*From:* John Collier
*Sent:* 21 October 2012 11:22 PM
*To:* fis
*Subject:* Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
At 06:14 PM 2012/10/21, Stanley N Salthe wrote:
Pedro -- it is of interest to me that
On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 3:38 PM, PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ
<pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es> wrote:
Dear FISers,
Continuing with the comments on the "how" versus the "what", it
is an important topic in mammalian (&vertebrate) nervous
systems. They are subtended by mostly separate neural tracts
(though partially interconnected), it is the dorsal stream,
specialized in the how & where, and the ventral stream stream
about the what.
-snip-
I think it of some interest that I have previously ( 2006 On
Aristotle’s conception of causality. General Systems Bulletin 35:
11.) proposed that the Aristotelian 'formal cause' determines both
'what happens' and 'how it happens', and that the combination of
this with material cause ('what it happens to') delivers 'where' it
happens.
(For completeness sake I add that efficient cause determines only
'when it happens', while final cause points to 'why it happens'. It
would be quite exciting to find that these informations were also
carried on separate tracts.)
It would be exciting, as that would seem to refute the Aristotelean idea
of the four causes as four aspects of all causation. However an
information channel can carry some part of the information from its
source, which would be a sort of filter or abstraction of the source.
So, for example, a channel might be sensitive only to the "how", but not
the "what", and vice versa. A channel is fundamentally a mapping of
classes from a source to a sink that through instances that retain the
mapping (see Barwsie and Seligman, Information Flow: The Logic of
Distributed Systems). So in this case, a channel sensitive to, say,
"what", would retain the what classifications of the source in a way
that the sink could use, but perhaps not any other information. The
channels themselves could still maintain all four aspects of
Aristotelean causation, so Aristotle need not be refuted. This would
still be very interesting, though. I am unclear what functional
advantage there would be, though we certainly manage to separate these
causes in much of our thinking (perhaps even, we can't help it).
Cheers,
John
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