information, thermod. & phys.

From: Pedro C. Marijuan <[email protected]>
Date: Fri 16 Jan 1998 - 14:06:43 CET

Dear colleagues,

just a few comments motivated by the really exciting topics raised so far.

1. INFO & THERMOD. ENTROPY

For my taste Werner's points capture very appropiately the subject. The
congruence between Boltzmann & Shannon's approaches seems very well
established. In my own language, the former refers to the possible number
of space-time dislocations and the latter to positional combinations of
signs. Appropiately chosing their definition spaces (Werner & Jerry) they
coalesce into a unitary approach.

However, if we take seriously the possibility of using the distinctional
signs (remember, those very ones that Tom, Soeren and I agreed last month
that they might constitute the info "grain") following a "compositional"
strategy instead of a positional one, then Karl Javorsky (1995) may be
right and we could arrange for a new counting based on "multidimensional
partitions" in order to give the real communicational possibilities of this
alternative compositional info strategy. Let me remember the hint I made
that this "partitional calculus" might underly the cellular signaling
system mysterious processing operations.

In general, compositional info "entropy" would be different from the
Shannon's & Boltzmann�s countings. Actually the math. relationship between
them could be quite curious: depending on the chosen set of distinctional
signs there might appear max. and min. values-- and relevant biological
parameters, eg of the genetic code, would seat precisely on such min.max
values! (again I am following Javorszky)

Actually, most of what Werner calls "free information", term which itself
is highly thought-provoking, could have the form of this compositional
info, far easier to be used in order to connect "compositions of sets" (and
to count the consequences of their inner productive and degradative
processes).

2. INFO AND THE PROBLEM OF "STRANGE EXISTENCES"

In his Volume 6 of "A la Recherche du Temp Perdu", Marcel Proust disagrees
with the conventional views about nations as entire entities. He insists
that they have to be contemplated from a perspective of "continuous
creation" and degradation, far above the level of individuals, generating
genuine collective organisms involved in cooperative and antagonistic
behaviors ... Can our present info & physics discussion give any hints
about this strange "way of existence"?

Also, exchanging views with Vicente Salas (participating in our fis.list
too) about the way firms and companies have to be understood, he expoused
me to some economists' discussions about "the nature of the firm"...
Another strange "way of existence" irreducible to any unidimensional
analysis, and involved in continuous creation and annihilation processes,
endowed with quite peculiar counting systems, conservation laws and
optimization principles, can be contemplated.

The orchestrated cellular dances between protein synthesis/protein
degradation and the organismic ones betwen cell reproduction and cell death
appear as the biological counterparts (and the final source) of the above
"strange" ways of existence.

"Informational existences", one might apply to these entities that exist in
ways utterly unfamiliar to physics.

3. THE INFO AND THE PHYSICS PARADIGMS, AND LIFE

Maybe we have taken for granted a way of thinking about "existences"
derived from classical physics but also from positional languages and
alphabetic writing (I follow Mcluhan and Andreas Goppold in this regard)
that biases our own views about the political, economic, and social realms,
and even about physics itself. Perhaps some aspects of the present "quantum
schyzophrenia" might stem from a series of underlying ontological choices
about "ways of existence" that we have been historically unable to overcome
(see also Otto Rossler in BioSystems FIS 94).

The philosopher Ortega y Gasset wrote a wonderful essay about "Oknos el
Soguero" (Oknos, the rope maker) where he comes to say just that: that
Greek, Roman and Western thought left aside the archaic way of thinking
based on the unceassant weaving and unweaving of Nature's own structures.
Nilly-willy recent molecular biology has just stumbled upon that very fact.
And it might be a fundamental constitutive aspect of most of the
supra-biological existences: neuronal, economic, social, etc.

So, Koichiro final question about info & physics, already very cogently
commented by previous co-discussants, could be restated from this point of
view as saying that the current bio (and complexity) revolution might
contribute to a new vertical info paradigm coherently contemplating "info
existences", perhaps extending to realms of physics too. Who knows whether
something interesting in this regard might be meaningful to aleviate
quantum schyzophrenia...

-----------------------------------------------------------
Pedro C. Mariju�n --FAX 34 976 761 861 --TEL 34 976 761 927
Dto. Ingenieria Electronica y Comunicaciones
CPS, Universidad de Zaragoza
Zaragoza 50015, SPAIN
Received on Fri Jan 16 14:38:38 1998

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