Re: [Fis] Concluding the Lecture? - In Praise of Teleodynamics
Dear Pedro, Terry and Fellow FISers - I was composing the email below when your email appeared asking us not to respond any further to Terry's final remarks. I disagree with this arbitrary cutoff as I was about to send out what follows below. It also seems an abridgement of free speech to ask us not to discuss an issue we might be interested in. Perhaps I am unfamiliar with the ground rules of the FIS list but the other listservs I belong to have never attempted to cutoff a topic. There have been occasions where they have asked an individual who posts too often to not turn the list into their own bully pulpit. Anyway as the guy who suggested that we ask Terry to lead a FIS conversation I will exercise the perogative to share my thoughts one more time. I would also be prepared to accept your restriction if you had given us advanced notice with an exact deadline of shutting down this thread. Here is what I had written when you sounded the bell as a death knell to this discussion which is submitted with respect and the undertaking to abide by the referee's decision and not comment on Terry's final remarks although I would love to hear from my colleagues their final thoughts on Terry's teleodynamic approach - Bob In order to respect the "only 2 per week" constraint here are my comments to the flurry of recent posts in this thread. There is one caveat with which I wish to preface my remarks and it is this: I am a member of Terry research team and therefore I am biased, but I would like to share with my FIS colleagues why I believe the teleodynamic approach that Terry has developed is the best game in town for understanding the origin of life and the nature of information. Pedro wrote on Jan 30: "At your convenience, during the first week of February or so we may put an end to the ongoing New Year Lecture --discussants willing to enter their late comments should hurry up. Your own final or concluding comment will be appreciated." Bob's reply: Since Pedro issued the above call for the end of the discussion of Terry's provocative paper there has been a flurry of activity. As The English author Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) once wrote: "Nothing so concentrates the mind as the hangman's noose!" I hope we can carry on a week or two more as some of us are just warming up. The first of the year is a logical starting point for a new discussion thread but it also corresponds to the beginning of a new semester here in Canada and other places in North America. I for one was focussed on launching the new semester and my courses so I respectfully request that we keep the conversation going for awhile longer before we start a new one. Now I have a few comments to support Terry's teleodynamic approach which I present: Joe Brenner wrote later on Jan 30: "we can all easily understand and agree that the incorporation of ‘homunculi’, that is, unproven mechanisms, as explanatory, should be avoided. In my view, however, Terry has a small army of homunculi at work (sic!) who insure that his processes of self-organization, self-reconstitution and ‘spontaneous’ self-assembly can take place! The finality of using his simulated autogenic systems is “a rigorous physical foundation upon which” future complex theories of information may be based. If, as I contend, Terry’s approach has failed to take into account the fundamentally dualistic physical properties of real systems, it is hard to see how it could do so." Bob's reply: As much as it pains me to disagree with my friend Joe who is in general in support of Deacon's approach I have to counter his accuasation that "Terry has a small army of homunculi at work": There are no homunculi in the autogen model. According to Deacon's approach an incredible co-incidence has occurred in which the two self organizing processes of auto-catalysis and the self assembly of the crystal-like membranes became self-supporting. It is only by a chance event that one can explain how an organization of molecules with properties so different from abiotic matter suddenly became alive, able to propagate its organization and emerge as a self that acts teleonomically in its own interest. That co-incidence is the one in a billion or more chance that the by product of a particular autocatalytic set were also the ingredients for the self assembly of a bi-lipid membrane that could encase the autocatalytic set in a protective membrane and that the by products of that self-assembly process provided the raw materials for the very same autocatalysis. This is not a homunucli but just plain dumb luck or to give it a fancy name an aleatoric event, a one in a trillion event, but given the billion year (or multi-trillion second) time scale it becomes inevitable that such a rare event will occur. The two self-organizing processes that combined to form the purported autogen are due to first order extrinsic constraints. That these two constraints could be mutuall
[Fis] Concluding the Lecture!
Dear colleagues, this New Year Lecture is over. Our invitee will make his final statements and ALL should abide by the courtesy "constraint" of not replying further... Thanks Terry for all your informational work! Best--Pedro BlackBerry de movistar, allí donde estés está tu oficin@ -Original Message- From: Steven Ericsson-Zenith Sender: Fis Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2015 11:38:17 To: Foundations of Information Science of Information Science Information Information Science Subject: Re: [Fis] Fwd: Re: Fwd: Re: Concluding the Lecture? Dear list, For clarity, below is the message that I sent to Terry offline, to which he responded. Here are my final remarks. The work presented by Terry uses a mixture of formal and informal terms but, from my point of view, the work lacks rigor. This is highlighted in the demand that constraints have no physical basis and is evident in the discussion concerning "dynamical constraint." The latter serves to illustrate another complaint concerning word density and comfort. A comfort in word juxtapositions is all very well if used, as it was by Charles Peirce, for precise technical purposes, if an equation is not at hand or is currently beyond statement. But something that Peirce required, inherited from his loving father, was a demand for necessity. Recall that for Benjamin and Charles mathematics is the science that draws "necessary conclusions" from premises of any kind. If Charles were to put together "dynamic" and "constraint," for example, you can be sure that he specified exactly what it is that is "dynamic" and specified exactly what a "constraint" is. In fairness, Terry has attempted to do this but, in my view, has failed. It should be clear that constraints are not of themselves dynamic and they may always be applied where degrees of freedom exist, though not exclusively. It appears that the "dynamic" part of "dynamical constraint" refers not to the constraint but to its object. Now, it may seem dumb to harp on this, but I fail to see how the application of a constraint to anything at all, dynamic or static, can be anything other than a posterior determinant. A constraint, like natural selection, necessarily has a physical basis, contrary to what was said, that is the physical basis of the constraint is the physical system itself. It is one that allows the constraining selection, the behavior, involved to take place. A posterior determinant enforces a necessary partial order. And this is something for which we may reasonably expect an equation. Now, anyone familiar with Shannon will know that these ideas cannot fit into Shannon's theory because Shannon deals with probability and transmissions. Indeed, we would need to move from the abstraction of communication to the necessity of apprehension where a more certain language may be brought to task. To abstract constraints away from the physical in any case, necessarily leads to dualism, and a blunt denial of this does not help anyone. Although a well reasoned denial is always worth listening to In trying to understand the language use, I suggested that, perhaps, simple notions such as YUK and YUM were thought of as constraints. In the case of bacteria, YUK and YUM, for me, are not merely "normative." They are manifest behaviors of the physical organism structure. I can say, for example, that this e-coli or that not only experiences YUM as it purses the density of a sugar gradient but that the surface shapes that have formed under its influence (and are refined by the insertion of latent receptors and motor functions), and that may be described as bound holomorphic functors (hyper-functors), are manifestations of the physical YUM. Finally, I find the claims that any of us are taking information theory beyond Shannon spurious. Here I almost certainly diverge from many of my colleagues who hold a nebulas information theory in such high regard and like to mix it up with all the other things that use the term "information" from the variety of European languages. It is fair for me to note, however, that Shannon was a fine applied mathematician and if you wish to move beyond Shannon, you must, at least, command that skill. It seems to me however that a different skill is required to enable us to extract ourselves from the senseless tangle into which we now all head. This is the skill of Schlipp, Reichenbach or Carnap, rigorous epistemology, without it there can be no hope for information theory of any kind of unified science. Regards, Steven My earlier message: I am puzzled concerning your use of the phrase "dynamical constraint" and your reference here to a "dynamical organization for interpretation." What is it exactly that is dynamic? Perhaps you mean to say that the process of interpretation is dynamic and that this process applies one or more static constraints. Such a constraint would be, for example, YUK or YUM. This might be a view consistent with that of Charles Peirce although it seems too anal
Re: [Fis] Fwd: Re: Fwd: Re: Concluding the Lecture?
Dear list, For clarity, below is the message that I sent to Terry offline, to which he responded. Here are my final remarks. The work presented by Terry uses a mixture of formal and informal terms but, from my point of view, the work lacks rigor. This is highlighted in the demand that constraints have no physical basis and is evident in the discussion concerning "dynamical constraint." The latter serves to illustrate another complaint concerning word density and comfort. A comfort in word juxtapositions is all very well if used, as it was by Charles Peirce, for precise technical purposes, if an equation is not at hand or is currently beyond statement. But something that Peirce required, inherited from his loving father, was a demand for necessity. Recall that for Benjamin and Charles mathematics is the science that draws "necessary conclusions" from premises of any kind. If Charles were to put together "dynamic" and "constraint," for example, you can be sure that he specified exactly what it is that is "dynamic" and specified exactly what a "constraint" is. In fairness, Terry has attempted to do this but, in my view, has failed. It should be clear that constraints are not of themselves dynamic and they may always be applied where degrees of freedom exist, though not exclusively. It appears that the "dynamic" part of "dynamical constraint" refers not to the constraint but to its object. Now, it may seem dumb to harp on this, but I fail to see how the application of a constraint to anything at all, dynamic or static, can be anything other than a posterior determinant. A constraint, like natural selection, necessarily has a physical basis, contrary to what was said, that is the physical basis of the constraint is the physical system itself. It is one that allows the constraining selection, the behavior, involved to take place. A posterior determinant enforces a necessary partial order. And this is something for which we may reasonably expect an equation. Now, anyone familiar with Shannon will know that these ideas cannot fit into Shannon's theory because Shannon deals with probability and transmissions. Indeed, we would need to move from the abstraction of communication to the necessity of apprehension where a more certain language may be brought to task. To abstract constraints away from the physical in any case, necessarily leads to dualism, and a blunt denial of this does not help anyone. Although a well reasoned denial is always worth listening to In trying to understand the language use, I suggested that, perhaps, simple notions such as YUK and YUM were thought of as constraints. In the case of bacteria, YUK and YUM, for me, are not merely "normative." They are manifest behaviors of the physical organism structure. I can say, for example, that this e-coli or that not only experiences YUM as it purses the density of a sugar gradient but that the surface shapes that have formed under its influence (and are refined by the insertion of latent receptors and motor functions), and that may be described as bound holomorphic functors (hyper-functors), are manifestations of the physical YUM. Finally, I find the claims that any of us are taking information theory beyond Shannon spurious. Here I almost certainly diverge from many of my colleagues who hold a nebulas information theory in such high regard and like to mix it up with all the other things that use the term "information" from the variety of European languages. It is fair for me to note, however, that Shannon was a fine applied mathematician and if you wish to move beyond Shannon, you must, at least, command that skill. It seems to me however that a different skill is required to enable us to extract ourselves from the senseless tangle into which we now all head. This is the skill of Schlipp, Reichenbach or Carnap, rigorous epistemology, without it there can be no hope for information theory of any kind of unified science. Regards, Steven My earlier message: I am puzzled concerning your use of the phrase "dynamical constraint" and your reference here to a "dynamical organization for interpretation." What is it exactly that is dynamic? Perhaps you mean to say that the process of interpretation is dynamic and that this process applies one or more static constraints. Such a constraint would be, for example, YUK or YUM. This might be a view consistent with that of Charles Peirce although it seems too analytic for me. This is surely not what you speak of since such a constraint is necessarily the organization of something existent (a priori). How then is this not a posterior determination? Perhaps you mean only to suggest that YUK or YUM are refinable "hardwired" interpretive constraints. In which case interpretation is no immediate process and constraint is not an activity. Perhaps "dynamic" then refers to this refinement and the in situ selection of one or the other? This would be more in line with my thinking. However, I hope you see the c
[Fis] Workshop Triangular Relationship Information-Reality-Cognition at IS4IS Summit
Dear Colleagues, As Marcin got problem with mail that bounced, I try again, with links to attachments. As you learned from Marcin's mails, this is the announcement of the workshop "Triangular Relationship Information-Reality-Cognition: Through the Prism of Physical-Biological-Cognitive Sciences, Computing and Philosophy" within FIS Track of ISIS Summit in Vienna, June 3-7, 2015 which Marcin and I are organising. As for all other tracks and workshops the deadline for extended abstracts (750-2,000 words) is February 27. Please find here links to the Call for Papers and a poster of the workshop. CALL FOR PAPERS <http://www.idt.mdh.se/~gdc/work/CallForPapers-TRIRC-20150203.pdf> http://www.idt.mdh.se/~gdc/work/CallForPapers-TRIRC-20150203.pdf POSTER<http://www.idt.mdh.se/~gdc/work/TRIRC-IS4IS-2015-poster.pdf> http://www.idt.mdh.se/~gdc/work/TRIRC-IS4IS-2015-poster.pdf With best regards, Marcin & Gordana Gordana Dodig Crnkovic, Professor of Computer Science Chalmers University of Technology & University of Gothenburg, Sweden http://www.ait.gu.se/kontaktaoss/personal/gordana-dodig-crnkovic/ School of Innovation, Design and Engineering, Mälardalen University http://www.mrtc.mdh.se/~gdc/ & Marcin J. Schroeder, Ph.D. Professor Akita International University Akita, Japan m...@aiu.ac.jp From: MARCIN Schroeder mailto:m...@aiu.ac.jp>> Date: Tuesday 3 February 2015 13:03 To: "fis@listas.unizar.es<mailto:fis@listas.unizar.es>" mailto:fis@listas.unizar.es>> Subject: [Fis] Workshop T 9.2 at IS4IS Summit ___ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
[Fis] Workshop T 9.2 at IS4IS Summit
Dear Colleagues,Using this chanel of communication I would like to bring to your attention information about "Triangular Relationship Information-Reality-Cognition: Through the Prism of Physical-Biological-Cognitive Sciences, Computing and Philosophy" Workshop within FIS Track of ISIS Summit in Vienna, June 3-7, 2015 which we are organizing with Gordana. As for all other tracks and workshops the deadline for extended abstracts (750-2,000 words) is February 27.I am attaching the Call for Papers and a poster of the workshop created by Gordana. The poster is so beautiful that it will be a nice decoration of the door to your office or of any bulletin board. Regards,MarcinMarc in J. Schroeder, Ph.D. Professor Akita International University Akita, Japan m...@aiu.ac.jp ___ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
