As u first for the week:
On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 5:04 PM, Gavin Ritz <garr...@xtra.co.nz> wrote: Hi Stan Using my last message for the week, Reacting to the below(s): As a materialist, I see the deformations initiated by Guy's propagated waves (e.g., as sensations) as forming the basis for information, but, as emphasized in semiotics, this only becomes information (e.g. perception) as a result of assimilation by the impacted system. Are you saying that perception is information? Perception is a process of making sense of sensations. The system will not be 'informed' by impacts that are not assimilated by it (and may not even be sensed), and so there is no point in assigning information to sensations (impacts) as such. As a 'pansemiotician', I have no problem in formulating this in purely physical systems as 'physiosemiosis', which is constructed whenever context (in complex system this can be internal to the system) will affect the effect of the impact. I have no idea what this all means. Ah, yes. Well, semiotics is just now making its way into science. From your point of view here, I am distinguishing Newtonian (dyadic) impacts from interactions involving a third entity - a context. This makes it triadic, as in Peircean semiotics. The impact of two entities will differ in different contexts. If not, then semiotics would be irrelevant. STAN Regards Gavin STAN On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 7:22 PM, Gavin Ritz <garr...@xtra.co.nz> wrote: Hi there Guy I'm at a loss still about information you mention below. If one talks about waves, light, sound these are all energy (frequency) concepts. Chemistry and physics are really only about energy, entropy and transduction's and conversions of energy in one form or the other of matter. Any flows of available energy are more than likely entropy production or free energy. (Gibbs type free energy) The only codes, and notations are the ones we give it, it is of our own making, if information does have an existence then its more than likely related to non baryonic matter. After all we are making assumptions about a universe with only a less than 4% understanding of its contents. Regards Gavin Reacting to Guy's posting ... -----Original Message----- From: fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Guy A Hoelzer Sent: Saturday, 5 February 2011 1:53 p.m. To: Foundations of Information Science Information Science Subject: Re: [Fis] [Fwd: Re: [Fwd: Info Theory]--From John Collier Hi Gavin, I’m not quite sure how to respond as you didn’t ask a particular question. Here are my thoughts about your points. Waves are indeed about energy, which I think fits nicely into the scheme I described regarding information. I suggested a very simple definition of information as a contrast. Physical gradients provide a nice example of contrast between different conditions on either side of a gradient. Energy generically fits this view whether you think about it in either particle (e.g., photon) or wave form. I am not a physicist, but I think energy always exists as some sort of localized concentration with a gradient between regions of higher energy and regions of lower energy. In this sense, energy can always be considered as a spatially configured pattern, and thus as information. So here you seem ready to invoke Bateson's 'difference that makes a difference'. But I don't see here the system for which this difference is made. On my own definition of information -- any constraint on entropy production -- I don't see that here either. Shannon's view of information as a reduction in uncertainty might be implicit because without any constraints the system will rapidly go to local equilibrium. In all three of these views of information an observing or participating system is implicit. I also agree that flows are about entropy production, and they must always be channeled in a way that requires a structural configuration. This is how I think about self-organizing dissipative systems. Flows cross gradients and dissipate those gradients in the process, which diminishes the contrast and thus the amount of information exhibited by the gradient. I would describe the emergent structure of such systems as information captured by the system, or transferred to the system, as the gradient is diminished. An intriguing suggestion. I see this as an alternative way to say that the system captures free energy from the flow and uses it to construct itself. I generally see information as the inverse of entropy, so the existence of information goes hand-in-hand with the existence of entropy. Whether information/entropy exist or are just heuristic concepts is an issue for others to debate. I do think, though, that it IS related to baryonic matter. Agreed on all of these. Replying to Jerry -- Stan: The issue of ostension remains high on my agenda. The individual sciences progress along individual paths, each asserting new knowledge, often confirmed by new applications to basic and applied research. Yet, between the sciences, the separation continue to grow. For example, see John Collier's recent posts. Why is this separation so deep? My inclination is that the source of the mis-communciation is the failure to grasp the role of codes in all biological communications. It seems that historically, philosophy operates only within the boundary of the linguistic modalities of a tongue. Even if a philosopher can operate in another modality, they do not as it is not permitted in their profession. The simple fact of life is that the chemical sciences, over the past two centuries, have created a new code for human communication that invokes a new grammar, a logic and an a very ancient way of looking at number with identity. I note the word "invokes". The code is a human construction. The rhetoric of this new code is used in the life sciences as the "lingua franca". In our models of biology. This code is not understandable in traditional physical philosophy, so the physics community remains out of the loop, offering nothing new to the biological sciences, merely singing the song of entropy off-key. Yes but, they have their own fanciful codes -- various fermions and bosons, etc. Cods are a favorite modernist construction. Of course, as the new lingua franca of biology and medicine describes networks of relationships, much as your family tree describes an historical network, and, as such, is not reducible to the simplistic "yes/no" of a decision for a symbol of a Shannon bit, the physical sciences community ignores the nature of information of life. A recent paper by Paul Davies asserts from Bits to Its. In an earlier message your wrote: As well, I think that there is no objective evidence that the world apart from us, is logical. The objective evidence of the order of the atomic numbers, the order of the molecules of life and the reproduction of the same ordering relations in offsprings of parents point toward a vast reservoir of natural order. But these are natural codes not artificial codes of the real number system. All of these are human constructs -- and that's fine, let's DO them, but let's not forget who the Creator is. The very fact of the existence of physical versus chemical codes shows that there is no basic underlying code. Your faith in entropy is showing! :-) Would your understanding of the ostension of artificial codes They are not ostensive at all, but linguistic and crisp. support an assertion from Bits to Its to Tits? Rather the reverse! STAN
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