Re: [Fis] Is information physical?

2018-04-25 Thread Ulanowicz, Robert
Dear Mark, I share your inclination, albeit from a different perspective. Consider the two statements: 1. Information is impossible without a physical carrier. 2. Information is impossible without the influence of that which does not exist. There is significant truth in both statements. I

Re: [Fis] New Year Lecture

2018-01-10 Thread Ulanowicz, Robert
Just a few short comments in response to Mark & John: We definitely must reconsider the logic of biology! To start with, we must abandon the Aristotelian prohibition of circular causality, as Alicia Juarrero suggests. Life is all about recursion! Then there's the inherent dialectical nature of

Re: [Fis] some notes

2017-11-19 Thread Ulanowicz, Robert
Dear Loet, Shannon "information" is indeed counter-intuitive, and we have John von Neumann's joke to thank for that confusion.Shannon asked von Nuemann what to name his formula. von Neumann told him to name it "entropy", because his metric is "formally identical to von Boltzmann's probabilistic