Re: [Fis] FW: The Information Flow
Step Two of *Learn to Count in Twelve Easy Steps*
*What happened previously:*
Step 1.:
We have introduced additional describing aspects of the logical sentence
a+b=c. Next to a,b,c, we also make use of u=b-a, k=b-2a, t=2b-3a, q=a-2b,
s=17-(a+b|c), w=2a-3b. For a graphical presentation, see:
http://32o2m99e.utawebhost.at/index.php?option=com_contentview=articleid=130:01engraphcatid=9:angollang=en
Discussion of Step 1:
Joe from Switzerland writes : [this approach]... potentially quite
dangerous. Alfred Korzybski (*Science and *Society) had an easy theory of
the mind that a high-school student could learn, and it led to
scientology.
Answer:
Leaving the orthodox way can well end in sectarian extremism. The approach
of the Twelve Easy Steps is insofar subversive that it disobeys Teacher’s
instruction: “Thou shalt not look into (a1-b1)-(a2-b2) if a1+b1=c=a2+b2 and
a1#a2”. Where this might end is indeed unpredictable.
*Step 2:*
Today we introduce the set of additions we shall use. We generate the 136
smallest pairs of a,b and their aspects {a,b,c,k,u,t,q,s,w}.
Reason why:
We demonstrate properties of the individual before the background of the
multitude. To be able to do so, we need a multitude. This is the reason for
which we create the multitude.
Why not less:
We see that Nature uses two sets of information carriers that come both in
triplets of four units. Therefore, we need 4 basic units. We see that the
basis of counting is related to the expression 2*i**2, and this gives
2*4**2=32.
Why not more:
We shall introduce the terms “sequential” and “contemporary” in Step 6. We
shall see in Step 10 that congruence between sequenced and contemporaneous
states will become inexact above n=136.
Data set:
The data set we use can be downloaded from:
http://32o2m99e.utawebhost.at/index.php?option=com_atrendezview=table1lang=en
Remark: The column “Permutáció” (permutation) shows the sequence of the
arguments used at the creation of the table. Its necessity will be
discussed in Step 10. Presently: disregard.
2012/11/19 Robert Ulanowicz u...@umces.edu
Quoting John Collier colli...@ukzn.ac.za:
As I have tried to argue above, to avoid reductionism in reality as
opposed to in logic and mathematics I think we need the additional
condition of dissipation (what I call nonHamiltonian mechanics
elsewhere -- the usual condition of conservation breaks down due to
the loss of free energy to the system).
John,
Your point underscores my earlier one. Dissipation is emblematic of
entropic processes -- which make ours an open world. There's no
wishing that away!
Bob
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Re: [Fis] FW: The Information Flow
Dear folks, Overall, I agree with Gordana. I have one, perhaps very large, correction though. I will go through this bit by bit (no pun intended). I have been planning to jump into this discussion, but a visit here (UFBA) by Stewart Newman has kept me busy. He gave lots of examples of non-computable processes in development in showing that developmental units could be retained through changes in both function and genes. Gerd Muller had told me this almost ten years ago, but Stewart has some remarkable new cases, some of which have implications for evolution and phylogeny. At 12:54 PM 2012/11/19, Bruno Marchal wrote: Dear Joe, On 19 Nov 2012, at 12:26, joe.bren...@bluewin.ch wrote: Dear Bruno, Gordana and All, What I am resisting is any form of numerical-computational totalitarianism. Joe, if you have an idea of an effective procedure that is not captured by the Turing machine, recursive function model, and you can make clear why it doesn't then I will listen to that complaint. Turing did, in fact, give a idea of how this might work in unpublished papers of his. He was also the originator of diffusion-reaction processes (I would not call them mechanisms, but they are commonly called so in the literature, since it has become fashionable to call processes that are not mechanical in the classical sense mechanisms). This sort of process is fundamental to Stuart's arguments about the non-reducibility of differences in developmental units to either genetic differences or to functional differences. Note, in passing, the role of differences here. If information is a difference that makes a difference, then we are talking about types of information here. Actual systems that realized Turing's mathematics were only created some time later, with the Brusselator (an autocatalytic reaction devised by Prigogine, but it is more) in the material form of the BelousovZhabotinsky reaction (BZ reaction) from the 1950s, but they are very common in nature, such as in forming the stripes on a zebra, or the correct end of a severed hydra. I have some remarks about computations to make next, which agree in general with Gordana's remarks, but add another element that I think is essential. Computationalism would be totalitarian if there was a computable universal programs for the total computable functions, and only them. But it is easy to prove that such a total universal machine cannot exist. This sort of machine is often called an 'oracle'. Greg Chaitin, who originated algorithmic information theory independently of Kolmogorov, did a construction of a number omega (my email programme won't take the Greek capital letter). If we knew that number, then we could tell whether any program halts. We could also give the first n digits of the product of any program if we knew the first n digits of omega (assuming the same programming language). The digits of omega, though, are provably random, which means that there is no program shorter than n that can compute the first n digits of the product for every program. So there are no oracles. We can get this from the unsolvability of the halting problem, but Chaitin's approach shows what an oracle would have to look like. The price of having universal machine is that it will be a partial machine, undefined on many arguments. Then such machine can be shown to be able to defeat all reductionist or totalitarian theories about their own behavior. That is why I say that computationalism is a vaccine against totalitarianism or reductionism. This is where I part company. There are two notions of computation. The first is the sense of computation. The first and most widely used is that of an algorithm (specifically a Knuth algorithm). It is equivalent to a program that halts, for all intents. There are programs that don't halt, which are partial functions: there is no algorithm that gives a value for every input. However, a program that could compute such a function (an oracle) would be able to compute the first n, for any n, numbers. It just can't compute them all. For example, the three body problem is known to be uncomputable. However, with a computer powerful enough, and some epsilon of some value, we could computer the later state of the system to within epsilon for any arbitrary finite time t. What we can't do is solve reaction diffusion systems. Why is that? It is because dissipation is an essential part of their dynamics -- they need an energy input to work (this is true of all dissipative systems in the Prigogine sense -- I say Prigogine sense since there are systems that self-organize through dissipation that are not dissipative systems, they are only self-reorganizing, not spontaneously self-organizing -- some people confuse the two, or are careless about distinguishing them, such as Stuart Kauffman). In any case, to reach a steady state in finite time (e.g., the BZ reaction oscillations) they do the noncomputable in finite time. Harmonics in the Solar System, such as the1-1
Re: [Fis] FW: The Information Flow
Quoting John Collier colli...@ukzn.ac.za: As I have tried to argue above, to avoid reductionism in reality as opposed to in logic and mathematics I think we need the additional condition of dissipation (what I call nonHamiltonian mechanics elsewhere -- the usual condition of conservation breaks down due to the loss of free energy to the system). John, Your point underscores my earlier one. Dissipation is emblematic of entropic processes -- which make ours an open world. There's no wishing that away! Bob ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
[Fis] Fw: The Information Flow
Dear Pedro,
I and I am sure most of us are grateful when you open up the debate in this
way. To go farther, though, people must be ready to ask many questions about
familiar concepts such as the following:
1. Are there serious alternatives to Aristotelian causality?
2. Is it possible to combine insights from Heraclitus and Parmenides to get
the advantages of both in complex domains?
3. Can non-mechanistic thought be expressed in sufficiently rigorous terms to
avoid slipping into non-sense and non-science?
4. In reply to your Why?, can an explanation of the refusal of people to
accept the necessary changes in mind-set be related to genetic + environmental
factors that also determine other doubtful polarizations (like voting for
Romney-Ryan) or criminal behavior?
As I have tried to express them in this forum from time to time in relation to
other issues, my answer to all the above questions is yes. But it takes new
work and a new attitude. As a personal example, I have asked about 12 (!)
mathematicians to help me express the calculus of implications of my Logic in
Reality in alternative, more familiar terms. None has either done so nor said
that it is not possible.
As another example, after some effort, the first article in proper English by
Wu Kun of the Institute for the Philosophy of Information in Xi'An has just
been published on-line in Information. People who assume, however, that his
view of philosophy is not of critical importance to information science are
making just the kind of mistake Pedro tells us to avoid! It is a
metaphilosophy, a recasting of the underlying assumptions of scientific -
natural and social - thought in informational terms. I urge you all to look at
it.
Best wishes,
Joseph
- Original Message -
From: PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ
To: fis@listas.unizar.es
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2012 10:32 PM
Subject: Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
Dear FISers,
Is it interesting the discussion on whether those informational entities
contain realizations of the Aristotelian scheme of causality or not?
The cell, in my view, conspicuously fails --it would be too artifactual an
scheme. Some parts of the sensory paths of advanced nervous systems seem to
separate some of those causes --but only in a few parts or patches of the
concerned pathway. For instance, in visual processing the what and the
how/where seem to be travelling together undifferentiated along the optic
nerve and are separated --more or less-- after the visual superior colliculus
in the midbrain before discharging onto the visual cortex. The really big flow
of spikes arriving each instant (many millions every few milisec) are mixed and
correlated with themselves and with other top-down and bottom-up preexisting
flows in multiple neural mappings... and further, when those flows mix with the
association areas under the influence of language, then, and only then, all
those logic and conceptual categorizations of human thought are enacted in the
ephemeral synaptic networks.
I am optimistic that a new Heraclitean way of thinking boils down in network
science, neuroinformatics, systems biology, bioinformation etc. Neither the
Parmenidean eliminative fixism of classical reductionists, nor the
Aristotelian organicism of systemicists. Say that this is a caricature. However
you cannot bathe twice in the same river not just because we all are caught
into the universal physical flow of photons and forces, but for the
Heraclitean flux of our own neurons and brains, for the inner torrents of the
aggregated information flows. The same for whatever cells, societies, etc. and
their physical structures for info transportation.
Either we produce an interesting new vision of the world, finally making sense
of those perennial metaphors among the different (informational) realms, or
information science will continue to be that small portion of incoherent
patches more or less close to information theory or to artificial intelligence.
In spite of decades of bla-bla- about information revolution and information
society and tons of ad hoc literature, the educated thought of our contemporary
society continues to be deeply mechanistic!
Why?
best wishes
---Pedro
-snip-
I think it of some interest that I have
previously ( 2006 On
Aristotle’s conception of causality.
General Systems Bulletin 35:
11.) proposed that the Aristotelian 'formal
cause' determines both
'what happens' and 'how it happens', and that
the combination of
this with material cause ('what it happens
to') delivers 'where' it
happens.
(For completeness sake I add that efficient
cause determines only
'when it happens', while final cause points
to 'why it happens'. It
would be quite exciting to find that these
informations were also
carried on separate tracts.)
It would be exciting, as that would seem to refute the
Aristotelean
[Fis] FW: The Information Flow (From John Collier)
*From:* John Collier
*Sent:* 21 October 2012 11:22 PM
*To:* fis
*Subject:* Re: [Fis] The Information Flow
At 06:14 PM 2012/10/21, Stanley N Salthe wrote:
Pedro -- it is of interest to me that
On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 3:38 PM, PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es wrote:
Dear FISers,
Continuing with the comments on the how versus the what, it
is an important topic in mammalian (vertebrate) nervous
systems. They are subtended by mostly separate neural tracts
(though partially interconnected), it is the dorsal stream,
specialized in the how where, and the ventral stream stream
about the what.
-snip-
I think it of some interest that I have previously ( 2006 On
Aristotle’s conception of causality. General Systems Bulletin 35:
11.) proposed that the Aristotelian 'formal cause' determines both
'what happens' and 'how it happens', and that the combination of
this with material cause ('what it happens to') delivers 'where' it
happens.
(For completeness sake I add that efficient cause determines only
'when it happens', while final cause points to 'why it happens'. It
would be quite exciting to find that these informations were also
carried on separate tracts.)
It would be exciting, as that would seem to refute the Aristotelean idea
of the four causes as four aspects of all causation. However an
information channel can carry some part of the information from its
source, which would be a sort of filter or abstraction of the source.
So, for example, a channel might be sensitive only to the how, but not
the what, and vice versa. A channel is fundamentally a mapping of
classes from a source to a sink that through instances that retain the
mapping (see Barwsie and Seligman, Information Flow: The Logic of
Distributed Systems). So in this case, a channel sensitive to, say,
what, would retain the what classifications of the source in a way
that the sink could use, but perhaps not any other information. The
channels themselves could still maintain all four aspects of
Aristotelean causation, so Aristotle need not be refuted. This would
still be very interesting, though. I am unclear what functional
advantage there would be, though we certainly manage to separate these
causes in much of our thinking (perhaps even, we can't help it).
Cheers,
John
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