Re: [Fis] A provocative issue
Dear Pedro,
your wise comments are no less inspiring for me than the last comments
by Loet, namely that the concept of information is 'relative' to each
context (and therefore 'objective' with regard to such context). This
happens with other concepts too, of course. I said this in my PhD
(1978). Then Fleissner and Hofkirchner created what they called
"Capurro's trilemma" that is well known in this list. Loet's remarks on
the contextual relativity is a solution (better: a dissolution) of the
trilemma. But this does not mean that we might like to make analogies,
equivocies and univocities from time to time that can be also useful or
inspiring.
The oriental thinkers you refer to, remember me what I discovered during
and after out last meeting in Vienna, that helped me to question my own
presuppositions (blindness) concerning the 'metaphysical' concept of
'in-formatio' I analized in 1978. I prefer not to quote this in extenso
but just raise you attention (maybe your curiosity) to pp. 8 ss of this
paper: http://www.capurro.de/icil2016.pdf
I still think that the concepts of message/messenger and translation
(trans-lation, tra-ducción, Über-setzen) (DNA etc.) is a key issue for
biology (and not only for biology). I say this without all your
knowledge regarding biology.
If after twenty years (I remember our meeting in Vienna in 1995)
discussing this concept we can say that at least we were able to
question again and again our presuppositions and this is the spirit of
science (and philosophy).
best
Rafael
Dear Arturo and FISers
We will forgive your life! Some other people in this list also
have strong reservations to a single, canonical approach to
information, either from Shannon, Boltzmann, or Fisher backgrounds.
In my case, mostly biologically and socially grounded
("sociotype"), I see a complex panorama of biological information,
mostly "relative" concerning communication with the environment
(via cellular signaling systems), but sort of "objective"
concerning the inner self-production processes (shared DNA and
genetic/translation and many other codes). But both are elegantly
intertwined in the advancement of a life cycle. My hunch is that
this type of relative/objective duality culminating in existential
maintenance has some generality and could be "exported" to physics
too. It is curious that some oriental thinkers (Chu-Hsi or Zhu Xi,
9 Centuries ago) had already advanced sort of similar ideas...
Well, above all, info is "paradoxical" and has kept all of us
amused in this list, at least for the past twenty years!
Best--Pedro
PS. Let me remind that you have not answered yet my topo-evo
comments in the earliest messages. That point is, I think, very
important in the present discussion.
El 11/12/2016 a las 16:57, tozziart...@libero.it escribió:
Dear FISers,
I know that some of you are going to kill me, but there’s
something that I must confess.
I notice, from the nice issued raised by Francesco Rizzo, Joseph
Brenner, John Collier, that the main concerns are always
energetic/informational arguments and accounts.
Indeed, the current tenets state that all is information,
information being a real quantity that can be measured through
informational entropies.
But… I ask to myself, is such a tenet true?
When I cook the pasta, I realize that, by my point of view, the
cooked pasta encompasses more information than the not-cooked one,
because it acquires the role of something that I can eat in order
to increase my possibility to preserve myself in the hostile
environment that wants to destroy me. However, by the point of
view of the bug who eats the non-cooked pasta, my cooked pasta
displays less information for sure. Therefore, information is a
very subjective measure that, apart from its relationship with the
observer, does not mean very much… Who can state that an event or
a fact displays more information than another one?
And, please, do not counteract that information is a quantifiable,
objective reality, because it can be measured through
informational entropy… Informational entropy, in its original
Shannon’s formulation, stands for an ergodic process (page 8 of
the original 1948 Shannon’s seminal paper), i.e.: every sequence
produced by the processes is the same in statistical properties,
or, in other words, a traveling particle always crosses all the
points of its phase space. However, in physics and biology, the
facts and events are never ergodic. Statistical homogeneity is
just a fiction, if we evaluate the world around us and our
brain/mind.
Therefore, the role of information could not be as fundamental as
currently believed.
P.S.: topology analyzes information by another point of view, but
it’s an issue for the next time, I think…
*Arturo Tozzi*
AA Professor Physics, University North Texas
Pediatrician ASL Na2Nord, Italy
Comput Intell Lab, University Manitoba
http://arturotozzi.webnode.it/
Re: [Fis] A provocative issue
Dear Arturo and FISers
We will forgive your life! Some other people in this list also have
strong reservations to a single, canonical approach to information,
either from Shannon, Boltzmann, or Fisher backgrounds. In my case,
mostly biologically and socially grounded ("sociotype"), I see a complex
panorama of biological information, mostly "relative" concerning
communication with the environment (via cellular signaling systems), but
sort of "objective" concerning the inner self-production processes
(shared DNA and genetic/translation and many other codes). But both are
elegantly intertwined in the advancement of a life cycle. My hunch is
that this type of relative/objective duality culminating in existential
maintenance has some generality and could be "exported" to physics too.
It is curious that some oriental thinkers (Chu-Hsi or Zhu Xi, 9
Centuries ago) had already advanced sort of similar ideas... Well, above
all, info is "paradoxical" and has kept all of us amused in this list,
at least for the past twenty years!
Best--Pedro
PS. Let me remind that you have not answered yet my topo-evo comments in
the earliest messages. That point is, I think, very important in the
present discussion.
El 11/12/2016 a las 16:57, tozziart...@libero.it escribió:
Dear FISers,
I know that some of you are going to kill me, but there’s something
that I must confess.
I notice, from the nice issued raised by Francesco Rizzo, Joseph
Brenner, John Collier, that the main concerns are always
energetic/informational arguments and accounts.
Indeed, the current tenets state that all is information, information
being a real quantity that can be measured through informational
entropies.
But… I ask to myself, is such a tenet true?
When I cook the pasta, I realize that, by my point of view, the cooked
pasta encompasses more information than the not-cooked one, because it
acquires the role of something that I can eat in order to increase my
possibility to preserve myself in the hostile environment that wants
to destroy me. However, by the point of view of the bug who eats the
non-cooked pasta, my cooked pasta displays less information for sure.
Therefore, information is a very subjective measure that, apart from
its relationship with the observer, does not mean very much… Who can
state that an event or a fact displays more information than another one?
And, please, do not counteract that information is a quantifiable,
objective reality, because it can be measured through informational
entropy… Informational entropy, in its original Shannon’s formulation,
stands for an ergodic process (page 8 of the original 1948 Shannon’s
seminal paper), i.e.: every sequence produced by the processes is the
same in statistical properties, or, in other words, a traveling
particle always crosses all the points of its phase space. However,
in physics and biology, the facts and events are never ergodic.
Statistical homogeneity is just a fiction, if we evaluate the world
around us and our brain/mind.
Therefore, the role of information could not be as fundamental as
currently believed.
P.S.: topology analyzes information by another point of view, but it’s
an issue for the next time, I think…
*Arturo Tozzi*
AA Professor Physics, University North Texas
Pediatrician ASL Na2Nord, Italy
Comput Intell Lab, University Manitoba
http://arturotozzi.webnode.it/
___
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 0
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 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
Re: [Fis] A provocative issue
Shannon declared in his original book that constraints are information. I don’t get the distinction you are trying to make. Also, Shannon information applies to continuous systems. If they have a form (are constrained), then they have finite information. Infinite information applies only if there are no constraints. I don’t see how that could be true in a world that has regularities. John Collier Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Associate Philosophy, University of KwaZulu-Natal http://web.ncf.ca/collier From: Fis [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Bob Logan Sent: Sunday, 11 December 2016 10:21 PM To: tozziart...@libero.it Cc: fis <fis@listas.unizar.es> Subject: Re: [Fis] A provocative issue Bravo Arturo - I totally agree - in a paper I co-authored with Stuart Kauffman and others we talked abut the relativity of information and the fact that information is not an absolute. Here is the abstract of the paper and an excerpt from the paper that discusses the relativity of information. The full papers available at: https://www.academia.edu/783503/Propagating_organization_an_enquiry Best wishes - Bob Logan Kauffman, Stuart, Robert K. Logan, Robert Este, Randy Goebel, David Hobill and Ilya Smulevich. 2007. Propagating Organization: An Inquiry. Biology and Philosophy 23: 27-45. Propagating Organization: An Enquiry - Stuart Kauffman, Robert K. Logan, Robert Este, Randy Goebel, David Hobill and lIlya Shmulevich Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle Washington Abstract: Our aim in this article is to attempt to discuss propagating organization of process, a poorly articulated union of matter, energy, work, constraints and that vexed concept, “information”, which unite in far from equilibrium living physical systems. Our hope is to stimulate discussions by philosophers of biology and biologists to further clarify the concepts we discuss here. We place our discussion in the broad context of a “general biology”, properties that might well be found in life anywhere in the cosmos, freed from the specific examples of terrestrial life after 3.8 billion years of evolution. By placing the discussion in this wider, if still hypothetical, context, we also try to place in context some of the extant discussion of information as intimately related to DNA, RNA and protein transcription and translation processes. While characteristic of current terrestrial life, there are no compelling grounds to suppose the same mechanisms would be involved in any life form able to evolve by heritable variation and natural selection. In turn, this allows us to discuss at least briefly, the focus of much of the philosophy of biology on population genetics, which, of course, assumes DNA, RNA, proteins, and other features of terrestrial life. Presumably, evolution by natural selection – and perhaps self-organization - could occur on many worlds via different causal mechanisms. Here we seek a non-reductionist explanation for the synthesis, accumulation, and propagation of information, work, and constraint, which we hope will provide some insight into both the biotic and abiotic universe, in terms of both molecular self reproduction and the basic work energy cycle where work is the constrained release of energy into a few degrees of freedom. The typical requirement for work itself is to construct those very constraints on the release of energy that then constitute further work. Information creation, we argue, arises in two ways: first information as natural selection assembling the very constraints on the release of energy that then constitutes work and the propagation of organization. Second, information in a more extended sense is “semiotic”, that is about the world or internal state of the organism and requires appropriate response. The idea is to combine ideas from biology, physics, and computer science, to formulate explanatory hypotheses on how information can be captured and rendered in the expected physical manifestation, which can then participate in the propagation of the organization of process in the expected biological work cycles to create the diversity in our observable biosphere. Our conclusions, to date, of this enquiry suggest a foundation which views information as the construction of constraints, which, in their physical manifestation, partially underlie the processes of evolution to dynamically determine the fitness of organisms within the context of a biotic universe. Section 4. The Relativity of Information In Sections 2 we have argued that the Shannon conception of information are not directly suited to describe the information of autonomous agents that propagate their organization. In Section 3 we have defined a new form of information, instructional or biotic information as the constraints that direct the flow of free energy to do work. The reader may legitimately ask the question “isn’t informatio
Re: [Fis] A provocative issue
Arturo, List: This is a view that was fairly common, especially associated with Edwin Jaynes, but the other view has also been put forward by people like Brillouin and, more recently, John Wheeler, Murray Gell-Mann and Seth Lloyd, for example. Cosmologist David Layzer is another example. Interesting that they are all physicists. My PhD student, Scott Muller, published a book based on his dissertation, Asymmetry: The Foundation of Information, (Springer 2007) that uses Jaynes’ notion of an IGUS together with group theory to define the amount of information in an object (I have a different way of doing that). Jaynes held that each IGUS had its own measure of information in something, and there was no common measure. Scott argued that you can combine the information measured by all possible IGUSs (sort of like observers or interactors, but more strictly defined) to get the information in the object. I define it as the minimal number of yes-no questions required to completely describe the thing. The two should be equivalent. So you are siding with Jaynes, I think. I think Scott nailed the idea of objective intrinsic information on solid ground. By the way, Shannon’s measure is of the information capacity of a channel. There are better ways to define the information in a real situation (e.g., the computational notion of information), but Shannon’s approach can be adapted to give the same result with some relatively intuitive assumptions. John Collier Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Associate Philosophy, University of KwaZulu-Natal http://web.ncf.ca/collier From: Fis [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of tozziart...@libero.it Sent: Sunday, 11 December 2016 5:57 PM To: fis@listas.unizar.es Subject: [Fis] A provocative issue Dear FISers, I know that some of you are going to kill me, but there’s something that I must confess. I notice, from the nice issued raised by Francesco Rizzo, Joseph Brenner, John Collier, that the main concerns are always energetic/informational arguments and accounts. Indeed, the current tenets state that all is information, information being a real quantity that can be measured through informational entropies. But… I ask to myself, is such a tenet true? When I cook the pasta, I realize that, by my point of view, the cooked pasta encompasses more information than the not-cooked one, because it acquires the role of something that I can eat in order to increase my possibility to preserve myself in the hostile environment that wants to destroy me. However, by the point of view of the bug who eats the non-cooked pasta, my cooked pasta displays less information for sure. Therefore, information is a very subjective measure that, apart from its relationship with the observer, does not mean very much… Who can state that an event or a fact displays more information than another one? And, please, do not counteract that information is a quantifiable, objective reality, because it can be measured through informational entropy… Informational entropy, in its original Shannon’s formulation, stands for an ergodic process (page 8 of the original 1948 Shannon’s seminal paper), i.e.: every sequence produced by the processes is the same in statistical properties, or, in other words, a traveling particle always crosses all the points of its phase space. However, in physics and biology, the facts and events are never ergodic. Statistical homogeneity is just a fiction, if we evaluate the world around us and our brain/mind. Therefore, the role of information could not be as fundamental as currently believed. P.S.: topology analyzes information by another point of view, but it’s an issue for the next time, I think… Arturo Tozzi AA Professor Physics, University North Texas Pediatrician ASL Na2Nord, Italy Comput Intell Lab, University Manitoba http://arturotozzi.webnode.it/ ___ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] A provocative issue
Bravo Arturo - I totally agree - in a paper I co-authored with Stuart Kauffman and others we talked abut the relativity of information and the fact that information is not an absolute. Here is the abstract of the paper and an excerpt from the paper that discusses the relativity of information. The full papers available at: https://www.academia.edu/783503/Propagating_organization_an_enquiry Best wishes - Bob Logan Kauffman, Stuart, Robert K. Logan, Robert Este, Randy Goebel, David Hobill and Ilya Smulevich. 2007. Propagating Organization: An Inquiry. Biology and Philosophy 23: 27-45. Propagating Organization: An Enquiry - Stuart Kauffman, Robert K. Logan, Robert Este, Randy Goebel, David Hobill and lIlya Shmulevich Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle Washington Abstract: Our aim in this article is to attempt to discuss propagating organization of process, a poorly articulated union of matter, energy, work, constraints and that vexed concept, “information”, which unite in far from equilibrium living physical systems. Our hope is to stimulate discussions by philosophers of biology and biologists to further clarify the concepts we discuss here. We place our discussion in the broad context of a “general biology”, properties that might well be found in life anywhere in the cosmos, freed from the specific examples of terrestrial life after 3.8 billion years of evolution. By placing the discussion in this wider, if still hypothetical, context, we also try to place in context some of the extant discussion of information as intimately related to DNA, RNA and protein transcription and translation processes. While characteristic of current terrestrial life, there are no compelling grounds to suppose the same mechanisms would be involved in any life form able to evolve by heritable variation and natural selection. In turn, this allows us to discuss at least briefly, the focus of much of the philosophy of biology on population genetics, which, of course, assumes DNA, RNA, proteins, and other features of terrestrial life. Presumably, evolution by natural selection – and perhaps self-organization - could occur on many worlds via different causal mechanisms. Here we seek a non-reductionist explanation for the synthesis, accumulation, and propagation of information, work, and constraint, which we hope will provide some insight into both the biotic and abiotic universe, in terms of both molecular self reproduction and the basic work energy cycle where work is the constrained release of energy into a few degrees of freedom. The typical requirement for work itself is to construct those very constraints on the release of energy that then constitute further work. Information creation, we argue, arises in two ways: first information as natural selection assembling the very constraints on the release of energy that then constitutes work and the propagation of organization. Second, information in a more extended sense is “semiotic”, that is about the world or internal state of the organism and requires appropriate response. The idea is to combine ideas from biology, physics, and computer science, to formulate explanatory hypotheses on how information can be captured and rendered in the expected physical manifestation, which can then participate in the propagation of the organization of process in the expected biological work cycles to create the diversity in our observable biosphere. Our conclusions, to date, of this enquiry suggest a foundation which views information as the construction of constraints, which, in their physical manifestation, partially underlie the processes of evolution to dynamically determine the fitness of organisms within the context of a biotic universe. Section 4. The Relativity of Information In Sections 2 we have argued that the Shannon conception of information are not directly suited to describe the information of autonomous agents that propagate their organization. In Section 3 we have defined a new form of information, instructional or biotic information as the constraints that direct the flow of free energy to do work. The reader may legitimately ask the question “isn’t information just information?”, i.e., an invariant like the speed of light. Our response to this question is no, and to then clarify what seems arbitrary about the definition of information. Instructional or biotic information is a useful definition for biotic systems just as Shannon information was useful for telecommunication channel engineering, and Kolmogorov (Shiryayev 1993) information was useful for the study of information compression with respect to Turing machines. The definition of information is relative and depends on the context in which it is to be considered. There appears to be no such thing as absolute information that is an invariant that applies to all circumstances. Just as Shannon defined information
