Re: [Fis] Causation is transfer of information
Hi Soeren and FISers, (1) Tychism is intrinsic to the Planckian information, since it is defined as the binary logarithm of the ratio of the area under the curve (AUC) of the Planckian distribution (PDE) over the AUC of the Gaussian-like Equation (GLE): I_P = log (AUC(PDE)/AUC(GLE)) Tychism is implied in GLE. (2) The Planckian processes are defined as those physicochemical or formal processes that generate long-tailed histograms (or their superpositions) fitting PDE (or its suppositions). The Planckian process seems irreducibly triadic in the Peircean sesne: f g Random processes ---> Long-tailed histograms -> PDE (Firstness) (Secondness) (Thirdness) | ^ | | | | | | || h Figure 2. The Irreducible Triadic Relation (ITR) embodied in the Planckian processes. f = selection process either natural or artificial; g = mathematical modeling; h = grounding, correspondence, or information flow. (3) (to be continued) All the best. Sung From: Søren Brier Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2017 7:06 PM To: Sungchul Ji; Terrence W. DEACON; John Collier Cc: fis Subject: RE: [Fis] Causation is transfer of information Dear Sung It is difficult for me to say as you do not make your metaphysical framework explicit. This was the great work Peirce did. I am pretty sure you do not have a dynamic triadic process concept of semiosis based on a tychastic theory of Firstness as potential qualia or forms of feeling of which information is only an aspect. Best Søren From: Sungchul Ji [mailto:s...@pharmacy.rutgers.edu] Sent: 29. marts 2017 20:35 To: Søren Brier; Terrence W. DEACON; John Collier Cc: fis Subject: Re: [Fis] Causation is transfer of information Hi Soeren, Can you be more specific about what aspect of my proposal described in my previous emails you think are my own and has nothing to do with (or are even based on my misinterpretation of) Peirce ? Thanks in advance. Sung From: Søren Brier mailto:sbr@cbs.dk>> Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2017 2:10 PM To: Sungchul Ji; Terrence W. DEACON; John Collier Cc: fis Subject: RE: [Fis] Causation is transfer of information Dear Sung I suggest you call this your own theory and make your own definitions of terms, because you confuse things by attempting to draw on Peirce, because there is a whole process philosophy with synechism, tychism, agapism and Scholastic realism plus a phenomenological and mathematically based triadic metaphysics as the basis of Peirce’s concepts, which is the fruit of his life’s work. I do not think you are ready to carry that load. It takes many years to understand fully. The ‘sign’ is a triadic process of representamen, object and interpretant working in the realm of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness in a society at large or a society of researchers devoted to the search for truth producing the meaning of signs, which when developed into propositional arguments can be tested in the fallible scientific process of generating more rationality in culture as well as nature. Best Søren From: Fis [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Sungchul Ji Sent: 29. marts 2017 00:27 To: Terrence W. DEACON; John Collier Cc: fis Subject: Re: [Fis] Causation is transfer of information Hi Fisers, I agree with Terry that "information" has three irreducible aspects --- amount, meaning, and value. These somehow may be related to another triadic relation called the ITR as depicted below, although I don't know the exact rule of mapping between the two triads. Perhaps, 'amount' = f, 'meaning' = g, and 'value' = h ? . f g Object ---> Sign --> Interpretant | ^ |
Re: [Fis] Causation is transfer of information
Hi Soeren, Can you be more specific about what aspect of my proposal described in my previous emails you think are my own and has nothing to do with (or are even based on my misinterpretation of) Peirce ? Thanks in advance. Sung From: Søren Brier Sent: Wednesday, March 29, 2017 2:10 PM To: Sungchul Ji; Terrence W. DEACON; John Collier Cc: fis Subject: RE: [Fis] Causation is transfer of information Dear Sung I suggest you call this your own theory and make your own definitions of terms, because you confuse things by attempting to draw on Peirce, because there is a whole process philosophy with synechism, tychism, agapism and Scholastic realism plus a phenomenological and mathematically based triadic metaphysics as the basis of Peirce’s concepts, which is the fruit of his life’s work. I do not think you are ready to carry that load. It takes many years to understand fully. The ‘sign’ is a triadic process of representamen, object and interpretant working in the realm of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness in a society at large or a society of researchers devoted to the search for truth producing the meaning of signs, which when developed into propositional arguments can be tested in the fallible scientific process of generating more rationality in culture as well as nature. Best Søren From: Fis [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Sungchul Ji Sent: 29. marts 2017 00:27 To: Terrence W. DEACON; John Collier Cc: fis Subject: Re: [Fis] Causation is transfer of information Hi Fisers, I agree with Terry that "information" has three irreducible aspects --- amount, meaning, and value. These somehow may be related to another triadic relation called the ITR as depicted below, although I don't know the exact rule of mapping between the two triads. Perhaps, 'amount' = f, 'meaning' = g, and 'value' = h ? . f g Object ---> Sign --> Interpretant | ^ | | | | | | |_| h Figure 1. The Irreducible Triadic Relation (ITR) of seimosis (also called sign process or communication) first clearly articulated by Peirce to the best of my knowledge. Warning: Peirce often replaces Sign with Representamen and represents the whole triad, i.e., Figure 1 itself (although he did not use such a figure in his writings) as the Sign. Not distinguishing between these two very different uses of the same word "Sign" can lead to semiotic confusions. The three processes are defined as follows: f = sign production, g = sign interpretation, h = information flow (other ways of labeling the arrows are not excluded). Each process or arrow reads "determines", "leads", "is presupposed by", etc., and the three arrows constitute a commutative triangle of category theory, i.e., f x g = h, meaning f followed by g ledes to the same result as h. I started using the so-called ITR template, Figure 1, about 5 years ago, and the main reason I am bringing it up here is to ask your critical opinion on my suggestion published in 2012 (Molecular Theory of the Living Cell: Concepts, Molecular Mechanisms, and Biomedical Applications, Springer New York, p ~100 ?) that there are two kinds of causality -- (i) the energy-dependent causality (identified with Processes f and g in Figure 1) and (ii) the information (and hence code)-dependent causality (identified with Process h). For convenience, I coined the term 'codality' to refer to the latter to contrast it with the traditional term causality. I wonder if we can view John's idea of the relation between 'information' and 'cause' as being an alternative way of expressing the same ideas as the "energy-dependent causality" or the "codality" defined in Figure 1. All the best. Sung From: Fis mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es>> on behalf of Terrence W. DEACON mailto:dea...@berkeley.edu>> Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2017 4:23:14 PM To: John Collier Cc: fis Subject: Re: [Fis] Causation is transfer of information Corrected typos (in case the intrinsic redundancy didn't compensate for these minor corruptions of the text): information-beqaring medium = information-bearing medium appliction = application conceptiont = conception On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 10:14 PM, Terrence W. DEACON mailto:dea...@berkeley.edu>> wrote: Dear FIS collea
Re: [Fis] Causation is transfer of information
With all due respect, I am still amazed how it is so much ignored and neglected all the science and math around information developed in the last 50-60 years! With most people here citing in the best case only Shannon Entropy but completely neglecting and ignoring algorithmic complexity, logical depth, quantum information and so on. Your philosophical discussions are quite empty if most people ignore the progress that computer science and math has done in the last 60 years! Please take it constructively. This should be a shame for the whole field of Philosophy of Information and FIS. Perhaps I can help alleviate this a little even if I feel wrong pointing you out to my own papers on subjects relevant to philosophical discussion: http://www.hectorzenil.net/publications.html They do care about the meaning and value of information beyond Shannon Entropy. For example, paper J21: - Natural Scene Statistics Mediate the Perception of Image Complexity (available online at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13506285.2014.950365 also available pdf preprint in the arxiv) and - Rare Speed-up in Automatic Theorem Proving Reveals Tradeoff Between Computational Time and Information Value (https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.04349). And we even show how Entropy fails at the most basic level: Low Algorithmic Complexity Entropy-deceiving Graphs ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.05972) Best Regards, Hector Zenil --- This email and any files transmitted with it are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender and delete the message. On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 10:14 PM, Terrence W. DEACON wrote: > > Dear FIS colleagues, > > I agree with John Collier that we should not assume to restrict the concept of information to only one subset of its potential applications. But to work with this breadth of usage we need to recognize that 'information' can refer to intrinsic statistical properties of a physical medium, extrinsic referential properties of that medium (i.e. content), and the significance or use value of that content, depending on the context. A problem arises when we demand that only one of these uses should be given legitimacy. As I have repeatedly suggested on this listserve, it will be a source of constant useless argument to make the assertion that someone is wrong in their understanding of information if they use it in one of these non-formal ways. But to fail to mark which conception of information is being considered, or worse, to use equivocal conceptions of the term in the same argument, will ultimately undermine our efforts to understand one another and develop a complete general theory of information. > > This nominalization of 'inform' has been in use for hundreds of years in legal and literary contexts, in all of these variant forms. But there has been a slowly increasing tendency to use it to refer to the information-beqaring medium itself, in substantial terms. This reached its greatest extreme with the restricted technical usage formalized by Claude Shannon. Remember, however, that this was only introduced a little over a half century ago. When one of his mentors (Hartley) initially introduced a logarithmic measure of signal capacity he called it 'intelligence' — as in the gathering of intelligence by a spy organization. So had Shannon chose to stay with that usage the confusions could have been worse (think about how confusing it would have been to talk about the entropy of intelligence). Even so, Shannon himself was to later caution against assuming that his use of the term 'information' applied beyond its technical domain. > > So despite the precision and breadth of appliction that was achieved by setting aside the extrinsic relational features that characterize the more colloquial uses of the term, this does not mean that these other uses are in some sense non-scientific. And I am not alone in the belief that these non-intrinsic properties can also (eventually) be strictly formalized and thereby contribute insights to such technical fields as molecular biology and cognitive neuroscience. > > As a result I think that it is legitimate to argue that information (in the referential sense) is only in use among living forms, that an alert signal sent by the computer in an automobile engine is information (in both senses, depending on whether we include a human interpreter in the loop), or that information (in the intrinsic sense of a medium property) is lost within a black hole or that it can be used to provide a more precise conceptiont of physical cause (as in Collier's sense). These different uses aren't unrelated to each other. They are just asymmetrically dependent on one another, such that medium-intrinsic properties can be investigated without considering referential properties, but not vice versa. > > It's time we move beyond terminological chauvenism so that we can further