Re: [Fis] Revisiting the Fluctuon Model
Dear Koichiro, Your peripheral remarks were not so to me, but exactly the further grounding in physics that I for one feel necessary. I would like to focus on two statements I found particularly relevant: If information has anything significant in its own right and can stand alone irrespective of whether or how it may become analytically accessible, on the other hand, one must go beyond the stipulation of the standard model. The logical system I am proposing does nothing too far outside the standard model. It focuses on the dualities and self-dualities of energy as metaphysically significant, with the inherent oppositional relation - distinguishable co-existing actualities and potentialities - as the basis for information. ...why not take up carbon chemistry as one more concrete example going beyond the hurdle? So far as we know, there has been no attempt for determining both carbon compounds as the building pieces of biology and chemical affinity latent in them in a mutually consistent manner. Logic in Reality provides a consistent interpretation of the latent affinity of chemical compounds in terms of residual unsaturated potentialities that are the resultant of those of the atoms, which result in turn from those at the lowest quantum level. This reality is equivalent to the information carried to higher levels of complexity that is necessary for the emergence of new forms and processes. It is the latent affinity (potentiality) of carbon-nitrogen-oxygen-sulfur compounds that enable them to be the building blocks of biology. The reason that I call this approach a logic rather than just a restatement of the underlying chemical physics is that one maintains its principles when entering the epistemological domain, eliminating as far as possible the barrier between epistemology and ontology that has been the source of so much , well, difficulty. Koichiro's note talks to the basic question Kevin and I posed, the reality + causal efficacy of fluctuons. More evidence for or against will be easier to evaluate with this in hand. Thank you and best wishes, Joseph - Original Message - From: Koichiro Matsuno To: fis@listas.unizar.es Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 2010 5:55 AM Subject: Re: [Fis] Revisiting the Fluctuon Model Folks, Kevin Kirby's opening remark on the Fluctuon model of Michael Conrad shed light on the role of information in physics and beyond. Here is some peripheral remark of my own, though a bit lengthy. 1) Practicing physics may look informational in exercising its own specification without saying so explicitly. A case in point is the renormalization scheme as demonstrated in quantum electrodynamics (QED). QED is quite self-consistent in specifying and determining the values of both the electric charge of an electron and its mass. Tomonaga-Schwinger have successfully set up a descriptive scheme of synchronizing the multiple times presiding over the virtual processes which might violate conservation laws in between in the light of the uncertainty principle in energy and time. The synchronization that is faithful to observing all the relevant conservation laws is an act of making both determinations of the mass under the influence of the electric charge and of its reversal coincidental, that is, the act of making both ends meet. A neat expression of the synchronization is seen in Dyson's equation in terms of Feynman's diagram. In short, the physical parameter called a mass or an electric charge is internally specified, determined and measured as such in the renormalization scheme of QED. So far, so good. 2) Michael felt some uneasiness with the renormalization scheme since the notion of information remains redundant and secondary at best there. Although the definitive values of the mass and the electric charge might seem informational to the experimentalist who intends to measure them externally, an electron in QED can already be seen to measure and fix them internally on its own. In the physical world describable in one form of renormalized scheme or another, that is to say, in the standard model of physics, information is merely a derivative from something more fundamental. The standard physicist has a good excuse for marginalizing information. If information has anything significant in its own right and can stand alone irrespective of whether or how it may become analytically accessible, on the other hand, one must go beyond the stipulation of the standard model. A notorious case that has strenuously kept defying the renormalization project of whatever kind attempted so far is quantum gravity, which was Michael's primary concern. Self-consistent scheme of justifying quantum gravity is required to reach continuity (gravity) as starting from discontinuity (quantum) and at the same time to reach discontinuity as starting from continuity even on an
Re: [Fis] Revisiting the Fluctuon Model
Dear FISers, Thanks to Kevin and Joseph for their excellent texts --and to the many other responding parties. For my own argumentation purposes I find very useful the comments from Stan, Kevin Clark, Koichiro. There are three different aspects I would like to deal with. Given my burden of nasty complicate tasks, I have to leave them as open questions to try to formulate better in the future, or maybe to be kindly dealt with by other parties. About the formalism to deal with entropies: How does the treatment of entropies by Michael in his Adaptability Theory --extended by the fluctuon model into the microphysical realm-- relate with the contemporary quantum information theory, and the qubits stuff? Given that it was initially conceived from the ecological perspective, can it be connected with Bob Ulanowicz's conceptualization of energy flow and diversity (and his tentative variational principle?) The paper by Kevin on Biological adaptibilities and quantum entyropies (BioSystems 64, 2002, 33-41) is an excellent portal for this question. Gravitation and the quantum--and information. There are plenty of theories on quantum gravitation to compare with the ideas in the fluctuon model, and to try to link with the information discussion. Given the curious biological penchant of Lee Smolin (The Life of the Cosmos,1997, Three roads to Quantum Gravity, 2000) and the relative clarity of his discussions on string theory and other approaches, I am very tempted to take some of his ideas on Calabi-Yau (manifolds) spaces as an ultimate Planckian scenario where energy and information collide and only elementary distinctions survive. They are communicable in some open dimensions, but not in the other closed ones... the idea of information as distinction on the adjacent is realized there; also in Smolin's discussions on information in black holes, birth of baby universes, etc. Could this frame of thought be put in agreement with the formal underpinnings of the fluctuon model --as far as I know, inspired by Josephson fluxons or electron solitons in quantum tunneling? It goes beyond my reach. Percolation --and the all pervasive and reverberating circulation of the perpetual disequilibrium as Koichiro as put. This aspect of Michael's thought was fascinating for me, a vertical but terribly heterogeneous scenario of information flows. Given that Joseph and Stan have made neat statements from different angles about a hierarchical structure of levels, I contend in favor of the general predominance of the heterarchical scheme. When we leave the narrow confines of a discipline, or the boundaries of an experimental setting, everything comes together again... Given the limitations of our individual cognition, those vagaries in the environment are not accidental, but fundamental--and they percolate in our collective cognition and in our social use of the sciences. I agree with Joseph (I think) in the need of a more cogent logic for the real and not only for the formal-theoretical. Part of the problem is that this artificial contention of percolation has been treated differently in each major discipline. See for instance Peter Denning views on Computational Science-versus Information Science. Echoing McLuhan centennial, couldn't we call this problem as the irrenunciable mosaic structure of information percolation? Thanking the patience, Pedro -- - Pedro C. Marijuán Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud Avda. Gómez Laguna, 25, Pl. 11ª 50009 Zaragoza, Spain Telf: 34 976 71 3526 ( 6818) Fax: 34 976 71 5554 pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/ - ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
[Fis] FW: Fluc replies - more
All, It is fascinating to follow the trails here from fluctuons to the it/bit issue and beyond. As I read Conrad's theory, a fluctuon is not a prima facie informational object; it is not bit-like, or qubit-like for that matter. It is as it as any particle -- even a virtual particle, a vacuum fluctuation -- can ever be. (Joe and I agree here.) That being said, fluctuons could still find a home in a dual-aspect theory like that which Gordana has been developing (in the same way as electrons, protons, etc.) Is Conrad an idealist? A materialist? Well, in much of his work he emphasized the special nature of matter, how it is the material substrate that makes evolution work. It was not, pace Dennett, the dumb Darwinian algorithm of variation + selection, but the amazingly productive degeneracy and verticality of the organization of the physical world that made it work. On the other hand, he also believed in what he called the principle of philosophic relativity (in a paper of the same name in 1997) or later, the principle of antinomic freedom. He said that he wanted to strive for a theory that was good in a variety of philosophical coordinate systems. (The particular issue that motivated this position dealt with free will versus determinism.) Well, despite that stance, I still think he was a materialist of a sort. The overview by Kevin Clark on how he related Kaluza-Klein induced matter theories to biophysics is tantalizing, and it certainly strikes one as in the spirit of Conrad's work. He did believe that the Ricci tensor, for example, would be interpreted in terms of density in his masson seas, and I suppose this could be consistent with some sort of induction down from 5D space into ordinary spacetime. (But this quickly goes far beyond my expertise here.) I do wish we could get more gravitational physicists to tease apart Conrad's ideas -- separating what could work from what is pleasing but a dead end. But as Koichiro points out in his closing recollection, one need not look only to the graviton here. On flows across scales, this itself need not be mysterious. Take a single photon hitting a rhodopsin molecule in the retina of a vertebrate then [...long chain here...] triggering a fight-or-flight response. Is that a flow across scales? Sure. Fluctuons come in to biology because life relies on subtle conformation changes of proteins, the tactile dance of enzymes, and quantum superposition effects play roles here, as well as fluctuations in the vacuum seas. This is where Conrad daringly closes the loop: in this low-mass high-information regime of biomolecules we see a striking similarity to the high-mass regime near black holes: the chasing of unreachable self-consistency. Koichiro's posting captures the metaphysical pathos of all this with these beautiful sentences: What is unique to the Fluctuon model is its emphasis on the participation of persistent and itinerant disequilibrium or a Fluctuon in implementing conservation laws internally, though there is no room for it in the mind of the standard physicist. This perpetual disequilibrium is all pervasive and reverberating up and down and from left to right and back. Now, pulling this back around to logic and Joseph Brenner. Dealing frankly with inconsistencies is paramount here. If our formalism of level is akin to Floridi's Levels of Abstraction, we will be missing something. (These LoAs are formalisms that capture things about the nature of abstraction, but capturing something in a formalism is not the same as illuminating it.) Joe's LIR is inconsistency-friendly which suggests that this is a meeting point with fluctuons perhaps? (I have run long, and will defer responding to Pedro's great new post on additional connections later.) -- Kevin P.S. As a side note, let me share my perplexity with the initial comment in Steven's post. Recursion is most frequently defined so that it has a bottom, thus ensuring finiteness, just as mathematical induction requires a base case, and just as standard set theory has an axiom of regularity (or foundation). Interesting things can be done with conceptually infinite recursion (e.g. fractal geometry), or non-well-founded set theory (e.g. Barwise's treatment of the liar paradox), but traditional well-founded recursion is, well, the foundation for computer science. _ Kevin G. Kirby Chair and Professor, Department of Computer Science Northern Kentucky University Highland Heights, KY 41099 ki...@nku.edu(859) 572-6544 ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
