Re: [Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 32, Issue 13

[Malcolm Dean]

To an animal about to be attacked and eaten, the meaning of an approaching
predator is quite clear.

Obviously, meaning is produced by, within, and among Observers, and not by
language.

Meaning may be produced *through* language, not *in* language, as a medium
of interaction (aka communication).

I wish scientific specialists had more awareness of the effects of their
specialization.

Malcolm Dean



> Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2016 20:29:21 +0100
> From: "Loet Leydesdorff" <l...@leydesdorff.net>
> To: "'Alex Hankey'" <alexhan...@gmail.com>, "'FIS Webinar'"
> <Fis@listas.unizar.es>
> Subject: Re: [Fis] Is quantum information the basis of spacetime?
>
> Dear Alex and colleagues,
>
> Thank you for the reference; but my argument was about meaning. Meaning
> can only be considered as constructed in language. Other uses of the word
> are metaphorical. For example, the citation to Maturana.
>
> Information, in my opinion, can be defined content-free (a la Shannon,
> etc.) and then be provided with meaning in (scholarly) discourses. I
> consider physics as one among other scholarly discourses. Specific about
> physics is perhaps the universalistic character of the knowledge claims.
> For example: "Frieden's points apply to quantum physics as well as
> classical physics." So what? This seems to me a debate within physics
> without much relevance for non-physicists (e.g., economists or linguists).
>


> Loet Leydesdorff
> Professor, University of Amsterdam
> Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)
>
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Re: [Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 22, Issue 27

[Malcolm Dean]

Psychological or otherwise, it is a question of one's Ontology.

All worldviews, without exception, begin in a miracle.

Malcolm

On Jan 23, 2016 12:57 PM,  wrote:
>
> Today's Topics:
>
>1. Re: A Meta(information)- scientific comment (Stanley N Salthe)
>
> Date: Sat, 23 Jan 2016
>
> As an erstwhile natural scientist (biology) and as a now soi-disant
natural
> philosopher, I agree with Joseph Brenner here:
>
> >this seems to be turning out to be as much a psychological question as a
> physical one.
>
> Such 'objects' as quarks are created by humans within elaborate machines.
> They are artifacts of engineering!  How can anyone really take them
> seriously as natural things?  I would agree that anything upon which so
> much time and money has been/is spent might seem on the face of it to be
> 'real'. I would also agree that these phenomena are potentially important
> in the tech world.  But they are surely not 'natural' even if we must take
> them to be real(ized).
>
> STAN
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Re: [Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 18, Issue 7

[Malcolm Dean]

On Sat, Sep 12, 2015 at 7:48 AM, Stanley N Salthe <ssal...@binghamton.edu>
wrote:

> Reacting to my:
>
> S: Well, I have generalized the Shannon concept of information carrying
> capacity under 'variety'...  {variety {information carrying capacity}}.
> This allows the concept to operate quite generally in evolutionary and
> ecological discourses.  Information, then, if you like, is what is left
> after a reduction in variety, or after some system choice. Consider dance:
> we have all the possible conformations of the human body, out of which a
> few are selected to provide information about the meaning of a dance.
>
> Jerry responded:
>
> Stan's post is a superb example of how anyone change the semantic meaning
> of words and talk about personal philosophy in context that ignores the
> syntactical meaning of the same word such that the exact sciences
> are generated.  Of course, this personal philosophy remains a private
> conversation.
>
> S: I really need a translation of this statement.

Jerry,

Can you provide an example of anything not explained by another thing?
And how is it possible to be a person and not express oneself from one's
personal philosophy?

Malcolm Dean
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Re: [Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 10, Issue 22

[Malcolm Dean]

On 2015-01-19 20:37 GMT+01:00 Joshua Augustus Bacigalupi 
bacigalupiwo...@gmail.com wrote to the FIS list:

  Josh Bacigalupi here, fellow pirate.  Thank you all for this
thoughtful discussion.
 
  ... We can all agree that the creation of entropy is necessary to do
work; ...


With respect, this statement should not continue to go unchallenged. I for
one do not agree.

Entropy is a mathematical variable which balances equations, but cannot
possibly describe the conditions and actual processes which lead to work,
enable its completion, or detail its purpose. The variable entropy
describes only one aspect. It is like claiming homeostasis as a complete
description of a human.

The constant danger is coming to believe in variables thrown into some
picture, such as we see in recent cosmology. They are reified. They become,
as a result, objects of faith, even worldviews (Rifkin 1981). If someone
claims mathematics as prior to cosmology, that scientific faith should not
be presented as if it is a proven fact.

It is ridiculous to continue talking about creation of entropy. What is
created are new conditions, fresh processes, and objects. The point of a
thermodynamic process, or more generally, an Information process, is
object-creation. It from bit.

Thermodynamics is only a part of an Information process (Lerner 2014) [
http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.7041 ].

Malcolm Dean
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Re: [Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 5, Issue 2

[Malcolm Dean]

Stan:

1. energy is primary being less abstract -- How is energy detected or
measured? Something observes a distinction. From a series of distinctions,
the Observer constructs an understanding. It emerges from bit. In this way,
Information is more abstract.

2. from some as yet incompletely defined substrate information implies
more than one entity (sender-receiver, object-interpreter) --- I think
this is the key issue. The received view is that the fundamental level is
pure randomness, which explains why some want to get rid of causality
completely. Since Parmenides, at least, it has been clear that entities
require some ground in which to exist and act---a ground of being, or in
Media Studies, a medium. Energy requires a medium, and so cannot be primary.

3. if they are not identical, energy and information always accompany one
another---I think one must distinguish between the view of mathematics and
physics, and the actual world. Energy and Information are alternative
mathematical formalisms and views of physicists. Whether the actual world
agrees depends on the details of one's own understandings and one's own
cosmology. Ideally, the correspondence would be perfect, but obviously this
is not the case for anyone.

Malcolm Dean
Member, Higher Cognitive Affinity Group, BRI
Research Affiliate, Human Complex Systems, UCLA

Today's Topics:

1. information.energy (Stanley N Salthe)

 Date: Sun, 3 Aug 2014 09:34:03 -0400
 From: Stanley N Salthe ssal...@binghamton.edu
 To: fis fis@listas.unizar.es
 Subject: [Fis] information.energy
 to Joseph
 Joseph -- Commenting on:

  We may agree that, if they are not identical, energy and
 information always accompany one another and may have emerged together from
 some as yet incompletely defined substrate. However, they may not be, do
 not have to be and for me are not at the same ontological level, and energy
 is primary being less abstract.

 Is there not also a sense that information implies more than one
 entity (sender-receiver, object-interpreter)? That too would tend to align
 with the idea of energy being primary.

 STAN

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