pdf Analogue mechanisms (or their highly parsed emulation in binary machines) might be one approach. See also: Neural Networks and Analog Computation: Beyond the Turing Limit Author: Hava T. Siegelmann The theoretical foundations of Neural Networks and Analog Computation conceptualize neural networks as a particular type of computer consisting of multiple assemblies of basic processors interconnected in an intricate structure. Examining these networks under various resource constraints reveals a continuum of computational devices, several of which coincide with well-known classical models. What emerges is a Church-Turing-like thesis, applied to the field of analog computation, which features the neural network model in place of the digital Turing machine. This new concept can serve as a point of departure for the development of alternative, supra-Turing computational theories. On a mathematical level, the treatment of neural computations enriches the theory of computation but also explicates the computational complexity associated with biological networks, adaptive engineering tools, and related models from the fields of control theory and nonlinear dynamics.[i] Segelmann states: “The surprising finding has been that when analog networks assume real weights, their power encompasses and transcends that of digital computers.”[ii] She goes on to say “our model captures nature's manifest “computation” of the future physical world from the present, in which constants that are not known to us, or cannot even be measured, do affect the evolution of the system.”[iii] [i] Siegelmann, H. (2007), Neural Networks and Analog Computation: Beyond the Turing Limit, http://www.cs.umass.edu/~hava/advertisement.html, Accessed 1 December 2009. See also Siegelmann, H (1999), Neural Networks and Analogue Computation, Beyond the Turing Limit, Boston, MA: Birkhäuser. [ii] Ibid. [iii] Ibid. Best Bill Seaman___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
I really respect all involved … that said-
Can we leave the past for a moment and just try to ask the 10 most important
questions of today.
What are they!
Jesus - this feel like a historical pissing match and is not being really
constructive.
b
On Oct 27, 2012, at 11:34 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote:
On 26 Oct 2012, at 22:32, PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ wrote:
Dear FISers,
Is it interesting the discussion on wether those informational
entities contain realizations of the Aristotelian scheme of
causality or not?
The cell, in my view, conspicuously fails --it would be too
artifactual an scheme. Some parts of the sensory paths of advanced
nervous systems seem to separate some of those causes --but only in
a few parts or patches of the concerned pathway. For instance, in
visual processing the what and the how/where seem to be
travelling together undifferentiated along the optic nerve and are
separated --more or less-- after the visual superior colliculus in
the midbrain before discharging onto the visual cortex. The really
big flow of spikes arriving each instant (many millions every few
milisec) are mixed and correlated with themselves and with other top-
down and bottom-up preexisting flows in multiple neural mappings...
and further, when those flows mix with the association areas under
the influence of languaje, then, and only then, all those logic and
conceptual categorizations of human thought are enacted in the
ephemeral synaptic networks.
I am optimistic that a new Heraclitean way of thinking boils down
in network science, neuroinformatics, systems biology,
bioinformation etc. Neither the Parmenidean eliminative fixism of
classical reductionists, nor the Aristotelian organicism of
systemicists. Say that this is a caricature. However you cannot
bathe twice in the same river not just because we all are caught
into the universal physical flow of photons and forces, but for the
Heraclitean flux of our own neurons and brains, for the inner
torrents of the aggregated information flows. The same for whatever
cells, societies, etc. and their physical structures for info
transportation.
Either we produce an interesting new vision of the world, finally
making sense of those perennial metaphors among the different
(informational) realms, or information science will continue to be
that small portion of incoherent patches more or less close to
information theory or to artificial intelligence. In spite of
decades of bla-bla- about information revolution and information
society and tons of ad hoc literature, the educated thought of our
contemporary society continues to be deeply mechanistic!
Why?
Even if the Parmenidean reality is restricted to the natural numbers,
with only the laws of addition and multiplication, we can prove,
assuming our brain are Turing emulable, that the view from inside as
to be Heraclitean.
The problem is not mechanism. The problem is the reductionist
conception of mechanism. I think.
The incompleteness phenomenon does not refute mechanism, like some
have proposed, but it does refute the reductionist conception of
mechanism.
Arithmetic is full of life and dreams.
Best,
Bruno
---Pedro
-snip-
I think it of some interest that I have
previously ( 2006 On
Aristotle’s conception of causality.
General Systems Bulletin 35:
11.) proposed that the Aristotelian 'formal
cause' determines both
'what happens' and 'how it happens', and that
the combination of
this with material cause ('what it happens
to') delivers 'where' it
happens.
(For completeness sake I add that efficient
cause determines only
'when it happens', while final cause points
to 'why it happens'. It
would be quite exciting to find that these
informations were also
carried on separate tracts.)
It would be exciting, as that would seem to refute the
Aristotelean idea
of the four causes as four aspects of all causation. However an
information channel can carry some part of the information from
its
source, which would be a sort of filter or abstraction of the
source.
So, for example, a channel might be sensitive only to the how,
but not
the what, and vice versa. A channel is fundamentally a mapping
of
classes from a source to a sink that through instances that
retain the
mapping (see Barwsie and Seligman, Information Flow: The Logic
of
Distributed Systems). So in this case, a channel sensitive to,
say,
what, would retain the what classifications of the source in a
way
that the sink could use, but perhaps not any other information.
The
channels themselves could still maintain all four aspects of
Aristotelean causation, so Aristotle need not be refuted. This
would
still be very interesting, though. I am unclear what functional
advantage there would be, though we
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
Interesting Software Best Bill http://www.kurzweilai.net/a-biology-friendly-robot-programming-language?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletterutm_campaign=fb29857305-UA-946742-1utm_medium=email http://parpar.jbei.org ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
How about Knowing Through… How can we embody a neural network/learning system through multi-modal sensing? b Bill Seaman Professor, Department of Art, Art History Visual Studies DUKE UNIVERSITY 114 b East Duke Building Box 90764 Durham, NC 27708, USA +1-919-684-2499 http://billseaman.com/ http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/AAH/faculty/william.seaman http://www.dibs.duke.edu/research/profiles/98-william-seaman On Oct 15, 2012, at 2:38 PM, Stanley N Salthe ssal...@binghamton.edu wrote: On that curious definition of knowledge, it looks like 'knowing how' rather than 'knowing that'. STAN On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 11:56 AM, Pedro C. Marijuan pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es wrote: Dear FIS Colleagues, Thanks to Zhao Chuan for the Computer Poem/Song. It is a soft way to retake our discussions. These weeks there have been a couple of important achievements in the bio-information field. On the one side, the first 'complete' model of a prokaryotic cell (A Whole-Cell Computational Model Predicts Phenotype from Genotype, by Karr et al., Cell, 150, 389-401, 2012). On the other, there was the report of another 'complete' scheme, that of the C. elegans nervous system, now at the level of individual synaptic contacts, which was able to explain the mating behavior of the worm (The Connectome of a Decision-Making Neural Network, by Jarrell et al., Science, 337, 437-444, 2012). It contained several references to the information flow through interneurons and sensorimotor circuits, and a very curious definition of knowledge (as the set of activity weights in an adjacency matrix of a neural network, upon which the network's input-output function in part depends...). Both papers are very interesting, relatively consistent with each other, and I think both represent symbolic milestones in the bio-information field. The point on information flows left me thinking on the larger perspective beyond single information items that we rarely focus on. Actually the first Shannonian information metaphor was about sources and channels --wasn't it? Particularly thinking on social information matters, how many aspects of contemporary life relate to the maintenance of the information flows intertwining and directing the economic flows. No doubt that the forces of communication have definitely won the upper hand upon the forces of production . Somehow, Zhao Chuan's poem is but a celebration of the central role that computers have come to play in the gigantic information flows of our time. best wishes --Pedro -- - Pedro C. Marijuán Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA) Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X 50009 Zaragoza, Spain Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 ( 6818) pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/ - ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] Physics of computing
I recently came across the work of Gotthard Gunther while at the archives of the Biological Computer Lab. at University of Illionois, formerly run by von Foerster. Two papers of interest in english... http://www.vordenker.de/ggphilosophy/gg_new_approach.pdf http://www.thinkartlab.com/pkl/archive/Cyberphilosophy.pdf Most of his texts are in German but I am still researching: Precursors – Biological Computing Lab “M-valued Logic” – Gotthard Gunther Proposal For a Basic Study of the Semantic and Syntactic Properties of Many-Valued and Morphogrammatic Systems of Logic. 1962 Morphogrammatic Logic “Logic which uses morphograms instead of values as basic operational units might be able to cope with the specific properties of self coding systems of mind-like or mental character.” “The ultimate aim of the cybernetical systems-approach is to design computers as fully self-reflective systems. The theory of resolvable functions suggests that logical relations between individual values do not properly represent the complex characteristics of reflection…This indicates that in order to represent reflection we have to look for a different (and more complex) logical unit. This seems to be the morphogram.” See also http://vordenker.de/contribs.htm - under Gotthard Gunther rudolf kaehr - special non two value logic: http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1015context=thinkartlabsei-redir=1referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Furl%3Fsa%3Dt%26rct%3Dj%26q%3Drudolf%2520kaehr%2520-%2520special%2520non%2520two%2520value%2520logic%26source%3Dweb%26cd%3D1%26ved%3D0CCIQFjAA%26url%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fworks.bepress.com%252Fcgi%252Fviewcontent.cgi%253Farticle%253D1015%2526context%253Dthinkartlab%26ei%3D-TqHT4feOK2I8gH51NW-CA%26usg%3DAFQjCNGu_-JW00NR_5TIw8X8Qa9GlG3ZRA#search=%22rudolf%20kaehr%20-%20special%20non%20two%20value%20logic%22 Best Bill Bill Seaman Professor, Department of Art, Art History Visual Studies DUKE UNIVERSITY 114 b East Duke Building Box 90764 Durham, NC 27708, USA +1-919-684-2499 http://billseaman.com/ http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/AAH/faculty/william.seaman http://www.dibs.duke.edu/research/profiles/98-william-seaman RadioSeaman Paste into itunes (Advanced/open audio streams) for internet radio: http://smw-aux.trinity.duke.edu:8000/radioseaman On Apr 12, 2012, at 8:25 PM, joe.bren...@bluewin.ch wrote: Dear Pedro, Thank you, Pedro, for bringing up the question of logics. My suggestion of a Logic in Reality is to open the debate, rather than to claim it is the only over-arching logic possible. Nevertheless, it would be useful for me and perhaps others if you could make your critique more specific by pointing to at least one logic that is used biologically that addresses the dynamics of complex processes. So far, I have not identified any such logical system that is more than a metaphorical use of the term logic or refers to some more or less reproducible characteristics of such processes. Otherwise, logics seem to me to refer only to abstracted linguistic aspects of processes that of course follow classical propositional logic but equate to tautologies. Because Logic in Reality is grounded in physics, it is able to express somewhat more about change, evolution, etc. than any logic of which I am aware. I would be glad to learn of other candidates for this role. Thank you and best wishes, Joseph Ursprüngliche Nachricht Von: pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es Datum: 11.04.2012 10:44 An: fis@listas.unizar.es Betreff: Re: [Fis] Physics of computing Dear John and colleagues, Nice to hear that you are OK after that dangerous intoxication --our best wishes for your complete recovery! About physical information I think that Landauer clarified the panorama, at least concerning the relationship between information theory and thermodynamics. According to his principle, any logically irreversible transformation of classical information is necessarily accompanied by the dissipation of at least k T ln(2) of heat per lost bit (about 3 x 10 exp -21 Joules at 300 K temperature), where obviously k is the Boltzmann constant and T the temperature. Recently this principle has been verified experimentally (Nature, 8 March 2012, p. 187). By the way, in his past message Loet enters Watts in a similar expression (?). To insist, Entropy and Information are dimensionless and do not explicitly incorporate any units... About the quantum management of info theory, it is another matter, quite more tricky. Beyond that immediate physicality, things get quite obscure as our contradictory meaning messages witness. The point made by Joseph on an overarching logic, is rather difficult to be maintained --at least in my small province
