Dear Marcus,
I think this is a wise question. We must always speak up and seek clarification
when we are concerned about our interpretation of the environment (in which can
be found my posts to FIS) if we are to achieve effective communication (the
exchange of knowledge between apprehending entities).
Thinking about the systems that Shannon worked upon, the ideas as conveyed by
Brit Cruise, and the computing machines and systems that I have helped design,
it is easy to see how one may become unclear.
I spent many years studying the movement of data from one processor to another
by various means, memory subsystems and the hardware problems of “addressing”
and “alignment,” hidden cache hierarchies and such like to improve performance
pragmatics, and I designed mathematically founded programming languages to
enable engineers to speak of semantics and performance semantics that are a
part of this bit "motion.”
And within these programming languages I studied the locality of expression,
scope, aliasing, and so on.
I spent further years informally studying the practices of engineers in
different parts of the world using these languages. And I informally observed
the common effects that these languages have upon how these engineers behave
and define themselves. Going so far, it seemed to me, as to dressing the same
way, liking the same kinds of music, dating the same types of people, and
buying the same models of car. There are observable differences, for example,
between C programmers and those that program in LISP.
Later I dealt with the Turing test and via a conversational interface that
provided access to content in a world full of people with a wide range of
educational and economic backgrounds.
All of these experiences present a different sense of “Locality” to the mind.
In the digital world, dominant in current Information Science, the ultimate
Locality is, necessarily, the Bit - combined with other bits via machine
operations. Everything else is not local, it is organized Bits.
And this is the point at the foundation of my discussion.
Bits may be organized but this organization is arbitrary - and has meaning only
in the effect that it has upon the behavior of the machine. Whether they are
aligned in 8bit or 64bit words as, in fact, as some hardware electronic grid
with high level hardware controller enforcing a strict organization, or they
are holes in the ground managed by our grandchildren, it is the same and our
perception of the Locality is an illusion.
I make the point that this organization is taken for granted and not properly
unaccounted for.
Since processor operations are 64bit wide (and have, experimentally, been
wider), we can say that this is the extent of locality in the common machine
(data structures are organization, not localities). But allosteric Locality
(if I may extend the common notion of this term) in biophysics is very
different, much more flexible, across the entire structure and sense is
directly bound to response.
Regards,
Steven
--
Dr. Steven Ericsson-Zenith, Los Gatos, California. +1-650-308-8611
http://iase.info
> On Sep 28, 2015, at 8:57 AM, Marcus Abundis <55m...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I am embarrassed to admit I feel I don't quite grasp the notion of
> Locality you reference. This seems to be a key initial concept in your model,
> and thus I feel I cannot comment specifically on following matters. By
> locality do you mean the “fact“ of specific items being specifically situated
> in specific environments? Please point me to the passage/post where you feel
> you explain this most succinctly (sorry?).
>
> Otherwise, I *think* I agree with the general Gestalt of your model . . .
> but again I am getting stuck early on and cannot comment specifically. Help
> is appreciated . . .
>
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