Dear Andrei and FIS colleagues,
Your expression, days ago, about information transformers is very
suggestive in the sense that it highlights far better than other terms
(e.g., proposed by complexity theoreticians: information gatherers
information users) what happens, say, to an informational entity coupled
to its open-ended environment. What happens is not a computation, or any
information processing event: it is closer to the discussion of abduction
we had in this list a couple of years ago -- I have also used
the processual embedded rather than the disembodied processing, as the
info transformation is irreducibly tied to the advancement of a life cycle.
Relating this to objectivity of informational laws looks adventurous, but
maybe OK. We converge on informational capabilities of photons, by
theoretical tools, by optical instruments, by our photoreceptors ---like
other opsin pigments of vertebrate eyes, and like bacterium's
bacteriorhodopsin.
(The little problem in my view is that in the two previous paragraphs there
are at least three or four different usages of information conflated!)
Anyhow, bacteria has around several million bases of structural information
to couple to its environment and act as an information transformer. A
rudimentary social animal (insects) has around the same number of neurons
to act as a new type of info trans. Let us get ahead to big brained human
individuals in a society, or to scientists socially coupled amidst the
practise of a scientific discipline. Each one cuts but a fine slice of its
open ended environment... And also to the level of the basic quantum grain
at the Planck scale? Therein, the global informational limitation regarding
the distinction on the adjacent capabilities has been disciplinarily
couched under conservation of energy and uncertainty principles. Let me
wonder whether Koichiro's approach to time out from energy conservation may
be one of the few ways to advance towards a bit accounting of the quantum
possibilities in its coupling to the infinite environment...
Sorry for having put together all these top-of-the-head, nonsense comments!
Pedro
At 16:53 14/09/2006, you wrote:
In this way we turn back to the concluding topic of our discussion (that
might be a starting point of a new discussion) -- about reality of
information laws. In my picture of reality information reality is
not less real than material reality. You wrote about
social construction of human knowledge... In my book transformers of
information are not less objective than electrons or photons. Roughly
speaking this imply that transformers of information with
completely different physical realization would generate the same social
structure of science, just because the objectivity of information laws.
But, as I wrote, this idscussion induces deep philosophic questions...
All the best, Andrei
Dear Andrei and colleagues,
Thanks a lot for your re-capping of the session. It is a very
thoughtful
perspective on information from the quantum side. My only comments
would
relate to your (partial) identification of models, reality, and
mathematics. It sounds too strong to my hears. We have cut science
from its
human origins, and then we resort to very curious reification myths.
How
does the practice of science relate to our human nature? The
tentative new
branch of \neuromathematics\ (it has already surfaced in past
discussions)
could throw interesting new light on the several fascinating topics
around
the necessarily \social\ construction of human knowledge...
I join your concerns when you state:
I am trying to sell the idea that the whole quantum enterprise is
about
simplification of description of extremely complex physical
phenomena.
I developed models in that the quantum probabilistic model appears
as a
projection of more complex classical statistical model.
Then I proceed: Wau! In such a case it seems that quantum
probability
theory and quantum information could be used everywhere where we
could
not provide the complete description of phenomena and we just try
to
create a simplified representation in complex Hilbert space.
So one can apply quantum information theory everywhere, from
financial
mathematics to genetics.
Months ago, when discussing on biomolecular networks, I argued that
rather
than a classical \state\ the central info construct of the living
cell
should be the \cycle\, then implying the advancement of a \phase\
(recapitulating and somehow making continuous the classical
biomolecular
views of Start, Gap1, Mitosis, Gap2 as discrete phases of the cell
cycle)
maintaining at the same time a continuous adaptation of the inner
molecular
population to the environmental demands. These biological sentences
may
sound very different from quantum statements, but I do not think so.
My
opinion is that the the living cell and other genuine \informational\
entities share a fundamental
