[Fis] The good old Sumerians and how we can improve on them

[Karl Javorszky]

*Properties of Places and of Objects*



*We have seen in this chatroom that there is recognisance of the need to
come up with something dramatically new and innovative in the field of
information theory, but also, that having been educated in a specific
fashion, it is not easy to think new thoughts.*

*So, if you kindly allow, I shall wrap the new concept in such ideas and
words which are not yet filled up and reserved with abstract meanings. This
is a technique which was used by Swift, as he discussed he relationships
between rulers and ruled, and by Lewis Carroll, when discussing some
logical syllogisms, to mention but two of the classical writers. Some say
that Aesop’s and La Fontaine’s fables are also among the didactic fairy
tales.*



   1. *What are the objects we abstract from: what the Sumers did*

*We are in Sumer, listening to the discussions among the king(s), princes
and wealthy courtiers. They decide that they will invent now the positional
algorithm, meaning that where a symbol is placed has as much influence over
the meaning of the resulting logical statement as which symbol it is.
(Simplified example: if A means 1, B means 2, C means 3, the invention of
the day is that  ABA means: 121 and not: 1 furthermore 2 furthermore 1. The
example is simplified: they did not use the decimal system. Look up
Wikipedia for a more exact explanation of the principle.)*

*What are the objects that the scientists have agreed on to use as things
that can have places? Not every one of them had camels, not every one of
them had date trees, not every one of them had bushels of wheat. What each
of them had was a harem with at least – say – 60 ladies in each of the
harems.*

*Now they had a set of objects the individual properties of which could be
dismissed; what can be agreed on is then: only the number and therefore the
position of the objects: herewith delivering a solid epistemological basis
for: so many identical objects to the left (or right) of it, so many places
to count. This results in the property of the i-th lady to have the
property of lady number i. *

*It is not the job of the narrator to speculate about the experiences of
the reader with a large number of ladies, but in those long bygone days
there could have been agreement among the wealthy and speculative-minded
Sumerians, that this method saves a lot of discussions on who is the prima
donna and why. *

*The de-individuation of the individual objects comes as a side-effect of
assigning places as individuating properties to objects. Lady X is that
lady who comes the 4th night hence and that week where ladies ABACBAC
follow each other is different to that week where ladies BCAACBC offer
their charms.*

*To be able to actually use the positional assignment based counting, it is
necessary to go through 3 steps of abstraction:*

*a)  **De-individuate the objects by assigning one absolute ranking to
them across all harems (women nr. 1: women represented by symbol A, women
nr. 2: women represented by symbol B, etc.);*

*b)  **Individuate the places by enumerating them 1, 2, 3, …. This they
were able to do, because they have discovered the rules connecting the 28
nights of the moon and some particularities of women and the 12 months and
the year: that is, they were able to enumerate in a temporal sequence,
which they then transferred to a linear (geometric) sequence;*

*c)   **Individuate the permutation based on a sample with replacement,
which is the method what we use till today to arrive at a picture of a
number. (We draw any of the symbols A,B,C,… and put it on place 1, then we
draw again from the same universe, obviously having replaced the element we
had drawn before, so it is again available. This 2nd element we put on
place 2. Then again we draw an element, again doing so as if there was an
endless supply of symbols, thinking ourselves to have replaced the sample
drawn. This fallacy of our imagination will entertain us much when
discussing the genetic information stricture.)*



   1. *What we can improve on the Sumers: what they had no way of doing*

*Had the Sumers been of such gentle and wise disposition as we are, they
had done the following (also, they would have needed paper, pencil and
computers):*

   1. *We establish the maximal number of describing aspects of the objects*

*We of course know that of a limited number of different objects, only a
limited number of distinct logical sentences can be said (after a while,
one will start repeating oneself. The maximal number of distinct
descriptions of a set containing n objects  – as can be read off
OEIS/A242615 – is the number of partitions of n, raised to the power of the
logarithm of the number of partitions of n. For all practical purposes, one
will establish this upper limit by calculating n!, building ln(n!) and
creating sqr(ln(n!)). This is the number of independent describing
dimensions and agrees for n<136 quite exactly to ln(p(n)), where p(n) =
number of partitions 

Re: [Fis] Fw: PRINCIPLES OF IS. The Pre-Science of Information

[Francesco Rizzo]

Caro Pedro,
ho inviato un brevissimo messaggio a John Collier, ma non è pervenuto. E'
possibile sapere perché?  Se non è possibile grazie lo stesso.
Francesco

P.s.:grazie.

P.s.Caro John,
hai detto in maniera semplice una grande verità. Tutta la conoscenza è
basata sulla legge dell'informazione,  quindi tutte le scienze non possono
fare a meno della stessa legge con una definizione comune e misurazione
diversa. Altrimenti, come ben dici, si crea solo confusione.
Un abbraccio.
Francesco
P.s. L'ho inviato un paio di ore fa, ma non è arrivato a destinazione:
forse per indirizzo sbagliato.

2017-11-06 16:06 GMT+01:00 Francesco Rizzo <13francesco.ri...@gmail.com>:

> Caro Pedro,
> ho inviato un brevissimo messaggio a John Collier, ma non è pervenuto. E'
> possibile sapere perché?  Se non è possibile grazie lo stesso.
> Francesco
>
> P.s.:grazie.
>
> P.s.Caro John,
> hai detto in maniera semplice una grande verità. Tutta la conoscenza è
> basata sulla legge dell'informazione,  quindi tutte le scienze non possono
> fare a meno della stessa legge con una definizione comune e misurazione
> diversa. Altrimenti, come ben dici, si crea solo confusione.
> Un abbraccio.
> Francesco
> P.s. L'ho inviato un paio di ore fa, ma non è arrivato a destinazione:
> forse per indirizzo sbagliato.
>
> 2017-11-06 15:40 GMT+01:00 Pedro C. Marijuan :
>
>> His server rejects quite many messages (from me too). Send to the list...
>> Best --Pedro
>>
>>
>> El 06/11/2017 a las 14:36, Francesco Rizzo escribió:
>>
>> Caro Pedro,
>> ho inviato un brevissimo messaggio a John Collier, ma non è pervenuto. E'
>> possibile sapere perché?  Se non è possibile grazie lo stesso.
>> Francesco
>>
>> P.s.Caro John,
>> hai detto in maniera semplice una grande verità. Tutta la conoscenza è
>> basata sulla legge dell'informazione,  quindi tutte le scienze non possono
>> fare a meno della stessa legge con una definizione comune e misurazione
>> diversa. Altrimenti, come ben dici, si crea solo confusione.
>> Un abbraccio.
>> Francesco
>> P.s. L'ho inviato un paio di ore fa, ma non è arrivato a destinazione:
>> forse per indirizzo sbagliato.
>>
>>
>> 2017-10-06 14:36 GMT+02:00 Pedro C. Marijuan :
>>
>>> Dear Terry and FIS colleagues,
>>> I think you make a good point. I was reminded on the problems my
>>> research group has found in the development of our "Sociotype project",
>>> cooperating with social science groups and psychologists. The lack of
>>> communication  in between those closer to formal fields or just within
>>> natural sciences (our case) and the humanities and social science fields is
>>> amazing. From my point of view they strongly defend some form of
>>> "obscurity", in the sense that they do not accept but a total disciplinary
>>> autonomy often ideologically rooted. Perhaps I am exaggerating, as the
>>> intrinsic complexity of those matters is only amenable to "foundations"
>>> from discoursive approaches... Well, in any case a metaphorical idea about
>>> those principles of Information Science is that they can work as "posts"
>>> where new electric lines may be tended, so that they can bring new light to
>>> new pockets within those ultracomplex realms. The gap between
>>> sceince-humanities might be well crossed by info science.
>>> (Finally let me apologize for not having processed yet all the late
>>> messages, I have a slow digestion)
>>> Best--Pedro
>>>
>>>
>>> El 05/10/2017 a las 19:21, Terrence W. DEACON escribió:
>>>
>>> Dear all,
>>>
>>> I am in agreement with Joseph's suggestion that our discussions of the
>>> foundations of information could be understood as pre-science. Efforts such
>>> as the list of principles proposed by Pedro offer a useful focus of
>>> discussion for working toward a more solid "foundation" precisely because
>>> it helps elicits responses that exemplify the fault lines in our community.
>>> These are not merely points of disagreement but also theoretical boundaries
>>> that need to be clearly identified if we want to seriously map this still
>>> ambiguous conceptual territory. Claims that this issue has been settled or
>>> that there are irresolvable issues involved or that the whole conceptual
>>> territory is useless are unhelpful. We just need to get explicit about our
>>> differences and what motivates them.
>>>
>>> On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 1:45 AM, Joseph Brenner 
>>> wrote:
>>>
 Dear Pedro, Dear FISers,



 In the 2 weeks I have been away, an excellent discussion has
 self-organized as Pedro noted. Any preliminary comments and criticisms of
 Pedro’s 10 Principles I could make now can refer to this. I would have said
 first that Pedro is to be thanked for this construction. Preparing a list
 of principles involves defining not only the content but also the number,
 order and relation between the entries. Zou, Stan and Ted in particular
 have recognized the existence of the list as 

Re: [Fis] Fw: PRINCIPLES OF IS. The Pre-Science of Information

[Francesco Rizzo]

Caro Pedro,
ho inviato un brevissimo messaggio a John Collier, ma non è pervenuto. E'
possibile sapere perché?  Se non è possibile grazie lo stesso.
Francesco

P.s.:grazie.

P.s.Caro John,
hai detto in maniera semplice una grande verità. Tutta la conoscenza è
basata sulla legge dell'informazione,  quindi tutte le scienze non possono
fare a meno della stessa legge con una definizione comune e misurazione
diversa. Altrimenti, come ben dici, si crea solo confusione.
Un abbraccio.
Francesco
P.s. L'ho inviato un paio di ore fa, ma non è arrivato a destinazione:
forse per indirizzo sbagliato.

2017-11-06 15:40 GMT+01:00 Pedro C. Marijuan :

> His server rejects quite many messages (from me too). Send to the list...
> Best --Pedro
>
>
> El 06/11/2017 a las 14:36, Francesco Rizzo escribió:
>
> Caro Pedro,
> ho inviato un brevissimo messaggio a John Collier, ma non è pervenuto. E'
> possibile sapere perché?  Se non è possibile grazie lo stesso.
> Francesco
>
> P.s.Caro John,
> hai detto in maniera semplice una grande verità. Tutta la conoscenza è
> basata sulla legge dell'informazione,  quindi tutte le scienze non possono
> fare a meno della stessa legge con una definizione comune e misurazione
> diversa. Altrimenti, come ben dici, si crea solo confusione.
> Un abbraccio.
> Francesco
> P.s. L'ho inviato un paio di ore fa, ma non è arrivato a destinazione:
> forse per indirizzo sbagliato.
>
>
> 2017-10-06 14:36 GMT+02:00 Pedro C. Marijuan :
>
>> Dear Terry and FIS colleagues,
>> I think you make a good point. I was reminded on the problems my research
>> group has found in the development of our "Sociotype project",  cooperating
>> with social science groups and psychologists. The lack of communication  in
>> between those closer to formal fields or just within natural sciences (our
>> case) and the humanities and social science fields is amazing. From my
>> point of view they strongly defend some form of "obscurity", in the sense
>> that they do not accept but a total disciplinary autonomy often
>> ideologically rooted. Perhaps I am exaggerating, as the intrinsic
>> complexity of those matters is only amenable to "foundations" from
>> discoursive approaches... Well, in any case a metaphorical idea about those
>> principles of Information Science is that they can work as "posts" where
>> new electric lines may be tended, so that they can bring new light to new
>> pockets within those ultracomplex realms. The gap between
>> sceince-humanities might be well crossed by info science.
>> (Finally let me apologize for not having processed yet all the late
>> messages, I have a slow digestion)
>> Best--Pedro
>>
>>
>> El 05/10/2017 a las 19:21, Terrence W. DEACON escribió:
>>
>> Dear all,
>>
>> I am in agreement with Joseph's suggestion that our discussions of the
>> foundations of information could be understood as pre-science. Efforts such
>> as the list of principles proposed by Pedro offer a useful focus of
>> discussion for working toward a more solid "foundation" precisely because
>> it helps elicits responses that exemplify the fault lines in our community.
>> These are not merely points of disagreement but also theoretical boundaries
>> that need to be clearly identified if we want to seriously map this still
>> ambiguous conceptual territory. Claims that this issue has been settled or
>> that there are irresolvable issues involved or that the whole conceptual
>> territory is useless are unhelpful. We just need to get explicit about our
>> differences and what motivates them.
>>
>> On Mon, Oct 2, 2017 at 1:45 AM, Joseph Brenner 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Dear Pedro, Dear FISers,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> In the 2 weeks I have been away, an excellent discussion has
>>> self-organized as Pedro noted. Any preliminary comments and criticisms of
>>> Pedro’s 10 Principles I could make now can refer to this. I would have said
>>> first that Pedro is to be thanked for this construction. Preparing a list
>>> of principles involves defining not only the content but also the number,
>>> order and relation between the entries. Zou, Stan and Ted in particular
>>> have recognized the existence of the list as such and the work involved.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> My own view is that we are all currently involved in reworking the
>>> Foundations of Information Science. These Foundations are not themselves
>>> science, but they look forward to the increased understanding of
>>> Information Science as Terry suggests. I propose the term “Pre-Science” for
>>> this process activity, a pun on the word ‘prescience’ whose normal
>>> definition is foreknowledge or foresight. The people who tend to make
>>> mistakes in this effort will be those who claim that any simple concept or
>>> set of concepts can do the job itself, supported by claims to authorities
>>> such as Peirce. Sets of *principles*, on the other hand, are tools more
>>> difficult to use but they permit directed consideration of