I really respect all involved … that said-
Can we leave the past for a moment and just try to ask the 10 most important
questions of today.
What are they!
Jesus - this feel like a historical pissing match and is not being really
constructive.
b
On Oct 27, 2012, at 11:34 AM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
>
> On 26 Oct 2012, at 22:32, PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ wrote:
>
>> Dear FISers,
>>
>> Is it interesting the discussion on wether those informational
>> entities contain realizations of the Aristotelian scheme of
>> causality or not?
>>
>> The cell, in my view, conspicuously fails --it would be too
>> artifactual an scheme. Some parts of the sensory paths of advanced
>> nervous systems seem to separate some of those causes --but only in
>> a few parts or patches of the concerned pathway. For instance, in
>> visual processing the "what" and the "how/where" seem to be
>> travelling together undifferentiated along the optic nerve and are
>> separated --more or less-- after the visual superior colliculus in
>> the midbrain before discharging onto the visual cortex. The really
>> big flow of spikes arriving each instant (many millions every few
>> milisec) are mixed and correlated with themselves and with other top-
>> down and bottom-up preexisting flows in multiple neural mappings...
>> and further, when those flows mix with the association areas under
>> the influence of languaje, then, and only then, all those logic and
>> conceptual categorizations of human thought are enacted in the
>> ephemeral synaptic networks.
>>
>> I am optimistic that a new "Heraclitean" way of thinking boils down
>> in network science, neuroinformatics, systems biology,
>> bioinformation etc. Neither the "Parmenidean" eliminative fixism of
>> classical reductionists, nor the Aristotelian organicism of
>> systemicists. Say that this is a caricature. However "you cannot
>> bathe twice in the same river" not just because we all are caught
>> into the universal physical flow of photons and forces, but for the
>> "Heraclitean flux" of our own neurons and brains, for the inner
>> torrents of the aggregated information flows. The same for whatever
>> cells, societies, etc. and their physical structures for info
>> transportation.
>>
>> Either we produce an interesting new vision of the world, finally
>> making sense of those perennial metaphors among the different
>> (informational) realms, or information science will continue to be
>> that small portion of incoherent patches more or less close to
>> information theory or to artificial intelligence. In spite of
>> decades of bla-bla- about information revolution and information
>> society and tons of ad hoc literature, the educated thought of our
>> contemporary society continues to be deeply mechanistic!
>>
>> Why?
>
>
> Even if the Parmenidean reality is restricted to the natural numbers,
> with only the laws of addition and multiplication, we can prove,
> assuming our brain are Turing emulable, that the view from inside as
> to be Heraclitean.
>
> The problem is not mechanism. The problem is the reductionist
> conception of mechanism. I think.
>
> The incompleteness phenomenon does not refute mechanism, like some
> have proposed, but it does refute the reductionist conception of
> mechanism.
>
> Arithmetic is full of life and dreams.
>
> Best,
>
> Bruno
>
>
>
>
>
>
>>
>> ---Pedro
>>
>>
>>>
>>> -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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