Re: [Fis] replies to several. The Key to Time
Dear Loet, Joseph and All, Let me just clarify the difference making a difference between both of you and me. First, to Loet; In other words: time is a construct of language? The answer will be yes if the physicist accepts time when preparing an authentic user’s manual on how to set up and read each clock. But, the answer will be no if somebody claims that time exists prior to the existence of our languages. These two attitudes are necessarily mixed up in our practice of doing empirical sciences as revealed in the contrast between evolutionary and developmental biology. That is the strength of empirical sciences. The “various conservation laws” are not a construct of language but constraints on constructions in language? Any empirical law, once established and framed in human languages, is very peculiar compared to the case of nomological laws in general in claiming its validity whenever or wherever in the empirical world unless our faith on the empirical regularity perceivable in the record is lost. Needless to say, some empirical laws mingled with something going beyond our experiences such as a wishful thinking might turn out to be wrong as in the case of Einstein’s big blunder. The original cyclic motions predate the reading. They are given? By whom and in which language? Some of our remote ancestors full of curiosity may have happened to notice the look-alike cyclic stellar movement as looking up into the sky every night and to report the astonishing observations to the folks in the neighborhood. This must have been the beginning of the whole story. Is the dative of a message different from the third case in the declension? The dative as the indirect object of a verb corresponds to the third case in the declension of a noun in German. Suppose the sentence like “He gives her a ring.” Of course, the “her” is the dative of the direct object “a ring”. Nonetheless, a proper interpretation of the sentence framed in the present tense is pretty difficult. “He” might want to make “a ring” to be a message of something else, while “she” might refuse to accept it. The dative is reactively active or passively synthetic and is by no means reactively passive. The dative can metamorphose into a subject in the next round. Moreover, the actual exchange of giving and refusing can be revealed as referring to the update of the perfect tense in the progressive tense. If “information” can be defined in terms of a probability distribution, would “time” be definable as a frequency distribution? This is really a Big “If”. If both the distributions are available, I could follow the argument. If such distributions are not available in advance for whatever reasons, the second best would be to rely upon conditional probabilities as the distributions further qualified by the explicit participation of measurement. In the latter, the relationship between information and time is more convoluted and interwoven. Bob Ulanowicz knows it better. Then, to Joseph; In my extension of logic to complex systems, reality and appearance are related contradictorially: Your distinction between reality and appearance reminds me of the notorious distinction between things-in-themselves and their phenomenology. I wish I could grasp the distinction. What I cannot speak about I have to pass over in silence. Perception is a real energetic process that is driven by our underlying dynamics,… not by verbs and their objects. Perhaps, this must be the take-home message you gave me. At issue is how to verbally respond to the question of what does “a real energetic process” look like. We are then required to employ some verbs to meet the assignment. (I do know the situation would be far more eased in the wet lab., less confrontational.) In fact, you have already provided us with a sound response to this question as saying “ … is driven by our underlying dynamics”. In short, perception of a perception of the flow of time ad infinitum eventually precipitates the construction of the flow of time. I think behind Loet’s reference to time as possibly a frequency distribution is a similar desire to move away from linguistic structures to real structures. Referring to and relying upon linguistic vehicles is unavoidable. Otherwise, we have to shut our mouths. The next big hurdle to jump over must be how to secure a passable correspondence between the linguistic vehicles and the object in the target as Jerry Chandler repeatedly emphasized on this list. Third, to Ted; We bridge that today with the two paradigms on which we build science: measurement and theories of cause. The notion of tense touches on both, one from one world, the other from the second. I ask your opinions on this third flow. The third flow is for the binding agency of a novel type. The cohesion acting between the
Re: [Fis] replies to several. The Key to Time
(I am still in China with disrupted internet. This may have to come to the list indirectly. In this reply, I take advantage of the amazing corpus of FIS emails over 14 years. This is an important resource and from time to time I use it in my work. Thank you, Pedro for sustaining this.) Koichiro -- As you know, I think you see something important. That it both sounds true and also does not fit old models makes it even more appealing. The model of our project is based on two-sorts, meaning one logic apparently native to the activity and another synthesized for introspection or external observation. As others have remarked, these are different but related concerns. Rather than trying to grow a single conceptual framework as most do, we bite the bullet on the formal challenge of two integrated logics. So my remarks here are framed as questions that can help us implement your insights as fully as we can. (While not used here, our test case is an understanding of apoptosis.) In 1998, you wrote: once we admit that there is no viewpoint that could integrate both that something and something-else, state description, that has been a favorite to many physicists, could not be tenable to that complex anymore. Information is always about a view from somewhere. It is methodologically untenable for the adherent to that view to tell where that somewhere is located. By saying this, I see physics loses nothing. Information gains something, instead. Information-processing is about a negotiation between each view from anywhere.' In 2002, A common denominator is serious negotiation between supplier and consumer. In 2003: (Ted's).. summary reminds... of one recurring theme surrounding the sturdy issue on the difference between dynamics in time and dynamics of time. in 2004: (Loet) reminds me of the contrast between a unified and a unifying theory of anything. And later, The wide topics covering probability, information, entropy, temperature, order, disorder, symmetry and asymmetry reminded me of at least one thing. Suppose I am a bacterium. Do I care (about) all of them? And even later in 2004, (Eugene Wigner pointed out...) The malaise surrounding us is that if we respect both thermodynamics and quantum mechanics on a par, we would lose the basis of what has been called probability distributions. Unless the notion of probability distribution is available, it would be next to impossible to talk about entropy and information in a decent manner. in 2005: ... a communication system is a matter of a second-person ontology instead of a third-person one in the latter of which irreducible fundamentals are objectively guaranteed along with an invariant context. Both the sender and the receiver of a message conceived in a third-person ontology as with the case of the mathematical theory of communication forces us, the externalist, to let both be synchronized in sharing the same context. This synchronization is exclusively of methodological origin... One crucial issue in this regard may be how an asynchronous patchwork of different contexts could come to be integrated into a consistent, synchronous one in the effect. Throughout, you have discussed this bridging problem in terms of interaction (1998), quantum entropy (2004), Maxwell's demon in measurement (2004), Zipf's law (2004), consilience (2004), many-worlds (2004), internalism (2005), phenomenologism (2005), epistemological synchronization-Dedekind's cut (2005), nonlinear quantum coherence (2005), situated logic versus propositional logic (2005), Bell's inequity (2006) and quantum electrodynamics (2010). But the most compelling metaphors to me have been those of tense, starting with your 1997 post on the essential difference between the present tense and the progressive tense: At issue is how to reach the present tense from the present progressive tense. Either through the present perfect or through the past progressive tense? If one tries to reach the present tense via the present perfect tense, this may imply the presence of perfected movement (or progression). And, this may reduce to the standard Kantian-Newtonian time. This always sat well with me. As computer scientists, we routinely consider the logic used to reason about a system in the context of the natural language members of that system use. And as practical scientists, we constantly question the uneasy relationship between logic and science and how logic simply has to evolve to capture dynamics of the world. The notions of tense, cause and triggering imperative are at the root of this, in a useful way both intuitively and formally. Though attempts to find some sort of a universal grammar to accommodate these two views promote some interesting exchanges, my proposal to you is that we take the clean approach and consider two related grammars. The formal properties of each of these are rather straightforward when considered by themselves, coming directly
Re: [Fis] replies to several. The Key to Time
Dear Joseph, I feel that in point 3. of your note you describe a key to time but you do not use it! Right. The last time, I skipped over something. The issue is how to descriptively approach phenomenological time via the interplay between real, physical systems without prior reference to the flow of time on the global scale. My intended entry for this endeavor has been to pay attention to some physical body remaining invariant while being constantly involved in exchanging its constituent subunits. That is to say, once a molecular aggregate happens to appear whose class identity is kept intact while the constituent subunits constantly come and go, the through-flow maintaining the class identity of the aggregate can superficially be associated with the flow of time as we know of it in the contradictory sense that while passing away constantly, time remains as time as keeping its identity. The flow of time here is only taken as “a representation”, or an anthropocentric metaphor at best, of the material through-flow as a decisive factor for keeping the class identity of a physical body at the cost of the vicissitude of the individual identities of the constituent subunits. The cyanobacterial circadian clocks are just an empirical example of keeping the class identity of a KaiC hexamer while constantly exchanging or shuffling the monomeric KaiC subunits. The objective, as you have written well earlier, is to better understand the interplay of what we call the tenses in language. The underlying issue is how can we construct the flow of time from the tenses. When the constant update of the present perfect tense in the present progressive tense is referred to in the finished record, we can perceive the flow of time as driven by the transitive verb “update” in the present tense, though only in retrospect. This updated version of the flow of time in retrospect exhibits a marked contrast to the flow of time riding on the intransitive verb “flow” in the present tense unconditionally, the latter of which is common to the standard practice of physical sciences even including relativity. The occurrence of the perfect tense is due to the act of measurement of material origin distinguishing between the before and after its own act, while its frequent update in the progressive tense will be necessitated so as to meet various conservation laws such as material or energy flow continuity to be registered in the record, e. g., not to leave the failure in meeting the flow continuity behind. The KaiC hexamers of cyanobacteria are involved in the constant update of the prefect tense in the progressive tense. How is that for using time as a synthetic construction rather than as an analytical tool?! The flow of time read by the externalist, say, by Ptolemy-Newton, into an invariant cyclic motion of the stellar configuration displayed over the sky is enigmatic in relating a cyclic movement of physical bodies to a linear movement of something else called time. A less ambitious approach could be to relate a linear movement of physical bodies to the linear movement of time even if the latter is an anthropocentric artifact, unless the artifact interferes with the physical bodies. The flow of time read-into by the physicist implies no linear flow of time in the absence of the physicist as leaving only the original cyclic motions behind. That must be quite stifling. In contrast, appreciating the material through-flow keeping the class identity of the supporting material aggregate as being represented as the flow of time comes to imply that the through-flow is informational in that it presumes both the message (e.g., the subunits to be exchanged) and its dative (e.g., the aggregate processing their exchanges). Both information and time, once set free from the read-into flow of time, are common in sharing the similar materialistic and energetic context in incorporating the transitive verbs into themselves as holding the contrast between the direct and the indirect object of a verb, that is to say, between a message and its dative. Despite that, I am not quite sure at this moment whether this synthetic view would merely be one step backward for the sake of the likely two steps forward to come. Best, Koichiro ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] replies to several. The Key to Time
Dear Koichiro and colleagues, Let me try to raise some questions. I find the language sometimes difficult. Examples might help! Ø The underlying issue is how can we construct the flow of time from the tenses. In other words: time is a construct of language? When the constant update of the present perfect tense in the present progressive tense is referred to in the finished record, we can perceive the flow of time as driven by the transitive verb “update” in the present tense, though only in retrospect. This is a description of this construction process: how it works. This updated version of the flow of time in retrospect exhibits a marked contrast to the flow of time riding on the intransitive verb “flow” in the present tense unconditionally, the latter of which is common to the standard practice of physical sciences even including relativity. The occurrence of the perfect tense is due to the act of measurement of material origin distinguishing between the before and after its own act, while its frequent update in the progressive tense will be necessitated so as to meet various conservation laws such as material or energy flow continuity to be registered in the record, e. g., not to leave the failure in meeting the flow continuity behind. The KaiC hexamers of cyanobacteria are involved in the constant update of the prefect tense in the progressive tense. The “various conservation laws” are not a construct of language but constraints on constructions in language? Have they always been these constraints or only since the scientific revolution of the 17th century? Ø The flow of time read by the externalist, say, by Ptolemy-Newton, into an invariant cyclic motion of the stellar configuration displayed over the sky is enigmatic in relating a cyclic movement of physical bodies to a linear movement of something else called time. A less ambitious approach could be to relate a linear movement of physical bodies to the linear movement of time even if the latter is an anthropocentric artifact, unless the artifact interferes with the physical bodies. The flow of time read-into by the physicist implies no linear flow of time in the absence of the physicist as leaving only the original cyclic motions behind. The original cyclic motions predate the reading. They are given? By whom and in which language? (By God in the revelation of his creation, that is, in the Bible?) That must be quite stifling. In contrast, appreciating the material through-flow keeping the class identity of the supporting material aggregate as being represented as the flow of time comes to imply that the through-flow is informational in that it presumes both the message (e.g., the subunits to be exchanged) and its dative (e.g., the aggregate processing their exchanges). Both information and time, once set free from the read-into flow of time, are common in sharing the similar materialistic and energetic context in incorporating the transitive verbs into themselves as holding the contrast between the direct and the indirect object of a verb, that is to say, between a message and its dative. Despite that, I am not quite sure at this moment whether this synthetic view would merely be one step backward for the sake of the likely two steps forward to come. Is the dative of a message different from the third case in the declension? Please, explain what you mean and provide perhaps an example. “Both information and time”…? If “information” can be defined in terms of a probability distribution, would “time” be definable as a frequency distribution? Is that perhaps how I can understand these two to be juxtaposed in this sentence? (I would be inclined to consider time as “what is being communicated” when frequencies are communicated.) Best wishes, Loet ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] replies to several
Dear Loet, Joe and all, We are reaching again the question of “meaning” as attached to information. Let me remind a few points addressed more or less explicitly in some previous posts: 1) A “meaning” does not exist by itself. It is a “meaningful information” (Shannon type information) related to a system that creates it or uses it in order to satisfy some constraint (ex: stay alive for species by ADN transmission, stay alive for organism by catching food, be happy for humans). And it is true that “mathematically derived “meaning” for antibodies is a pale representation of meaning in the human context”. This is why trying to understand what is a “meaning” by a systemic approach can be interesting. 2) Any meaning has an origin, more or less iterated from other meanings. As already expressed at FIS, a basic meaning generation process can be modeled through the MGS (Meaning Generator System) where a system submitted to a constraint generates a meaning when it receives an information from its environment that has a connection with the constraint. The generated meaning is precisely the connection existing between the received information and the constraint (http://crmenant.free.fr/FIScience/Index.htm , http://crmenant.free.fr/ResUK/MGS.pdf). The received information can already be meaningful. 3) The MGS is a building block populating agents that have different constraints to satisfy (http://www.idt.mdh.se/ECAP-2005/INFOCOMPBOOK/CHAPTERS/10-Menant.pdf). 4) Networks of meanings for an agent about an item of its environment constitute a meaningful representation of the item for the agent. Meanings link agents to their environments (“ “). 5) Meaning generation by the MGS can be used as an evolutionary tool beginning with bacteria. It brings to highlight the specificities of organisms and humans in terms of systems and constraints where our understanding is sometimes limited (“ “). Best Christophe From: l...@leydesdorff.net To: joe.bren...@bluewin.ch; fis@listas.unizar.es Date: Sun, 8 May 2011 21:16:01 +0200 Subject: Re: [Fis] replies to several Dear Joe: 1. If I follow Loet, I must accept that Information Theory is essentially a mathematical theory that requires abstractions for extension to complex contexts. But Bob says that the mathematically derived “meaning” for antibodies is a pale representation of meaning in the human context and only reflects how wanly quantitative models in general prefigure more complicated human situations. CONCLUSION: something else that is non-mathematical and non-abstract beyond IT as so defined is required to capture meaning. Yes, I would agree. Shannon-type information is yet meaningless. Information can only be provided with meaning by the substantive specification of a system of reference. For this reason, one needs not only a formal theory of the exchange, but also substantive theories. For example, a theory about the exchange of molecules in biology, and of atoms in chemistry, or of transactions in economy. These theories of specific communications cannot be expected to be unified because the substances (of “what is communicated and why”) are different. The formal theory of communication serves us, among other things, for moving from one substantive theory to another and for developing metaphors that can thus heuristically be transported, because of the abstraction involved. Additionally, these confrontations can lead to further developments of the algorithms that are relevant for studying the dynamics. The dynamics in the communication of meaning is different from the communication of information! Information can also circulate as noise (without meaning). I doubt it that meaning can be communicated without communication of information. Meaning is generated when information can be related by “an observing system” or more precisely in a discourse. It seems to me that semioticians focus exclusively on the communication of meaning without relating it to the communication of information. The latter, for example, has to confirm to the entropy law, while the former does not. The possibility of generating negative information has first been discussed by Brillouin as negentropy (- Delta H). Meaning circulation generates redundancies because the historical case is one of possible cases from the perspective of hindsight and thus the maximum entropy (of possible states) can be continuously enlarged. This is further reinforced when meanings are codified in terms of models. Models enable us to consider more possible case in the future. Such systems – e.g., scientific discourses – can be considered as strongly anticipatory. They act against the axis of time. […] 3. Two aspects of the exchange between Koichiro and Loet merit attention: 1) Loet said that his point of replacing “why” with “what” did not seem necessary to him. In my mind, however, when Koichiro refers to “what is communicated by what
Re: [Fis] replies to several
Folks, Joseph wrote: Two aspects of the exchange between Koichiro and Loet merit attention: 1) Loet said that his point of replacing “why” with “what” did not seem necessary to him. In my mind, however, when Koichiro refers to “what is communicated by what”, he is insisting on not losing the qualitative components of the information involved. Let me make my points a little bit clearer. 1. Being empirical is not necessarily rational (e.g., Galilei’s empirical inertia v.s. Aristotle’s rational telos). 2. Linear progression of time, say time (t+1) following time t, is already a consequence of synchronization among the clocks available to us. A point of clarification is that synchronization in the making as a necessary condition for a meaningful integration into whatever context is not sure about whether it could also proceed upon a linear progression of time. Suppose everybody asks the nearest neighbor “what time do you have?”. The outcome might be somewhere in between the two extremes of a successful synchronization in the end among all of them on one hand and a total mess on the other. 3. Linguistic or theoretical access to synchronization in the making would be hard to imagine when it is prohibited to refer to time as a comprehensible analytical tool in advance. This does not however mean the end of the whole issue. Empirical access to synchronization in the making is totally different. Cyanobacteria as the first photosynthetic bacteria appeared on Earth could have been quite successful in synchronizing their circadian clocks among them without asking the help of our languages. 4. Addressing the theoretical question of what kinds of material means are employed for the job of synchronization and why, goes far beyond our present rational comprehension. Although the cyanobacterial circadian clocks employ three different kinds of protein called KaiA, B and C for the job, we cannot say for sure at this moment why these particular proteins would come to be focused upon. This has been an irrevocable empirical fact. 5. Neuronal dynamics is full of synchronization in the making by means of exchanging an extremely wide variety of chemical messengers, including for instance acetylcholine, available empirically. 6. Even if we take a pause for a while for addressing the grandiose why-questions, there may still remain some room for tailoring time for a comprehensible analytical tool. Time is further qualified in terms of its tense. There remains a likelihood of addressing how the actual dynamics would proceed through the interplay between the different tenses, especially between the present progressive and the present perfect tense. 7. Put it bluntly, information synthesizes the flow of time from scratch. Cheers, Koichiro ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] replies to several
I note that there has been some relatively recent work bridging Shannon's theory (and probabilistic theories more generally) and the Channel Theory of Jon Barwise and Jeremy Seligman. • Allwein, Gerard. 2004. A qualitative framework for Shannon information theories. In Proceedings of the 2004 workshop on New security paradigms , 23-31. Nova Scotia, Canada: ACM. doi:10.1145/1065907.1066030. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1065907.1066030coll=Portaldl=GUIDECFID=22417089CFTOKEN=87154842. • Allwein, G.T., Moskowitz, I.S., Chang, L.W.: A new framework for Shannon information theory. Technical Report A801024, Naval Research Laboratory (2004) • Seligman, Jeremy. 2009. Channels: From Logic to Probability. In Formal Theories of Information , 193-233. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00659-3_8. and some intriguing work approaching quantum mechanics via Chu spaces, which are of course related to channel theory: • Abramsky, Samson. 2011. “Big toy models.” Synthese . doi:10.1007/s11229-011-9912-x. http://www.springerlink.com.hmlproxy.lib.csufresno.edu/content/073455w4h5u4588h/. These may be of interest to some. === Jacob Lee ttp://www.jacoblee.net/ - Original Message - From: Loet Leydesdorff l...@leydesdorff.net To: joe brenner joe.bren...@bluewin.ch, fis@listas.unizar.es Sent: Sunday, May 8, 2011 12:16:01 PM Subject: Re: [Fis] replies to several Dear Joe: 1. If I follow Loet, I must accept that Information Theory is essentially a mathematical theory that requires abstractions for extension to complex contexts. But Bob says that the mathematically derived “meaning” for antibodies is a pale representation of meaning in the human context and only reflects how wanly quantitative models in general prefigure more complicated human situations. CONCLUSION: something else that is non-mathematical and non-abstract beyond IT as so defined is required to capture meaning. Yes, I would agree. Shannon-type information is yet meaningless. Information can only be provided with meaning by the substantive specification of a system of reference. For this reason, one needs not only a formal theory of the exchange, but also substantive theories. For example, a theory about the exchange of molecules in biology, and of atoms in chemistry, or of transactions in economy. These theories of specific communications cannot be expected to be unified because the substances (of “what is communicated and why”) are different. The formal theory of communication serves us, among other things, for moving from one substantive theory to another and for developing metaphors that can thus heuristically be transported, because of the abstraction involved. Additionally, these confrontations can lead to further developments of the algorithms that are relevant for studying the dynamics. The dynamics in the communication of meaning is different from the communication of information! Information can also circulate as noise (without meaning). I doubt it that meaning can be communicated without communication of information. Meaning is generated when information can be related by “an observing system” or more precisely in a discourse. It seems to me that semioticians focus exclusively on the communication of meaning without relating it to the communication of information. The latter, for example, has to confirm to the entropy law, while the former does not. The possibility of generating negative information has first been discussed by Brillouin as negentropy (- Delta H). Meaning circulation generates redundancies because the historical case is one of possible cases from the perspective of hindsight and thus the maximum entropy (of possible states) can be continuously enlarged. This is further reinforced when meanings are codified in terms of models. Models enable us to consider more possible case in the future. Such systems – e.g., scientific discourses – can be considered as strongly anticipatory. They act against the axis of time. […] 3. Two aspects of the exchange between Koichiro and Loet merit attention: 1) Loet said that his point of replacing “why” with “what” did not seem necessary to him. In my mind, however, when Koichiro refers to “what is communicated by what”, he is insisting on not losing the qualitative components of the information involved. This seems confused to me. What is the qualitative aspect of “information”? (As a sideline: you did not answer any of my questions!) The qualitative aspect can only be the system of reference attributed to the information which provides the information with meaning. This system of reference is qualitative and therefore a qualitative and substantive theory of communication is then needed. This theory is different from the formal theory of communication. “By what” refers to the carriers of the information. Emphasis
