Dear Stan,
I sometimes become confused by your word usage. S: Well, I have generalized the Shannon concept of information carrying capacity under 'variety'... {variety {information carrying capacity}}. This allows the concept to operate quite generally in evolutionary and ecological discourses. I can easily follow that Shannon-type information (uncertainty) can be considered as variety. “Information” and “variance” are very close concepts, but variance measurement assumes normality of the distribution. It seems to me that the carrying capacity of a communication channel is determined by the maximum information content H(max) = log(N), whereas the information content H = - Sigma p(i) log p(i). (The difference is also the redundancy.) Information, then, if you like, is what is left after a reduction in variety, or after some system choice. This is no longer Shannon’s, but Bateson’s definition, isn’t it? One could also say that this is the “meaningful information” selected as a signal from the noise (Shannon-type information that is not yet meaningful). Consider dance: we have all the possible conformations of the human body, out of which a few are selected to provide information about the meaning of a dance. The example is perhaps confusing. Is the system of reference the dance or us giving meaning to the dance? It seems to me that the concept of “meaning” merits a discussion of its own. Some (Bateson-type) information is more meaningful than other; Shannon-type information is defined as meaningless. Best, Loet STAN STAN On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 8:22 AM, Pedro C. Marijuan <pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es> wrote: Dear Steven and FIS colleagues, Many thanks for this opening text. What you are proposing about a pretty structured discussion looks a good idea, although it will have to confront the usually anarchic discussion style of FIS list! Two aspects of your initial text have caught my attention (apart from those videos you recommend that I will watch along the weekend). First about the concerns of a generation earlier (Shannon, Turing...) situating information in the intersection between physical science and engineering. The towering influence of this line of thought, both with positive and negative overtones, cannot be overestimated. Most attempts to enlarge informational thought and to extend it to life, economies, societies, etc. continue to be but a reformulation of the former ideas with little added value. See one of the last creatures: "Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies" (2015), by Cesar Hidalgo (prof. at MIT). In my opinion, the extension of those classic ideas to life are very fertile from the technological point of view, from the "theory of molecular machines" for DNA-RNA-protein matching to genomic-proteomic and other omics' "big data". But all that technobrilliance does not open per se new avenues in order to produce innovative thought about the information stuff of human societies. Alternatively we may think that the accelerated digitalization of our world and the cyborg-symbiosis of human information and computer information do not demand much brain teasing, as it is a matter that social evolution is superseding by itself. The point I have ocasionally raised in this list is whether all the new molecular knowledge about life might teach us about a fundamental difference in the "way of being in the world" between life and inert matter (& mechanism & computation)---or not. In the recent compilation by Plamen and colleagues from the former INBIOSA initiative, I have argued about that fundamental difference in the intertwining of communication/self-production, how signaling is strictly caught in the advancement of a life cycle (see paper "How the living is in the world"). Life is based on an inusitate informational formula unknown in inert matter. And the very organization of life provides an original starting point to think anew about information --of course, not the only one. So, to conclude this "tangent", I find quite exciting the discussion we are starting now, say from the classical info positions onwards, in particularly to be compared in some future with another session (in preparation) with similar ambition but starting from say the phenomenology of the living. Struggling for a convergence/complementarity of outcomes would be a cavalier effort. All the best--Pedro Steven Ericsson-Zenith wrote: ...The subject is one that has concerned me ever since I completed my PhD in 1992. I came away from defending my thesis, essentially on large scale parallel computation, with the strong intuition that I had disclosed much more concerning the little that we know, than I had offered either a theoretical or engineering solution. For the curious, a digital copy of this thesis can be found among the reports of CRI, MINES ParisTech, formerly ENSMP, http://www.cri.ensmp.fr/classement/doc/A-232.pdf, it is also available as a paper copy on Amazon. Like many that have been involved in microprocessor and instruction set/language design, using mathematical methods, we share the physical concerns of a generation earlier, people like John Von Neumann, Alan Turing, and Claude Shannon. In other words, a close intersection between physical science and machine engineering. ...I will then discuss some historical issues in particular referencing Benjamin Peirce, Albert Einstein and Alan Turing. And finally discuss the contemporary issues, as I see them, in biophysics, biology, and associated disciplines, reaching into human and other social constructions, perhaps touching on cosmology and the extended role of information theory in mathematical physics... _______________________________________________ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis -- ------------------------------------------------- Pedro C. Marijuán Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA) Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X 50009 Zaragoza, Spain Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 <tel:%2B34%20976%2071%203526> (& 6818) pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/ ------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
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