Re: [Fis] The Information Flow

[Koichiro Matsuno]

Folks,

   Bob U said "The foundations, they are trembling!" I have taken it to imply 
that propositional
calculus itself is also in a bad shape. This observation reminds me of the 
hanging paradox first
invented by an American logician Arthur Prior more than 60 years ago. It goes 
like this:

   "On a certain Saturday a judge sentenced a man to be hanged on Sunday or 
Monday at noon,
stipulating at the same time that the man would not know the day of his hanging 
until the morning of
the day itself. The condemned man argued that if he were hanged on Monday, he 
would be aware of the
fact by noon on Sunday, and this would contravene the judge's stipulation. So 
the date of his
hanging would have to be Sunday. Since, however, he had worked this out on 
Saturday, and so knew the
date of his hanging the day before, the judge's stipulation was again 
contravened. The date,
therefore, could not be Sunday either. The prisoner concluded that he would not 
be hanged at all.
However, the official gazette issued on Tuesday reported that the man was 
hanged on last Sunday." 

   The logician-prisoner (the externalist) was right in his deduction upon the 
trusted propositional
calculus, while the judge (the internalist) was also right in faithfully 
executing the sentence. But
both cannot be right at the same time. Despite that, the internalist could 
finally come to preside
over this empirical world. I had a hard time to convince myself of it. Strange?

   Cheers,
   Koichiro Matsuno




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Re: [Fis] The Information Flow

[Bruno Marchal]

On 02 Nov 2012, at 14:16, Pedro C. Marijuan wrote:

> FIS friends,
>
> It is too big a challenge to respond to Joseph's and Bill's points.
> While thinking about their points (in "slow thought" mode) I will just
> make a couple of complementary remarks.
>
> First, following Gould's arguments on "replaying life's tape", what
> would happen if we could replay the sciences' tape? Would we obtain a
> similar map of the sciences? Would we finally obtain the same ways of
> thinking & visions of the world? I do not think so. Historically, we
> could have had a very different system of the sciences... when the  
> East
> and the West discovered each other before the scientific revolution
> (medieval travels of Marco Polo and Ruiz de Clavijo) and later on  
> during
> the Enlightenment, there was a curious situation of alternative paths
> followed by each World. Joseph Needham's work summarizes the  
> respective
> stronger and weaker points. The point is that scientific trajectories
> have to be re-examined along the different epochs, motivated either by
> external happenstances or just by the inner dynamics. And this is a
> problem of our time concerning the massive social experiment with
> accelerated information flows. We lack scientific guidance on  
> important
> parts of the process ---not just the technological wizard.

I think the futures are plural, but what you say might make sense for  
a notion of normal (in Guass sense) futures, but then it can depend at  
which scale level you will replay the tape.



>
> The other point is about vindicating the convenience of mechanical
> thinking ---just for large domains of experience but not for tackling
> the general nature & problems of information flows. It is in this  
> sense
> that I was talking about the need of a sort of Heraclitean paradigm
> (well taken by Joseph)... About the completeness of the mechanical way
> of thinking, based on particles, forces (and fields), I remember I  
> asked
> in this list about the "laws of nature" several years ago---where do
> they reside so that they can directly interact with matter? What
> materiality have themselves? Are they but disembodied information? I
> think the responses dovetail better with informational thinking, which
> is in fact what today prevails in cosmology and quantum information
> processing.

I sort of agree. I certainly agree with the spirit of what you say  
here. But the word "mechanism" cannot have the same sense before and  
after the discovery of the universal machine and its limitation. As my  
work illustrates in detail, universal machine have already two  
internal aspects which conflict with each other, and are close to the  
analytical/intuitive distinction.
In a sense, no machine can believe analytically that she is a machine,  
and from her inner , first person perspective this happens to be true:  
the 1p of a machine is not possibly a machine from the machine 1p  
view. That is why I insist that mechanism, after Gödel and Turing  
appears to be a vaccine against reductionist thinking.

Now there is a (big) price for this, which is that materialism get  
inconsistent (even the weak materialism which asserts only the  
existence of primitive matter). Eventually the appearance of matter  
has to be entirely justified by the coherence of the relative number  
dreams (dream = computations as seen by the computed person).
So mechanism disallows a view of nature based on particles and forces.  
They have to be fictional mind construct to make locally sense of the  
experience lived in the artithmetical reality.
Matter is not disembodied information, but first person plural  
(shared) subjective appearances in the coherent dreams of the numbers,  
or more exactly numbers relation with each other. Computationalism is  
used by materialist to put consciousness under the rug, but the fact  
is that materialism is simply incompatible with computationalism.  
There is no choice than to go back to Plato, or to abandon mechanism  
if we want to maintain Aristotle theology (like most materialist do,  
consciously or not).




>
> Am afraid I have advanced little and just introduced more noise in the
> discussion!

Not at all. I personally find those points very important. It  
certainly gives me the opportunity to insist on something I have  
worked on for a very long time, and which is that mechanism itself  
forbids the mechanical reductionism.
Sometimes I sum this by if my 3p I is a machine, then my 1p I is not a  
machine, from my 1p point of view.
It makes mechanism into a relief for those who dislike reductionist  
thinking, especially around the communication and information studies.
But then it makes us more ignorant than what many physicalists want us  
to believe. Indeed, now, the laws of physics got a non trivial origin,  
and they have evolved themselves in a space of numbers/machine dreams.  
This is far from the current aristotelian metaphysics assumed, not  
always consciously, by m

Re: [Fis] The Information Flow

[Robert Ulanowicz]

Quoting "Pedro C. Marijuan" :

> First, following Gould's arguments on "replaying life's tape", what
> would happen if we could replay the sciences' tape? Would we obtain a
> similar map of the sciences? Would we finally obtain the same ways of
> thinking & visions of the world? I do not think so. Historically, we
> could have had a very different system of the sciences... when the East
> and the West discovered each other before the scientific revolution
> (medieval travels of Marco Polo and Ruiz de Clavijo) and later on during
> the Enlightenment, there was a curious situation of alternative paths
> followed by each World. Joseph Needham's work summarizes the respective
> stronger and weaker points. The point is that scientific trajectories
> have to be re-examined along the different epochs, motivated either by
> external happenstances or just by the inner dynamics. And this is a
> problem of our time concerning the massive social experiment with
> accelerated information flows. We lack scientific guidance on important
> parts of the process ---not just the technological wizard.

Dear Pedro,

I heartily concur! Folks have been concerned with the contingent  
nature of science for a while now. One of the most prominent was John  
A. Wheeler, who dreamed up a metaphor for the development of science  
that I have included in several of my publications:

  **

The development of science is like a game played by a number of guests  
at a dinner party. Waiting for dinner to be served, the guests elect  
to play the game “20 Questions” the object of which is to guess a  
word. In Wheeler’s version, one individual is sent out of the room,  
while those who remain are to decide upon a particular word. It is  
explained to the delegated person that upon returning, he/she will  
question each of the group in turn and the responses must take the  
form of a simple, unadorned “yes” or “no” until the questioner guesses  
the word. After the designated player leaves the room, one of the  
guests suggests that the group not choose a word. Rather, when the  
subject returns and poses the first question, the initial respondent  
is completely free to answer “yes” or “no” on unfettered whimsy.  
Similarly, the second person is at liberty to make either reply. The  
only condition upon the second person is that his/her response may not  
contradict the first reply. The restriction upon the third respondent  
is that that individual’s reply must not be dissonant with either of  
the first two answers, and so forth. The game ends when the subject  
asks, “Is the word X?” and the only response coherent with all  
previous replies is “Yes”.

After Wheeler, John A. 1980. Beyond the black hole. Pp. 341-375 In: H.  
Woolf (Ed.) Some Strangeness in the Proportion. Reading, PA:  
Addison-Wesley.

   **

Now for a recent and more radical turn in this direction, I direct  
your attention to the work of historian of science, Ed Dellian  
. Ed recently  
translated Principia from the Latin into German and discovered that  
most of  the contemporary renditions of Newton's second law don't  
correspond to Newton's narrative. In particular, we generally quote  
his second law as f=ma. Newton, however, left off with a geometric and  
discrete version of the second law of the form (f/mv)=c, a constant.  
The continuous, algebraic versions of mechanical laws trace rather to  
Liebnitz and Euler as what Dellian calls "Berliner Mechanik". Newton  
argued strenuously against this direction! Dellian further contends  
that by remaining with Newton's geometric stance one could have  
avoided the necessity of creating the separate disciplines of  
thermodynamics and quantum physics, so that physics would have  
remained a more unified whole.

Ed's assertions caught my attention, because I have always been  
suspicious about the first law of thermodynamics (See p23ff in  
.) I have since  
come to the conclusion that when the continuum assumption is valid,  
the classical algebraic laws perform brilliantly. When they do not,  
they become useless, if not misleading. In particular, Elsasser warned  
us of their inapplicability in the face of heterogeneity  
.

I have come to the conclusion that much of contemporary physics is  
dealing with la-la land and not reality. Take quantum entanglement,  
for example. Physicists would have us believe that an electron can be  
present in our lab or halfway across the universe, and will be  
resolved instantaneously upon measurement. Well, I can swallow  
entanglement within a space of say, 1,000 radii of an electron. But at  
macroscopic dimensions? Anyone who believes that fairy tale has never  
encountered the Buckingham-Pi Theorem (as most physicists haven

Re: [Fis] The Information Flow

[Pedro C. Marijuan]

FIS friends,

It is too big a challenge to respond to Joseph's and Bill's points. 
While thinking about their points (in "slow thought" mode) I will just 
make a couple of complementary remarks.

First, following Gould's arguments on "replaying life's tape", what 
would happen if we could replay the sciences' tape? Would we obtain a 
similar map of the sciences? Would we finally obtain the same ways of 
thinking & visions of the world? I do not think so. Historically, we 
could have had a very different system of the sciences... when the East 
and the West discovered each other before the scientific revolution 
(medieval travels of Marco Polo and Ruiz de Clavijo) and later on during 
the Enlightenment, there was a curious situation of alternative paths 
followed by each World. Joseph Needham's work summarizes the respective 
stronger and weaker points. The point is that scientific trajectories 
have to be re-examined along the different epochs, motivated either by 
external happenstances or just by the inner dynamics. And this is a 
problem of our time concerning the massive social experiment with 
accelerated information flows. We lack scientific guidance on important 
parts of the process ---not just the technological wizard.

The other point is about vindicating the convenience of mechanical 
thinking ---just for large domains of experience but not for tackling 
the general nature & problems of information flows. It is in this sense 
that I was talking about the need of a sort of Heraclitean paradigm 
(well taken by Joseph)... About the completeness of the mechanical way 
of thinking, based on particles, forces (and fields), I remember I asked 
in this list about the "laws of nature" several years ago---where do 
they reside so that they can directly interact with matter? What 
materiality have themselves? Are they but disembodied information? I 
think the responses dovetail better with informational thinking, which 
is in fact what today prevails in cosmology and quantum information 
processing.

Am afraid I have advanced little and just introduced more noise in the 
discussion!

best wishes

---Pedro


> Challenge for FIS- What are your 10 most important questions?
>
>
> 1) How can we best explore the latest version of new means of 
> scanning/observing the body? What are they? how are they 
> mathematically intra-explored?
> 2) how can we best move from emergent systems to known systems? 
> Transcending Rosen...
> 3) is there a new relational mathematics that moves across current 
> spaces? Who is working now on this? How can we do it?
> 4) How can people best collaborate with different mind sets --- people 
> that think differently?? Is this valuable?
> 5) How can we make new publishing arenas that explore and support 
> transdisciplinary research?
> 6) How can we best bridge research fields in terms of mathematics?
> 7) How can we go beyond what we know in a quantum jump without having 
> our past research being put into question? or should we just allow 
> ourselves to change as we learn/absorb?
> 8) How can we make sure institutions are supporting such research in 
> terms of tenure?
> 9) What is the best publishing venue for such research?
> 10) Who is best funding this…
>
>
> b
>
>
> Bill Seaman
> Professor, Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies
> DUKE UNIVERSITY
> 114 b East Duke Building
> Box 90764
> Durham, NC 27708, USA
> +1-919-684-2499
> http://billseaman.com/
> http://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/AAH/faculty/william.seaman
> http://www.dibs.duke.edu/research/profiles/98-william-seaman
>
>
>
> RadioSeaman
> Paste into itunes (Advanced/open audio streams) for internet radio:
> http://smw-aux.trinity.duke.edu:8000/radioseaman
>
>
>
>
>
> On Oct 27, 2012, at 11:34 AM, Bruno Marchal  > wrote:
>>
>> Even if the Parmenidean reality is restricted to the natural numbers,
>> with only the laws of addition and multiplication, we can prove,
>> assuming our brain are Turing emulable, that the view from inside as
>> to be Heraclitean.
>>
>> The problem is not mechanism. The problem is the reductionist
>> conception of mechanism. I think.
>>
>> The incompleteness phenomenon does not refute mechanism, like some
>> have proposed, but it does refute the reductionist conception of
>> mechanism.
>>
>> Arithmetic is full of life and dreams.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Bruno


-- 
-
Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
-

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