Dear Arturo and FISers,
The last paragraphs of your chess game, pretty exciting, remind me
strongly on the role that I have been attributing to cellular signaling
systems, and the radical difference they have with metabolic cellular
networks, although finally both are interrelated into the advancement of
a life cycle at the cellular scale. As I have often commented, it is
like reading the newspaper versus eating a sandwich, or better reading
the menu carte versus devouring it.
Going back to nervous systems, the approach presented reminds me, more
and more, the work of Kenneth Paul Collins in late 1980s and early 90s.
His work was condensed in : /"On the Automation of Knowledge Within
Central Nervous Systems."/ Unpublished Manuscript, presented as a poster
at the AAAS Meeting in 1991, Boston. (Sorry Malcolm for giving the
"reference" so late). I talked with him there, and was impressed by his
work and kept in touch with him for several years. With his permission,
I translated it into Spanish, changing some not well-solved aspects and
adding a few more stuff: /"El Cerebro Dual: Un Acercamiento
Interdisciplinar a la Naturaleza del Conocimiento Humano y Biológico"
/Authors: KP Collins and PC Marijuan, published by /Editorial Hacer,
Barcelona (1997)/. "The central principle of Duality Theory [am quoting
from Kenneth, p.3] is that the neural arrays of the vertebrate Central
Nervous System are physically organized so that their functioning will
blindly minimize the sum of the topologically-distributed ratios of
excitation to inhibition that occur within them."
Many more interesting quotations could be cited. But his manuscript of
more than 100 dense pages did not attract any attention except a very
few parties (essentially, me). He went down and down and my final
indirect news were from some discussion lists where he was trolling in a
sick way. At that time, I had received some alarming news from himself
about his own deteriorating mental health... (late 90s/early 2000s).
Anyhow, in 1997 I published /"The Topological Inventions of Life: From
the Specialization of Multicellular Colonies to the Functioning of the
Vertebrate Brain."/ World Futures, 1997. 50. 617-631., where I was
summarizing the basic tenets of his theory, and I have kept mentioning
him in some of my publications. The point is that his work anticipated
basic ideas nowadays developed by Arturo and James, Friston, Sengupta,
etc. about CNS overall optimization principles, entropy/information,
symmetries & antisymmetries, dynamic connectome, learning & trophic
mechanisms, behavioral propensities, etc. He was particularly great
connecting the abstract processing of neural information with human
behavior, learning biases, emotional reactions ("the prejudice towards
the familiar", violence, depression). With today's' new knowledge, some
gaps in those views may be filled in, and viceversa, we could work and
throw a new light upon his great behavioral insights. That's my personal
opinion, of course, that was not very well received when I tried to talk
about with relevant neuroscientists.
Well, it was a good occasion to tell this story in the list, that has
always troubled me, and that now finally has found avantgarde germane
developments.
Best wishes--Pedro
//
El 12/12/2016 a las 16:44, tozziart...@libero.it escribió:
Coming back to our chessboard, this means that information can be
studied in terms of systems’ symmetries and changes in dimensions,
rather than in terms of entropies and energetic gradient descents.
An object (on an event) embedded in an environment encompasses a
certain amount of information, but such information increases when you
add a further dimension to the environment (NOTE: non necessarily a
spatial dimension, but also other possible ones, such as an increase
of complexity). Indeed, a dimension more gives you a coordinate more,
and therefore more information. To make the usual example, the 2D
shadow of a cat encompasses less information than a 3D cat. Some
authors start from a very low number of dimensions (e.g., the
holographic Universe of t’Hooft and Susskind), others from an high
number (claims dating back to Spinoza and Kant and going through our
Universe made of eleven-dimensional Kaluza-Klein manifolds and
subsequent decrease of dimensions, until our 3D plus time perceivable
environment). It does not matter: when projecting among levels,
information is always a function of the number of dimensions.
In such a framework, the role of energy is different from the role of
information: the energy is something "injected" from the external
"environment" into the system, in order to produce the change of
coordinates into the system; on the other side, the changes of
information can be detected into the system, and depend on the energy
just indirectly (second-hand). In other words:
a) the system's change of dimensions dictates the change in
information, while
b) the changes in energy dictate the projective mechanisms that allow
the changes in system's dimensions.
It is a subtle, but foremost difference, that can be highlighted just
taking into account a very general topological framework. This is one
of the examples of the importance of the topological meta-language in
the study of science foundations.
Arturo Tozzi
--
-------------------------------------------------
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 0
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
-------------------------------------------------
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