Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
Dear Robert and FIS colleagues, On 12 Nov 2012, at 16:35, Robert Ulanowicz wrote: Dear Pedro, Roman Littlefield is coming out with a volume along those lines entitled Beyond Mechanism http://www.academia.edu/1141907/Beyond_Mechanism_Putting_Life_Back_Into_Biology As for our Chinese colleagues, I find them more open to non-mechanical scenarios than are anglophones. The problem is that few people defending mechanism are aware that mechanism is incompatible with weak materialism (the primary existence of a physical universe, that is more or less the current dogma/ paradigm). Most proponents of Mechanism have still the 19th century conception of Mechanism, which is refuted by theoretical computer science/mathematical logic. Mechanical entities are intrinsically related to non mechanical scenario. You cannot genuinely be open to mechanism without being open to the non-mechanical. Most predicate applying to machine are undecidable, non mechanical, etc. Machines, notably when they are self- observing, are confronted to the non mechanical, and *can* overcome it by relying on non mechanically generable informations. I am not defending Mechanism, but as a logician I do invalidate widespread misconception on machines, and notably I try to explain that Digital Mechanism (computationalism) is quite the opposite of reductionism. I would even say that it might be used as a vaccine against reductionism in the exact and human science. Mechanism, in the weak sense I am using, is quite plausible, as there are no evidences against it, but this does not mean that Mechanism is a good *explanation* of anything. On the contrary, I prefer to look at it as a tool, perhaps a simplifying tool, to *formulate* the problems (notably the mind-body problem), to explain it is not yet solved, even in that simplifying frame, etc. We are very ignorant of what are machines, and probably so, in case we assume we are ourself Turing emulable (with or without oracles). All three of my books are being translated into Chinese. The first one, Growth and Development: Ecosystems Phenomenology has already been published. Congratulation ! Best, Bruno Quoting PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es: Dear colleagues, Yes, the foundations are trembling... as usual during quite long a time. Maybe too many aspects have to be put into line in order to have new, more consistent foundations for human knowledge. Until now the different crisis of Mechanics, the dominant scientific culture, have been solved at the small price of leaving conceptual inconsistencies until the rug of brand new fields or subdisciplines while at the same time fictive claims of unity of sceince, reductionism, etc. were upheld. Good for mechanics, as probably there were few competing options around --if any. Bad for the whole human knowledge, as multidisciplinary schizophrenia has been assumed as the natural state of mental health. My opinion is that information science should carefully examine the problematic claims at the core of mechanical ways of explanation, as some (many?) of them refer to the information stuff: unlimited communication (even between physical elements), arbitrary partitions and boundary conditions, ideal status of the acting laws of nature, ominiscient observer, idealized nature of human knowledge (no neurodynamics of knowledge), disciplinary hierarchies versus heterarchical interrelationships, logical versus social construction and knowledge recombination, idealized social information, etc.etc. Probably I have misconceived and wrongly expressed some of those problems, but in any case it is unfortunate that there is a dense feedback among them and a strong entrenchment with many others, so the revision task becomes Herculean even if partially addressed. The big problem some of us see, and I tried to argument about that in the last Beijing FIS meeting, is that without an entrance of some partial aspect in the professional science system, none of the those challenges has the slightest possibility of being developed in the amateur mode/marginal science our studies are caught into. Therefore a common challenge for FIS, the new ISIS society, ITHEA, Symmetrion, INBIOSA, etc. is to take some piece or problem, with practical implications, and enter it into the institutional system, it does not matter where and by whom, and little by little expand the initial stronghold with the collective support of all of us. There is a terrific collection of individualities and scholars in the FIS enterprise and the germane entities, so that any small oficializing attempt should prosper quite soon. Let us think about that... there is hope for non-trembling foundations! Provided we are institutionally clever. best wishes ---Pedro PS. by the way, I would like to hear in this list from our flamboyant Beijing FIS Group, as without discussion they and
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
Bruno said -- but this does not mean that Mechanism is a good *explanation* of anything. On the contrary, I prefer to look at it as a tool, perhaps a simplifying tool, to *formulate* the problems (notably the mind-body problem), to explain it is not yet solved, even in that simplifying frame, etc. Quite right. Logic is a linguistic mechanism, and a ll of our philosophical and scientific efforts are mediated by it. We (except poets) are all mechanists! STAN On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 8:50 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Dear Robert and FIS colleagues, On 12 Nov 2012, at 16:35, Robert Ulanowicz wrote: Dear Pedro, Roman Littlefield is coming out with a volume along those lines entitled Beyond Mechanism http://www.academia.edu/1141907/Beyond_Mechanism_Putting_Life_Back_Into_Biology As for our Chinese colleagues, I find them more open to non-mechanical scenarios than are anglophones. The problem is that few people defending mechanism are aware that mechanism is incompatible with weak materialism (the primary existence of a physical universe, that is more or less the current dogma/ paradigm). Most proponents of Mechanism have still the 19th century conception of Mechanism, which is refuted by theoretical computer science/mathematical logic. Mechanical entities are intrinsically related to non mechanical scenario. You cannot genuinely be open to mechanism without being open to the non-mechanical. Most predicate applying to machine are undecidable, non mechanical, etc. Machines, notably when they are self- observing, are confronted to the non mechanical, and *can* overcome it by relying on non mechanically generable informations. I am not defending Mechanism, but as a logician I do invalidate widespread misconception on machines, and notably I try to explain that Digital Mechanism (computationalism) is quite the opposite of reductionism. I would even say that it might be used as a vaccine against reductionism in the exact and human science. Mechanism, in the weak sense I am using, is quite plausible, as there are no evidences against it, but this does not mean that Mechanism is a good *explanation* of anything. On the contrary, I prefer to look at it as a tool, perhaps a simplifying tool, to *formulate* the problems (notably the mind-body problem), to explain it is not yet solved, even in that simplifying frame, etc. We are very ignorant of what are machines, and probably so, in case we assume we are ourself Turing emulable (with or without oracles). All three of my books are being translated into Chinese. The first one, Growth and Development: Ecosystems Phenomenology has already been published. Congratulation ! Best, Bruno Quoting PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es: Dear colleagues, Yes, the foundations are trembling... as usual during quite long a time. Maybe too many aspects have to be put into line in order to have new, more consistent foundations for human knowledge. Until now the different crisis of Mechanics, the dominant scientific culture, have been solved at the small price of leaving conceptual inconsistencies until the rug of brand new fields or subdisciplines while at the same time fictive claims of unity of sceince, reductionism, etc. were upheld. Good for mechanics, as probably there were few competing options around --if any. Bad for the whole human knowledge, as multidisciplinary schizophrenia has been assumed as the natural state of mental health. My opinion is that information science should carefully examine the problematic claims at the core of mechanical ways of explanation, as some (many?) of them refer to the information stuff: unlimited communication (even between physical elements), arbitrary partitions and boundary conditions, ideal status of the acting laws of nature, ominiscient observer, idealized nature of human knowledge (no neurodynamics of knowledge), disciplinary hierarchies versus heterarchical interrelationships, logical versus social construction and knowledge recombination, idealized social information, etc.etc. Probably I have misconceived and wrongly expressed some of those problems, but in any case it is unfortunate that there is a dense feedback among them and a strong entrenchment with many others, so the revision task becomes Herculean even if partially addressed. The big problem some of us see, and I tried to argument about that in the last Beijing FIS meeting, is that without an entrance of some partial aspect in the professional science system, none of the those challenges has the slightest possibility of being developed in the amateur mode/marginal science our studies are caught into. Therefore a common challenge for FIS, the new ISIS society, ITHEA, Symmetrion, INBIOSA, etc. is to take some piece or problem, with practical implications, and enter it into the institutional
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
Hey Stan - I agree with the way you characterize the role of logic as a linguistic mechanism. Logic connects one set of statements, the premises, with another set of statements, the conclusion. Without challenging your remarks I would suggest that like the case with the poets it is sometimes useful to set aside the dictates of logic. McLuhan talked about the reversal of cause and effect. By this he meant in the case of artists that they start with the effect they wish to create and then find the causes that will create the effect they are striving for. In the case of technology McLuhan correctly noted that the effect of the telegraph was the cause of the telephone. But for me the interesting phenomena where the logic of cause and effect does not hold is the case of emergence and self-organization. With an emergent system in which the properties of the system can not be derived from, reduced to or predicted from the properties of the components the notion of cause and effect does not hold. The reductionist program of logical thinking does not do much to understand emergent phenomena. It is not that logic is wrong it is that it is irrelevant. So if one is an emergentist one cannot be a mechanist. That is simple logic. ;-) warm regards - Bob On 2012-11-13, at 9:30 AM, Stanley N Salthe wrote: Bruno said -- but this does not mean that Mechanism is a good *explanation* of anything. On the contrary, I prefer to look at it as a tool, perhaps a simplifying tool, to *formulate* the problems (notably the mind-body problem), to explain it is not yet solved, even in that simplifying frame, etc. Quite right. Logic is a linguistic mechanism, and a ll of our philosophical and scientific efforts are mediated by it. We (except poets) are all mechanists! STAN On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 8:50 AM, Bruno Marchal marc...@ulb.ac.be wrote: Dear Robert and FIS colleagues, On 12 Nov 2012, at 16:35, Robert Ulanowicz wrote: Dear Pedro, Roman Littlefield is coming out with a volume along those lines entitled Beyond Mechanism http://www.academia.edu/1141907/Beyond_Mechanism_Putting_Life_Back_Into_Biology As for our Chinese colleagues, I find them more open to non-mechanical scenarios than are anglophones. The problem is that few people defending mechanism are aware that mechanism is incompatible with weak materialism (the primary existence of a physical universe, that is more or less the current dogma/ paradigm). Most proponents of Mechanism have still the 19th century conception of Mechanism, which is refuted by theoretical computer science/mathematical logic. Mechanical entities are intrinsically related to non mechanical scenario. You cannot genuinely be open to mechanism without being open to the non-mechanical. Most predicate applying to machine are undecidable, non mechanical, etc. Machines, notably when they are self- observing, are confronted to the non mechanical, and *can* overcome it by relying on non mechanically generable informations. I am not defending Mechanism, but as a logician I do invalidate widespread misconception on machines, and notably I try to explain that Digital Mechanism (computationalism) is quite the opposite of reductionism. I would even say that it might be used as a vaccine against reductionism in the exact and human science. Mechanism, in the weak sense I am using, is quite plausible, as there are no evidences against it, but this does not mean that Mechanism is a good *explanation* of anything. On the contrary, I prefer to look at it as a tool, perhaps a simplifying tool, to *formulate* the problems (notably the mind-body problem), to explain it is not yet solved, even in that simplifying frame, etc. We are very ignorant of what are machines, and probably so, in case we assume we are ourself Turing emulable (with or without oracles). All three of my books are being translated into Chinese. The first one, Growth and Development: Ecosystems Phenomenology has already been published. Congratulation ! Best, Bruno Quoting PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es: Dear colleagues, Yes, the foundations are trembling... as usual during quite long a time. Maybe too many aspects have to be put into line in order to have new, more consistent foundations for human knowledge. Until now the different crisis of Mechanics, the dominant scientific culture, have been solved at the small price of leaving conceptual inconsistencies until the rug of brand new fields or subdisciplines while at the same time fictive claims of unity of sceince, reductionism, etc. were upheld. Good for mechanics, as probably there were few competing options around --if any. Bad for the whole human knowledge, as multidisciplinary schizophrenia has been assumed as the natural state of mental health. My opinion is that information science should carefully examine the
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
Tuesday, November 13, 2012, 3:57:10 PM, Bob wrote: ... But for me the interesting phenomena where the logic of cause and effect does not hold is the case of emergence and self-organization. With an emergent system in which the properties of the system can not be derived from, reduced to or predicted from the properties of the components the notion of cause and effect does not hold. The reductionist program of logical thinking does not do much to understand emergent phenomena. It is not that logic is wrong it is that it is irrelevant. So if one is an emergentist one cannot be a mechanist. That is simple logic. ;-) Don't know if I'm an emergentist or not. On one hand, I do not believe in the cannot be derived from, reduced to or predicted from condition because it seems intrinsically subjective, perhaps even circular. But on the other hand I do believe that complex systems are generally just as real and just as significant as their components, higher level explanations being generally just as good as lower level ones, and only the purpose for which the explanation is required determines which level is most appropriate. I also believe that causation can only be considered to occur horizontally, along levels of explanation. That is because causation is inherently temporal, effects following causes, and there is no passage of time in vertical forays into higher or lower levels of description/explanation. There is no vertical causation. However, I do consider myself a mechanist, because as I see it, one high level event can always be decomposed into a number of lower level events, and eventually, if the process is repeated, a level will be reached at which all of the events can be clearly understood as mechanical. The lower level ones do not CAUSE the highest level one, because they are occurring simultaneously, but they COMPOSE it, and there is no mysterious other element to it. Having said which, if the high level event is to be causally explained, other events on the same level will have to be involved in the explanation, a low level story will NOT do the job. So I believe I've reconciled emergence with mechanism, but I suspect that whether you agree with me depends on what you consider to be essential to emergence. Or how strongly you feel about mechanism. Or, of course, maybe I've just made a silly mistake. :) (Some say that levels of description/explanation are not real (Don Ross?), and I don't know whether that's a reasonable thing to say or not, but they're certainly indispensable to us.) -- Robin Faichney http://www.robinfaichney.org/ ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
Dear Joseph and FIS colleagues, I will not argue here for or against computationalism (digital mechanism), because I do not understand how complex biological, cognitive and social processes can be computable, if no algorithm can be written for them. I speak of the processes themselves, not models of them.I would be grateful if someone (Bruno?) could explain this to me - I apologize if I have missed where this was done. (Joseph) It seems to me that the answer to Joseph's question is given in the following passage by Roger Penrose: (S)ome would prefer to define computation in terms of what a physical object can (in principle?) achieve (Deutsch, Teuscher, Bauer and Cooper). To me, however, this begs the question, and this same question certainly remains, whichever may be our preference concerning the use of the term computation. If we prefer to use this physical definition, then all physical systems compute by definition, and in that case we would simply need a different word for the (original Church-Turing) mathematical concept of computation, so that the profound question raised, concerning the perhaps computable nature of the laws governing the operation of the universe can be studied, and indeed questioned. Penrose in the Foreword to Zenil H. (Ed.): A Computable Universe, Understanding Computation Exploring Nature As Computation, World Scientific Publishing Company/Imperial College Press, (2012) In the field of Natural Computing the whole of nature computes. Nature is a network of networks of computing processes. For many of such processes there are no simple single algorithms (like for human mind which also is a process - a network of processes) There is a complex computational architecture and not a single algorithm. Nature indeed can be seen as a network of networks of computational processes and what we are trying is to compute the way nature does, learning its tricks of the trade. So the focus would not be computability but computational modeling. How good computational models of nature are we able to produce and what does it mean for a physical system to perform computation, computation being implementation of physical laws. From the Introduction to the book Computing Nature, forthcoming in SAPERE book series: http://www.mrtc.mdh.se/~gdc/work/COMPUTING-NATURE-20121028.pdf In a computing nature complex biological, cognitive and social processes are (naturally) computable, even if no algorithm can be written for them. But then computable is a more general term, as Penrose points out. With best regards, Gordana From: fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Joseph Brenner Sent: den 13 november 2012 18:24 To: Bob Logan; Stanley N Salthe Cc: fis Subject: Re: [Fis] The Information Flow Dear FIS Friends and Colleagues, Sometimes I feel as if I have been whistling Dixie, to use an American expression for futility, for the last four years. I have tried to call attention to the fact that there is at least one way of doing logic, that of Stéphane Lupasco as up-dated in my Logic in Reality (LIR), that is not bounded by linguistic constraints, but allows one to make inferences about the real states of a system, actual and potential. LIR is thus a logic that is relevant to the discussion, offering a considerably more complex picture of causality than a simple reversal of cause and effect. Ditto for emergence. It is thus a new but still rigorous, if partly qualitative way of mediating certainly philosophical and some scientific efforts, for example information-as-process. I will not argue here for or against computationalism (digital mechanism), because I do not understand how complex biological, cognitive and social processes can be computable, if no algorithm can be written for them. I speak of the processes themselves, not models of them. I would be grateful if someone (Bruno?) could explain this to me - I apologize if I have missed where this was done. A contrario, if anyone does not understand Logic in Reality, I would be happy to send some references that explain it. This might make possible its inclusion in the discussion. Thank you and best wishes, Joseph - Original Message - From: Bob Loganmailto:lo...@physics.utoronto.ca To: Stanley N Salthemailto:ssal...@binghamton.edu Cc: fismailto:fis@listas.unizar.es Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2012 4:57 PM Subject: Re: [Fis] The Information Flow Hey Stan - I agree with the way you characterize the role of logic as a linguistic mechanism. Logic connects one set of statements, the premises, with another set of statements, the conclusion. Without challenging your remarks I would suggest that like the case with the poets it is sometimes useful to set aside the dictates of logic. McLuhan talked about the reversal of cause and effect. By this he meant in the case of artists that they start with the effect they wish to create and then find the causes that
