Replying to Kevin --
On Tuesday, Sep 28, 2010 at 6:29 PM, Kevin Kirby <ki...@nku.edu> wrote:
-snip-
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.
No! Are you asserting that a brain will respond to a single tickled
rhodopsin molecule? The retina needs to be regaled with more than that in
order to trigger a biological response. The rhodopsin molecule exists at
the chemical level in nature's hierarchy, and at that level electrons /
photons (IN plural) can have effects because of the chemical organization,
and so, these are not direct, unmediated effects. Biological synthesis
mediates between these effects and consciousness. Put otherwise, a single
photon carries no information for biology. The statement I defend is that
‘no information transits unmediated across scales’. The hierarchy in this
case can be viewed either as [cell [rhodopsin [photonS]]] or as {energy flow
{chemical reaction { biological organization}}}. Curiously, I am getting
the feeling that hierarchy, after being ignored for decades, is now being
taken as 'ho-hum' -- old hat!
Replying to Joe --
On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 11:05 AM, Joseph Brenner <joe.bren...@bluewin.ch>
wrote:
Dear Gordana and All,
-snip-
2. This judgment is confirmed :-) by the citations: a) One can agree (I do)
with Floridi's interpretation of reality as the totality of structures
interacting with one another, but we still do not know what a structure is,
ontologically, and there is a *caesura *with the implication for
information; b) Referring to "physicists who say that reality is
fundamentally informational" is begging the question at issue.
3. It is not quite accurate to say that Floridi's Levels of Organization
(LoOs) give access to an "ontological side" that will enable us to see an
informational reality for two reasons: a) we have not established that
reality is primarily informational nor what this might mean (see above); b)
LoOs, to quote Floridi do "support an ontological approach, according to
which systems *for analysis *(my emphasis) are supposed to have a
structure in themselves *de re*, which is allegedly captured and uncovered
by its description. For example, levels of communication, of decision
processing and of information flow can all be presented as specific
instances that can be analyzed in terms of LoOs." However, I submit that we
are still dealing, here, with epistemological constructions.
S: LoOs are hierarchical structures, are in fact compositional
hierarchies (the ones that interdict unmediated information flow across
levels separated by scale). Hierarchies are conceptual tools, allowing us
to simplify our models of the world -- levels of OBSERVATION are obviously
epistemological tools (he also uses "levels of abstraction"). No one can
assert that the world itself has this kind of structure (though it does seem
to in many aspects).
-snip-
5. On the question of "it 'or' bit", I suggest that bits are the simplest,
most abstract elements of information, constitutive of its lowest semantic
level. Its are something more, for example, as Kevin Kirby said,
fluctuons can perfectly well be looked at as "its", given their apparent
interactive characteristics. Understanding the relationship (one or more ?)
between information and matter/energy may be easier if we consider that we
might be talking about the same thing from two perspectives.
S: From a developmental point of view, 'bits', being crisp and
digital, would be end points of material evolution, which could be modeled
thus (using a subsumptive hierarchy): {vagueness -> {fuzziness ->
{crispness}}} One could say that only some parts of the world could be
modeled as fuzzy, and even fewer as crisp.
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