Re: [Fis] fis Digest, Vol 577, Issue 10; Joseph Reply to Jerry
Dear Jerry, Thank you as usual for your thought-provoking note, which nevertheless requires the following clarification of your position. You ask, because I assume that your answers to your four questions is no, that there is no tension in the group between the empirical and abstract, given the success of Shannon, etc. Do you not believe in the validity of Boolean algebra? JEB: I do not, for complex informational and other non-Markovian processes. Do you not believe in the validity of encoding processes? JEB: Only in a very limited computational domain. Do you not believe in the validity of transmission processes/error correction codes? JEB: Same as above. This picture excludes most of what is important in information transmission in interpersonal interactions. Do you believe that the genesis of mind is Turing computable? JEB: I do not This is, for me at least, a solid basis for 'tension'. If all this is what the 'overwhelming majority' of people in this group believe, then I accept my minority status. But then, I also find your more general position that The current foundation of information sciences does not meet the needs of chemistry, biology or medicine. A second foundation must be built to express the role of information in communications within living systems. as an overly pessimistic statement of the situation. The FoundationS (plural) of Information Science are developing due to the work of Pedro in Bioinformatics and Bob L. and Bob U. in related areas; Gordana in natural computational aspects of information; Loet and Deacon (by proxy) in dynamics; myself in the logical grounding and patterns of evolution of all this in physics; John Collier, José Maria, Sören in cybersemiotics, Krassimir and others, all hopefully with the major foundational document of Mark Burgin in mind. My vision is that what is really needed is a new relational synthesis of this foundational work that takes into account the most relevant aspects of all of it. I look forward to seeing new contributions along these lines, emerging, exactly from the tension between the abstract and non-abstract characteristics of information. Best wishes, Joseph - Original Message - From: Jerry LR Chandler To: fis@listas.unizar.es Sent: Thursday, November 07, 2013 8:34 PM Subject: Re: [Fis] fis Digest, Vol 577, Issue 10 Pedro, List: You write: ...a reference to the tension between the empirical and the abstract in FIS. I quite agree, it is one of the essential tensions in any healthy scientific development (whenever it is possible to maintain it). Tensions? Tensions between the empirical and the abstract? From my reading of the posts of various contributors over the past 3-5 years, I heartily disagree with this view of the current situation on this FIS list serve. Shannon's information theory was published about 65 years ago. It has become the logical foundation of a huge industry employing millions of workers, globally. The principle abstraction of information theory can be roughly stated. If one encoded information (numbers, letters, images, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, art, music, literature, feeling, emotions, etc.) into a binary code, then the encoded information can be electronically encoded and transmitted (transferred) to other electronic devices and decoded by other machines or individuals. This dependency, in turn, relies upon Boolean Algebra and associated mathematics. It now appears that the overwhelming majority of contributors to list serve find this externalist's view of information to be in complete harmony with the empirical and the abstract. Where is the tension? Do you not believe in the validity of Boolean algebra? Do you not believe in the validity of encoding processes? Do you not believe in the validity of transmission processes/error correction codes? The overwhelming majority of contributors find this externalist's view of information to be acceptable, and seek to make it more acceptable by tweaking the word-smithing a bit in order to become congruent with their personal philosophy. At least that is my view of the current status. Why do I write this message, perhaps a bit on the side of harshness? Quite simple. The current foundation of information sciences does not meet the needs of chemistry, biology or medicine. A second foundation must be built to express the role of information in communications within living systems. For example, central to the tree of life are the informative feed-forwards processes that transmit genetic information into individual anatomies and logical processes, life itself. Of particular theoretical interest, from the perspective of FIS, are the feed-forward processes that start with the messages encoded in a fertilized egg and generate, through a sequence of biochemical process, the mind. Perhaps one or more
Re: [Fis] fis Digest, Vol 577, Issue 10; Joseph Reply to Jerry
Individuality The abstract and the concrete fight, because the abstract cannot presently picture the concrete flexibly and exactly enough. Connecting to the main thema of this session, individuality can be used to clarify the tension. A person, belonging to many subgroups in his universe, is not easy to model in the present understanding of logic, as units and elements there are conceptually alike. Logic needs a more sophisticated approach to the idea of distinguishing between One as one-of-many and One with specific group attributes. The group attributes are axiomatic in nature, in abstract life we are at the beginning of handling them. Jerry is right, there is definitely a way of describing nature in an abstract fashion. The tension comes from trying to do it in a more elegant fashion. The effort is making the logical language more sensitive to rules we add to its codified grammar. We wish it to become more nuanced. One of the added rules may do some hair splitting on commutativity. The individuality of the logical elements is a value in itself, and leads one to questions like how many individuality makes one separate individual, and is this an additional, second one? This forum is, helas, where people with the most diverse backgrounds try to figure out how to think about what we experience and how to speak about what we think. Formalizing and codifying the result will be a second step: first we draw up a wish list of ideas and concepts which need words in the abstract language. The tension is a motivation. ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] fis Digest, Vol 577, Issue 10
Pedro, List: You write: ...a reference to the tension between the empirical and the abstract in FIS. I quite agree, it is one of the essential tensions in any healthy scientific development (whenever it is possible to maintain it). Tensions? Tensions between the empirical and the abstract? From my reading of the posts of various contributors over the past 3-5 years, I heartily disagree with this view of the current situation on this FIS list serve. Shannon's information theory was published about 65 years ago. It has become the logical foundation of a huge industry employing millions of workers, globally. The principle abstraction of information theory can be roughly stated. If one encoded information (numbers, letters, images, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, art, music, literature, feeling, emotions, etc.) into a binary code, then the encoded information can be electronically encoded and transmitted (transferred) to other electronic devices and decoded by other machines or individuals. This dependency, in turn, relies upon Boolean Algebra and associated mathematics. It now appears that the overwhelming majority of contributors to list serve find this externalist's view of information to be in complete harmony with the empirical and the abstract. Where is the tension? Do you not believe in the validity of Boolean algebra? Do you not believe in the validity of encoding processes? Do you not believe in the validity of transmission processes/error correction codes? The overwhelming majority of contributors find this externalist's view of information to be acceptable, and seek to make it more acceptable by tweaking the word-smithing a bit in order to become congruent with their personal philosophy. At least that is my view of the current status. Why do I write this message, perhaps a bit on the side of harshness? Quite simple. The current foundation of information sciences does not meet the needs of chemistry, biology or medicine. A second foundation must be built to express the role of information in communications within living systems. For example, central to the tree of life are the informative feed-forwards processes that transmit genetic information into individual anatomies and logical processes, life itself. Of particular theoretical interest, from the perspective of FIS, are the feed-forward processes that start with the messages encoded in a fertilized egg and generate, through a sequence of biochemical process, the mind. Perhaps one or more of the externalists can determine whether the genesis of mind, a process common to almost all human descendants, is Turing Computable or not? Cheers Jerry Research Professor Krasnow Institute for Advanced Studies GMU On Nov 7, 2013, at 11:00 AM, fis-requ...@listas.unizar.es wrote: 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 (Pedro C. Marijuan) From: Pedro C. Marijuan pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es Subject: Re: [Fis] FIS News Date: November 7, 2013 7:11:48 AM CST To: fis@listas.unizar.es Dear Karl and FIS colleagues, Many thanks for the comprehensive response. You have made a reference to the tension between the empirical and the abstract in FIS. I quite agree, it is one of the essential tensions in any healthy scientific development (whenever it is possible to maintain it). My tongue-in-cheek complain was precisely addressed to the usual abscence of such tension in our discussions, or say, the insufficient presence of the empirical. For instance, in the current exchange I was mentioning the ecological-sociological views of Jared Diamond, as one of the most vocal authors on the collapse of historical societies, even pretty complex ones. His views on the structural traits involving the complexification of the daily interactions could be quite interesting to discuss along the present theme. Nowadays there also a number of network science studies on person-to-person interactions, often along cell-phone technologies. Other more general approaches look for the influence of new technologies in human relationships (in Xian an excellent presentation on friendship from an Aristotelian background in the i-society was made by Michael Patrick). Another interesting angle concerns the studies on smart cities , how individual life stories are carried out among energy-material flows coupled with information flows of a new nature. The contemporary acceleration of artificial information
