s my last or the week: Replying to Gavin -- I think you make the 'error of misplaced concreteness'. Information theory -- and all theories and laws are modeling tools, not actual phenomena. So, it is also true that when an apple falls it is not being pulled by gravitation Gravitation is our way of understanding the falling. We all know these things, so there is no need to point this out.
STAN On Sat, Apr 9, 2011 at 11:45 PM, Gavin Ritz <garr...@xtra.co.nz> wrote: Ted Thank you Mark. This promises to be interesting. My view may best be introduced by stating that I believe we are in the business of creating a new science that will depend on new abstractions. These abstractions will extend from the notion of "information" as a first class citizen, as opposed to our default, the "particle." The latter has qualities that can be measured and in fact the very idea of metrics is bound to this notion of thingness. GR: I just can't see the evidence that information has anything to do with living organisms. Much of the dialog here works with the problem of naming what that it is. GR: They look more like logical operators, such as Imperative logic, declarative logic and interrogative logic. Having said that... > 1. Is it necessary/useful/reasonable to make a strict distinction between information as a phenomenon and information measures as quantitative or qualitative characteristics of information? Thank you Mark. This promises to be interesting. My view may best be introduced by stating that I believe we are in the business of creating a new science that will depend on new abstractions. These abstractions will extend from the notion of "information" as a first class citizen, as opposed to our default, the "particle." The latter has qualities that can be measured and in fact the very idea of metrics is bound to this notion of thingness. Because we will not leave existing theoretical tools behind, we need a bridge between the abstractions of "effect" in the particle model (fields and forces) and the corresponding "effect" in the information model. I am fine with extending the metaphor far enough to say that we need something like parametrics in our new science of information. But I really balk at using the notion from one system in another without some sort of morphism. Much of the dialog here works with the problem of naming what that it is. Unfortunately, the abstractions of fields and forces are a very poor formal model, because they are defined not by their essence but by their metrics. Having said that... > 1. Is it necessary/useful/reasonable to make a strict distinction between information as a phenomenon and information measures as quantitative or qualitative characteristics of information? I am rather certain that there is a very real distinction, because of how we define the problem. After all, we are not asking how do information and information metrics fit within the confines of rather limited abstractions. At least I am not. But the distinction does not allow for full orthogonality from set theory (the formalism of things), because we want to be able to model and engineer observable phenomenon in a cleaner way. This should be the test of any serious proposal, in my view. This requirement is why discussion on these matters often moves into category theory, after the fashion of Barwise and others. A spanning morphism can extend the notion of parameters to information space, but only when considered in the situation of that origin (meaning measurable space in the traditional sense). > 2. Are there types or kinds of information that are not encompassed by the general theory of information (GTI)? I believe so. Some types clearly have laws that affect the world, which is how you scope the types covered by GTI. But just as particle physics finds it handy to have virtual particles and transcendent symmetries over them, so will we have information types that do not touch the world in an observable way; these will be required to support clean laws of behavior, yet to be convincingly proposed. > 3. Is it necessary/useful/reasonable to make a distinction between information and an information carrier? I suppose you will get universal agreement on this, at least here. But... I was just at NIH at a rather introspective conference on structural biology, which assumes that the form of the carriers collectively forms the code of the system. They have dropped billions (quite literally) into metrics associated with these laws of information form but are ready to abandon the concept as a key technique. Clearly there is a system-level conveyance of information that "carries" an organizational imperative. If these can be said to be supported with the metaphoric virtual particle with the local interaction governed by the form of the carrier, then the answer is both yes and no. I am intrigued by the notion introduced here recently that suggests "intelligence" as inhabiting this new, non-parametrizable space. --Ted _____ Ted Goranson tedgoran...@mac.com http://www.sirius-beta.com
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