Dear Krassimir and FIS colleagues,
Many thanks for your message & effort to prepare the compilation to be
published soon. It is good counting with dissemination works that take these
information debates to different environments so that new insights and
conceptual cross fertilizations may occur. (These weeks I have been rather
absent minded, involved with the nasty task of closing my desk room and
having to transport home all my archives--throwing away lots and lots of
reprints and docs. No space available at home! It was very fatiguing.
Hopefully it is almost over.) Well, about Arturo's last comment, am sorry
about having to leave out of science most of research activities of last
centuries, including some of the Greatest Founding Books of Biology
(Darwin's), Neuroscience (Ramon y Cajal's, Sherrington's) and many others.
No maths there! Watson & Crick's arch-famous paper with the DNA
report had no maths either... They all will join the heaps of papers I
discarded! Well, more seriously, FIS was conceived to articulate a common
ground in between the different info worlds, utterly separated, taking from
the physical/computational, to the biological/neuronal, and to the
personal/social. There was, and there is, no immediate "informational"
connection at all. Perhaps after taking various steps behind each one of
these realms, a sort of general interconnecting thread could be discovered;
this is what we thought long ago. Hélas, as all these years discussions have
witnessed, the itinerary resembles an intransitable Moebius band rather than
a linear path... But at least there is fun in the attempt.
About data, "dataism", and some other curiosities we will have a new
discussion session at the end of next week. Raquel del Moral will present
the chair of this new session.
Best
wishes to all,
--Pedro
On Wed, 21 Feb 2018 20:50:08 +0200 "Krassimir Markov" wrote:
Dear FIS Colleagues,
The main result of our paper “Data versus Information” is the understanding that the data
and information are different (external and internal kinds of reflection for subjective
consciousness), i.e. "Information = data + something in and by consciousness"
After publishing the paper, Arturo wrote an important remark and I promise to answer in this letter. In private conversation we had discussed some aspects. The conversation was interesting but it is not available for the FIS-list and I have no permission to publish it. Because of this I will use abstract form of questions (Q) and answers (A).
Dear Arturo, I apologize in advance but I hope there is nothing bad in this and it will be useful.
The remark of Arturo was: I'm just annoyed that the most represented
position among FISers, i.e., that information is an objective, quantitative,
physical measure linked to informational entropy, has not been taken into
account at all. After all our efforts to maintain our firm position, we
have been censored.
(A): Usually we say “we collect information” measuring different real
features – temperature, distance, weigh, etc. Scientists from physics do this
permanently.
The methodical error here is that really we collect data.
After processing the data in the consciousness, the information may be created
in it. Reflections (data) exist everywhere, but information exists only in
consciousness. It is important that information in the consciousness of one
subject is external for another, i.e. it is data for him/her.
Yes, I know that many people believe in the opposite, but still there are no
scientific basics this believing to become
scientific theory.
I am mathematician who had worked in the institute of mathematics more than 40 years and, in particular, I have taught probability and statistics. I absolutely clearly know (and every good mathematician knows!) that the probabilities are a human model and do not exist in the reality. Because of this, all definitions of information based on probability are the same what we had published in the paper. This kind of information exits only in the concrete human consciousness!
The rest is data; sometimes called: "statistical data".
(Q): Statistics is so important, that we can quantify the standpoint of
our reality, i.e., quantum mechanics, just through statistical tools. If you
negate statistics in the study of reality, you fully destroy the medicine, the
scientific method and the prospective and retrospective studies. It is totally
absurd to negate the
importance of statistics. I'm sorry, but yours is just a metaphysical
approach to scientific problems.
(A): Yes, I agree that the statistics is very important and useful. But we discuss "what
is the information?" and not "is the statistics important or not?".
Only what I say is that the statistics is pure humans' activity. By processing
statistical data we may predict many events. But this not excludes humans'.
Computer prosthesis of our brains does not change the situation.
An