Re: [Fis] replies to several. The Key to Time

2011-05-26 Thread Koichiro Matsuno
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

2011-05-25 Thread Ted Goranson
(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

2011-05-23 Thread Koichiro Matsuno
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

 

 

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Re: [Fis] replies to several. The Key to Time

2011-05-23 Thread Loet Leydesdorff
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

 

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