Dear Xueshan and colleagues,
Your points about hierarchies are quite interesting. Let me remind
however, in my second message of this week, the discussion in last month
about "momenta" and "itineraries". It is another way to approach the
hierarchy discussion that comes closer, I think, to the enormous variety
of contents that one can find in those different realms. Aligning the
different momenta, as I understand that Nikhil has been proposing for
those self-organizing instances, discards the rhetorical excesses and
allows a better concentration on the essential topics. One can arrange
an autonomous "informational entity" in many ways, provided that the
necessary communication and self-production activities are properly
intertwined so that they allow sufficient adaptation to the changing
environment. Life has been playing that game endlessly, so we find
plenty of parallels ("momenta to align") with most of our
social-informational problems. For instance, in the organization of
metabolism, the use of inner "depots" as a backup of the whole metabolic
network (ATP, GTP, and a few others) strongly reminds the currency
problem --from a different angle, not just from the ecosystemic one or
from the gut microbiome. It is clear that advancing on the
sustainability problems has to be socially distributed, and put both
into the accounting of States, and of the companies and Institutions,
and even more into the citizenship at large. A new scientific
description on how info circulates among all those realms, via
individuals and e-machines, is not an easy matter at all. It belongs
more to the parlance of "phase transitions", and even more to the
"organismic" dimension mentioned below. And so... in this juncture we are!
Best--Pedro
PS. to Nikhil, in Jared Diamond book (Guns, Germs...) there is an
excellent table summarizing the "info inventions" necessary for
societies to transcend the basic complexity of natural groups. It is
another way to approach the theme you deal with in last message.
Xueshan Yan wrote:
> Dear Stan，
> Generally speaking, we have two kinds of Information Science, one is
> materialist, another is imformationist. Of course, what FIS colleagues
> are discussing here is materialist one. As to the imformationist
> information science, it sprang from John Wheeler and is becoming
> confirmative in some frontiers of physics recently, for example, the
> string-net theory advocated by some theoretical physicists of MIT.
> In materialistic information science, self-organization and
> autopoiesis are two wonderful criteria, they can exclude those
> information sciences based on information technology from real
> information science for their hetero-organization and heteropoiesis.
> As to the information science based on library science spread through
> the United States, whether it is a real information science,
> undoubtedly, it is questionable.
> Let’s come back to our topic. Facing so many kinds of information and
> disciplines of information theory/informatics/information science, we
> urgently need a classification to handle them, and the hierarchy
> consideration maybe is more fundamental. Which was activated by Pedro
> (He said it is Fisher’s idea, really Pedro?) with Cell, Brain, Firm
> many years ago, and advanced by Joshi these days.
> In fact, Joseph and I had some private communication about this issue
> several weeks ago, the topic is something I named “From Mechanism to
> Organicism” which was arisen when I predict the paradigm shift of
> information studies in the next 10 years or more. In those mails, we
> have touched this problem.
> According to your expression, we have several different hierarchies:
> 1. [firm [brain [cell]]]: Pedro
> 2. [society [cell [molecule]]]: Joshi
> 3. [social [organism [cell [molecular [microphysical ]: Stan
> 4. [organism [cell [molecule [fundamental particle: Xueshan
> 5. [organism [cell [molecule]]]: Xueshan
> From its narrow sense, social character only belongs to organism, so
> we can absorb “society” into “organism”. In the organism group, we
> have animal and plant. In animal, we have man, chicken, dog, tiger,
> lion, etc. Of course, our main object is man, just like medicine and
> physiology that claim their object over all animals, but man is their
> main object. Man’s information problem is our main aim here.
> From communication standpoint, that man (of course also all organism),
> cell, molecule (at lest organic molecule) can communicate each other
> are undoubtedly, so the information disciplines can emerge from this
> level undoubtedly naturally. But question is: can communication take
> places between two fundamental particles, such as two atoms? So, I am
> not sure if we can have a physical informatics at last.
> It is very humorous, this will bring us to the FIS discussion 13 year
> ago again: Is informational existences still only start with the
> biological? Is it still a huge black hole? (Gyorgy Darvas).
> Best wishes,
> Xueshan
>
