Caro Pedro e cari tutti,
questa e-mail dell'egregio Hans von Baeyer mi ha stimolato a segnalare,
ancora una volta, quanto sia stato anticipatore il mio pensiero
scientifico-economico sull'importanza della legge dell'informazione a
partire, ad es.,dagli inizi degli anni Ottanta. Sia chiaro, non rivendico
nè presumo niente, bensì da poverino esponenziale come mi auto-definisco
sento tutto il piacere bambino di portare alla Vostra conoscenza che sul
processo di tras-in-form-azione ho scritto e pubblicato più di una dozzina
di libri. Qualcuno di essi l'ho inviato al carissimo Pedro che mi auguro
continui a tenermi non solo nella mente, ma anche nel cuore.
Grazie e saluti augurali nel nome del Signore mio e di tutti, credenti e
non credenti.
Francesco Rizzo, già professore di Economia e organizzazione aziendale
nella Facoltà di Ingegneria di Catania.
2014/1/18 Hans von Baeyer <henrikrit...@gmail.com>
> Dear Friends: In keeping with the message of my lecture, that knowledge of
> the world is based on the ensemble of individual experiences, more than on
> assumed objective, actual properties of an external reality, I will tell
> you about my experiences of writing and discussing the New Year Lecture. I
> enjoyed the entire process enormously, and wish once more to applaud Pedro
> for inventing this new tradition!
>
> Even as I started this email I learned something that piqued my interest.
> Gregory Bateson was quoted: "Kant argued long ago that this piece of chalk
> contains a million potential facts (Tatsachen) but that only a very few of
> these become truly facts by affecting the behavior of entities capable of
> responding to facts." Google.de informed me that Tatsache is probably an
> 18th century translation of the English "matter of fact". "Tat" is a deed,
> a "factum", something done or performed, while "Sache" means a thing or a
> matter. This tenuous etymology connects factuality with action rather than
> with some intrinsic essence. Kant's words "affecting", "behavior" and
> "responding" are QBist to the core. More and more I realize that philosophy
> matters. Chris Fuchs, the chief spokesman for QBism, is among the rare
> physicists who give credit to philosophers for the contributions they make
> to natural science. In return he hopes that they will listen to physicists
> who bring news from the furthest reaches of nature.
>
> My most intense experience in connection with the New Year Lecture was the
> writing of it. The first challenge was brevity: "The letter I have
> written today is longer than usual because I lacked the time to make it
> shorter" quipped Blaise Pascal. In order to introduce QBism to you, I had
> to explain the Q and the B. How to do that within the allotted length?
> The distinction between Bayesian and frequentist probability is an old
> subject among mathematicians, so I was able to steal from them. ("Schreiben
> ist Borgen", writing is borrowing, according to the aphorist G.C.
> Lichtenberg.) But in order to talk about the Q, I had to show succinctly
> what's so special about quantum mechanics. At this point I was considerably
> aided by the GHZ prediction and its fairly recent corroboration, because,
> unlike all previous experiments, GHZ is a one-shot deal, rather than a
> subtle statistical effect. Like finding a single white raven to falsify the
> claim that "all ravens are black." But even so, although I could easily
> demonstrate the WRONG classical prediction, I was not able to show those of
> you who are not trained in theoretical physics how the correct quantum
> mechanical prediction for GHZ comes about. Unfortunately I would need a
> semester for that! In any case, by keeping to the prescribed format of the
> lecture, I was able to clarify my own thinking and to streamline my
> presentation of the unfamiliar topic.
>
> My timing was very fortunate in that two unusually accessible articles
> about QBism appeared in November and December 2013 -- both available for
> free at <arxiv.org>. (ID numbers 1311.5253v1 and 1312.7825.) What a
> welcome coincidence! It reassured me that the topic I had chosen for my
> lecture is emerging from its niche in quantum foundations research and
> slowly seeping out into the broader community.
>
> From the subsequent discussion I discovered several important things that
> are new to me. I learned that there is the possibility, by means on
> non-Kolmogorovian probabilities, to avoid the troublesome certainty of
> probability 0 and 1 -- in particular via Logic in Reality. I learned about
> the interesting concept of "feed-forward", in contrast to feedback, which
> corrects for disruptions of a system BEFORE the disrupting influence kicks
> in. (In order to do that, the mechanism has to make use of an accurate
> model of the system's performance, so that it can PREDICT how the system
> will react. I think it's an exaggeration to call this maneuver "inverting
> the cause-and-effect sequence", but it comes close.) I learned about
> instrumentalism, and will try to understand how it relates to pragmatism.
>
> I was surprised when the conversation on the list veered from probability
> and epistemology to communication and information. But I shouldn't have
> been. The QBist point of view divides science into two realms. On the one
> hand each individual agent assembles the totality of her experiences
> (experimenting, reading, talking, calculating...) into a web of probability
> assignments that is as coherent and comprehensive as possible. That's the
> easy part, and, as usual, physicists have picked it as their domain. But
> the hard part is the effort of agents to correlate their private
> experiences -- i.e. to communicate with each other in order to develop a
> common scientific worldview. Agent A's description of an experience serves
> as input for updating B's personal probability assignments via Bayes' law.
> And this is done through language as well as math. Niels Bohr more clearly
> than any of the other pioneers of quantum mechanics realized the importance
> of language -- he was "steeped in language" in the apt phrase of one
> biographer. He thought that language is necessary to relate the abstract,
> quantum mechanical description of matter to everyday experiences of the
> world. QBists would add that it also enables agents to relate to each
> other.
>
> So, my fellow agents, I hope that my lecture has given you a few tidbits
> of new information to serve as input for updating some of the probability
> estimates you use to make decisions on your own future action. By future
> action I mean thinking, talking, reading, writing... Your emails have
> certainly caused me to re-think! And, being fundamentally an optimist, I
> hope that in infinitesimal ways our worldviews will converge, and improve,
> and lead to a better world. That's my New Year's wish for FIS!
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Hans Christian von Baeyer
>
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