First, a few responses. I agree with Hans von Baeyer. Pedro’s kindness is
magic.
I agree with Gyorgy Darvas that quarks communicate.
I also agree with Jerry Chandler. Brute force is not the major mover of
history. Values and virtues count. A lot. In fact, a culture organizes
itself by calling one way of doing things evil—brute force—and another way
of doing things a value and a virtue. Our way is the value and the
virtue. The ways of others are brute force and evil. We see cooperation
and
warmth among us. But only enmity and destruction among them.
The brute force is not within groups, where values, virtues, and
compassion prevail. It’s between groups. It’s in the pecking order battles
between groups.
Which means, in answer to Marcus Abundis, yes, groups struggle for
position in inter-group hierarchies like chickens in a barnyard. For
example,
America and China are vying right now for top position in the barnyard of
nations. Russia’s in that battle, too. On a lower level, so are Saudi
Arabia and Iran, whose proxy war in Syria for pecking order dominance has cost
a
quarter of a million lives. That’s brute force. Between groups whose
citizens are often lovely and loving to each other. Whose citizens are proud
of their values and virtues.
Now for a final statement.
Information exists in a context. That’s not at all surprising.
Information is all about context. As the writings of Guenther Witzany hint.
And
as Ludwig Wittgenstein also suggested. Information is relational.
Information does not exist in a vacuum. It connects participants. And it
makes
things happen. When it’s not connecting participants, it’s not information
FIS gets fired up to a high energy level when discussing the definition of
information and its relationship to Shannon’s entropic information
equation. Alas, these discussions tend to remove the context. And context is
what gives information its indispensable ingredient, meaning.
There are two basic approaches in science:
· the abstract mathematical;
· and the observational empirical.
Mathematical abstractionists dwell on definitions and equations.
Empirical observers gather facts. Darwin was an observational empiricist. I’d
like
to see more of Darwin’s kind of science in the world of information theory.
One of Darwin’s most important contributions was not the concept of
natural selection. It was an approach that Darwin got from Kant and from his
grandfather Erasmus. That approach? Lay out the history of the cosmos on a
timeline and piece together its story. In chronological order. Piece
together the saga of how this cosmos has created itself. Including the
self-motivated, self-creation of life.
Communication plays a vital role in this story. It appears in the first
10(-32) of a second of the cosmos’ existence, when quarks communicated
using attraction and repulsion cues. OK, it’s not quite right to call the cues
attraction and repulsion cues. When two quarks sized each other up, they
interpreted the signals of the strong force differently. If you were a
quark, another quark might size you up and promptly speed away. But a quark
of
a different variety might detect the same signals, find them wildly
attractive, and speed in your direction. One quark’s meat was another’s
poison,
even in that first form of communication in the cosmos.
Information is not a stand-alone. Again, it’s contextual. It’s ruled
by what Guenther Witzany calls syntax, semantics, and, most important of
all, pragmatics. Its meaning comes from where it fits in a bigger picture.
Were the signals quarks exchanged information? Not according to many of
the definitions in FIS. Some of those definitions say that to be regarded
as information, a sender must deliberately signify something symbolically.
She must, for example, want to warn you about a poisoned apple. She must
put that message in symbols, like the words “poisoned apple,” then convey
that signal to a receiver. If she doesn’t want to see you poisoned, she
might text you, “watch out for poisoned apples.” I’m not sure whether the
definitions extant in FIS demand that you look at her text or not. Much less
whether you act on it.
In my latest book, The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates, I
propose a different definition of information. Information is anything a
receiver
can decode, anything he can decipher. How do you know a receiver has
decoded a message? Through the decoder’s actions. If you are a quark and you
detect my strong force, you either scoot away or you rush over and join me.
You act. If you are a neurosurgeon looking at an mri, you make internal
decisions, mental decisions. You don’t move physically. Not at first. But
you move mentally. You imagine your scalpel poised over a different spot
than you might have picked before seeing the mri.
Information is anything a receiver can decode. So starlight reaching
planet earth 4.5 billion years ago, nearly half a billion years before the
appearance of the first life, was not information. There was no one or no
thing that interpreted it, translated it, or acted on it. But starlight in
the
age of the Babylonians 2,600 years ago was highly informational. Entire
teams of scribes and priests spent their lives observing it and interpreting
it. Many of their interpretations were detailed bullet points of
political and personal advice to the ruler. Was there motion in response to
starlight? You bet. Starlight literally moved the troops and policies of
empires.
And today, when there are tens of thousands of professional astronomers
and millions of amateurs with telescopes, all churning out data and emails
to each other, the amount of information in starlight has skyrocketed. But,
in fact, the actual starlight has not increased. Not a bit. It’s the
number of interpreters that’s shot up. And with the interpreters, something
else has mushroomed: the information, the interpretation, and the theories
along with their supporting or opposing “facts.”
The timeline of communication from quarks to empires is crucial. It’s the
natural history we need to see the evolution of information. No matter
what we define information to be. The timeline of the cosmos is context on
the biggest scale. It can make new meaning of facts we scarcely see. It
can make more phenomena we experience every day but do not see into, guess
what? Information.
That’s a timeline I’m working on.
Thanks for having me in your group. And thanks for giving me a chance to
share thoughts with you.
howard
____________
Howard Bloom
Author of: The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces
of History ("mesmerizing"-The Washington Post),
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st
Century ("reassuring and sobering"-The New Yorker),
The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism ("A
tremendously enjoyable book." James Fallows, National Correspondent, The
Atlantic),
The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates ("Bloom's argument will rock
your world." Barbara Ehrenreich),
How I Accidentally Started the Sixties ("Wow! Whew! Wild!
Wonderful!" Timothy Leary), and
The Mohammed Code ("A terrifying book…the best book I've read on Islam."
David Swindle, PJ Media).
www.howardbloom.net
Former Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute; Former Visiting
Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University.
Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; Founder, Space Development
Steering Committee; Founder: The Group Selection Squad; Founding Board
Member: Epic of Evolution Society; Founding Board Member, The Darwin Project;
Founder: The Big Bang Tango Media Lab; member: New York Academy of
Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American
Psychological Society, Academy of Political Science, Human Behavior and
Evolution
Society, International Society for Human Ethology, Scientific Advisory Board
Member, Lifeboat Foundation; Editorial Board Member, Journal of Space
Philosophy; Board member and member of Board of Governors, National Space
Society.
In a message dated 2/1/2016 8:46:55 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es writes:
Thanks Howard. Please, at your convenience send the concluding comments to
the fis list.
_______________________________________________
Fis mailing list
Fis@listas.unizar.es
http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
