Dear Plamen, I fully agree with your assessment of the downside of dataism. The necessary counterbalance, though, cannot in my opinion come through using binary operators (in the sense of Burgin/Brenner) such as capital and currency, where the movement of ideas is involved. There is an implied reduction of their properties which could vitiate your project. Transaction is in principle a good word, but it, also, must not be reduced to its lowest common economic denominator. 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. Best wishes, Joseph ----Message d'origine---- De : plamen.l.simeo...@gmail.com Date : 10/03/2018 - 16:40 (PST) À : ajime...@iisaragon.es Cc : fis@listas.unizar.es Objet : Re: [Fis] Is Dataism the end of classical hypothesis-driven research and the beginning of data-correlation-driven research? Dear Alberto, Pedro, and FIS Colleagues, I think you got the message. All in all, an effort to organize scientific/intellectual potential in this forum and others of that kind into a kind of currency of a much higher value than money and other material and virtual resources on Earth deserves to be made. For me, the term "blockchain" is a bad word match for what this vision may really become in future. [Maybe this is because of my past history from Eastern Europe, which made me feel "blocked" and "chained" for a long time of my life.] I would rather prefer a term that means unblocking and unchaining instead. But it should be certainly one thing: trusted information of a high value like patents, articles, discoveries, and discussions like those we have here can be ranked on, especially in the era of "fake news" and spam surrounding us. What we are talking about is not new. It only has a new "fashion" name. We can regard it as an extension of the internet, beyond the semantic one, an intelligent and active, but also trusted and self-organized network of humans, animals, plants, and technical devices, a welcome tool extending our senses to feel an entire ecosystem of evolving things. I have not read an article discussing "blockchain" in the above sense, maybe because like most phenomena in "dataism" the term is currently only unilaterally exploited by the majority, held under the umbrella of finances, trade, insurances, contracts, encryption, etc. trivial "high-impact" fields, similarly to the unilateral understanding of AI, machine learning, and even quantum computing. They all are still understood (by the majority of our contemporaries) as means to maintain the status quo of science, economy, and society. But they can be also used to change the paradigm. If we stay in the loop accepting data-driven hypothesis and machine-generated theory only because we have sunk in the self-created ocean of data, this would mean to betray human mind at the end. On the other hand, we could use all these tools to empower and perpetuate human mind activities like those in this forum. Therefore, I wish to ask you if you would eventually support a future experiment for creating a "human mind capital" currency based on the trustfulness of the idea transactions in this forum. I think we can get even funding for this experiment. All the best. Plamen ___ ___ ___ Dr. Plamen L. Simeonov simeio.org | ibiomath.org | inbiosa.eu ___________________________________________________________ 2017 Towards a First Implementation of the WLIMES Approach in Living System Studies Advancing the Diagnostics and Therapy in Personalized Medicine 2017 JPBMB Focused Issue on Integral Biomathics: The Necessary Conjunction of Western and Eastern Thought Traditions for Exploring the Nature of Mind and Life * * free promotional access to all focused issue articles until June 20th 2018 ____________________________________________________________ On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 11:46 PM, Alberto J. Schuhmacher <ajime...@iisaragon.es> wrote: Dear Plamen, Pedro and Collegues, I am enjoying a lot this forum. I absolutely foresee Scientific Blockchain as a continuously growing list of scientific records and contributions (blocks) linked and secured using cryptography, somehow a kind of peer reviewed process. Would you be able to publish it in a journal based on their scientific value? Dataist-machines won chess players but still are learning Science, they are completing their “Bachelor”. Their use for biomedical applications is growing everyday. For example, their accuracy for in biomedical imaging diagnosis will be similar to humans soon. For other applications, such as genetic predisposition and health prediction/prognosis the conversion to a fanatic dataism may abuse of “predictivity” and forget the relevance of the organism-environment. It will take some time for machines to complete their “Philosophical Doctorate”. Technology could be ready soon for data driven hypothesis but our knowledge of fundamental aspects of life are still weak. All the best, AJ El 10-03-2018 21:05, PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ escribió: Dear Plamen and Colleagues, If it can be feasible, I would very much welcome what you propose. Yes, it would be great developing a general articulation amongst all our exchanges. Roughly, I feel that a fundamental nucleous of neatly conceptualized information is still evading us, but outside that nucleous, and somehow emanating from it, there are different branches and sub-branches in quite different elaboration degrees and massively crisscrossing and intermingling their contents. A six-pointed star, for instance, radiating from its inner fusion the computational, physical, biological, neuronal, social, and economic. The six big branches in perfect periferic colussion and confusion. Could a blockchain, along its full develpment in time, represent a fundamental cartography of the originating fusion nucleous? About dataism enchantment, well, too many times we have been said "look, finally this is the great, definitive scientific approach"--behaviorism, artificial intelleigence, artifficial catastrophe & complexity theory, and so on. Let us wait and see. Welcome in the extent to which it really responds to unanswered questions. And let us be aware of the technocratic lore it seems to drag. This was my second cent for the week. best--Pedro On Fri, 9 Mar 2018 10:30:01 +0100 "Dr. Plamen L. Simeonov" wrote: These are wise words, Pedro. What I was meaning with my previous posting on FIS was that there is a foundational emerging technology - blockchain - that could give us, scientists organized in fora like FIS, IB, IS4IS etc. to become a valuable currency of the future. I am speaking not about finances or resources like petrol, gold, water, etc. What we are doing all the time with the exchange of ideas online are in fact transactions, often with huge potential. Why do not try to elevate them to the level that they deserve? I am not sure if the FIS forum members can follow me. Can you? All the best. Plamen ____________________________________________________________ On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 6:15 PM, PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ < pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es> wrote: head> Dear Alberto, Many thanks for the kickoff text. I will try to produce a couple of direct comments. You have reminded me of the early 70's, when I first approached science. A few computers had made their entrance in the university halls. During those years, and for some decades to come, a new mantra was to be ensconced: modeling, simulations. Thanks to computers, we had a fascinating new tool; a mathematical machine that was opening a new window to the world of science, equivalent to the telescope or the microscope in the scientific revolution. Now, almost 50 years later, after having provoked their own "information revolution" it seems that computers are more than a new tool. Dataism coupled with artificial intelligence, deep learning and the other techniques, have taken them to the command post, so that they are becoming direct "agents" of the scientific progress. And this is strange. They have already defeated masters of chess, of go and of other contests... are they going to defeat scientists too? Are they the "necessary" new lords of all quarters of techno-social complexity? You have depicted very cogently the new panorama of biomedical research, probably the mainstream, and I wonder whether this is the most interesting direction of advancement. In some sense, yes (or no!), as it is where big biomed companies, technological firms, and management establishment are pointing at. It is easy to complain that they are leaving aside the integrative vision, the meaningful synthesis that facilitate our comprehension, the "soul" in the machine... But we have been complaining in this way at least during the last two decades. So I really do not know. Fashions in science come and go: maybe all of this is a temporary illusion. Or a taste of the science of the future. In any case, it was nice hearing from a biomedical researcher in the wet lab. Best wishes--Pedro On Tue, 06 Mar 2018 21:23:01 +0100 "Alberto J. Schuhmacher" wrote: blockquote> Dear FIS Colleagues, I very much appreciate this opportunity to discuss with all of you. My mentors and science teachers taught me that Science had a method, rules and procedures that should be followed and pursued rigorously and with perseverance. The scientific research needed to be preceded by one or several hypotheses that should be subjected to validation or refutation through experiments designed and carried out in a laboratory. The Oxford Dictionaries Online defines the scientific method as "a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses". Experiments are a procedure designed to test hypotheses. Experiments are an important tool of the scientific method. In our case, molecular, personalized and precision medicine aims to anticipate the future development of diseases in a specific individual through molecular markers registered in the genome, variome, metagenome, metabolome or in any of the multiple "omes" that make up the present "omics" language of current Biology. The possibilities of applying these methodologies to the prevention and treatment of diseases have increased exponentially with the rise of a new religion, Dataism, whose foundations are inspired by scientific agnosticism, a way of thinking that seems classical but applied to research, it hides a profound revolution. Dataism arises from the recent human desire to collect and analyze data, data and more data, data of everything and data for everything-from the most banal social issues to those that decide the rhythms of life and death. "Information flow" is one the "supreme values" of this religion. The next floods will be of data as we can see just looking at any electronic window. The recent development of gigantic clinical and biological databases, and the concomitant progress of the computational capacity to handle and analyze these growing tides of information represent the best substrate for the progress of Dataism, which in turn has managed to provide a solid content material to an always-evanescent scientific agnosticism. On many occasions the establishment of correlative observations seems to be sufficient to infer about the relevance of a certain factor in the development of some human pathologies. It seems that we are heading towards a path in which research, instead of being driven by hypotheses confirmed experimentally, in the near future experimental hypotheses themselves will arise from the observation of data of previously performed experiments. Are we facing the end of the wet lab? Is Dataism the end of classical hypothesis-driven research (and the beginning of data-correlation-driven research)? Deep learning is based on learning data representations, as opposed to task-specific algorithms. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. Deep learning models are loosely related to information processing and communication patterns in a biological nervous system, such as neural coding that attempts to define a relationship between various stimuli and associated neuronal responses in the brain. Deep learning architectures such as deep neural networks, deep belief networks and recurrent neural networks have been applied to fields including computer vision, audio recognition, speech recognition, machine translation, natural language processing, social network filtering, bioinformatics and drug design, where they have produced results comparable to and in some cases superior to human experts. Will be data-correlation-driven research the new scientific method for unsupervised deep learning machines? Will computers became fundamentalists of Dataism? Best regards, AJ p> --- Alberto J. Schuhmacher, PhD. Head, Molecular Oncology Group Aragon Health Research Institute (IIS Aragón) Biomedical Research Center of Aragon (CIBA) Avda. Juan Bosco 13, 50009 Zaragoza (Spain) br> email: ajime...@iisaragon.es Phone: (+34) 637939901 _______________________________________________ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis _______________________________________________ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis _______________________________________________ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
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