Re: information, thermod. & phys.

Dear Pedro, Koichiro and All:

Pedro's message generated several questions which may be worth
exploring.

Pedro C. Marijuan wrote:
>
> 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.

Should information be limited to operations on space - time objects or
should material objects be admitted into the discussion? Tom S. at NCI
has focused on the materiality of DNA information as manifested in
sequences of material objects - the individual bases.
If physical objects are admitted into the discussion, how are the
material attributes to be enumerated and counted as 'information'?
>
> 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.

I do not understand how the term "compositional" is being used here.
In the sense of matheamtical functions ( f • g • h ) over a sequence of
sets?
What would be the nature of the objects being composed?

> 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)

I do not understand the proposed relations between compositions and the
min / max.
Could you be more explicit in the nature of the counting operations and
the functions?
>
> 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.

How would one distinguish between the term "strange way of existence"
and non-stationary systems which have a "kernel" of stability but
otherwise fluctuate in dimensionality? Other evolutionary examples of
such systems could be given...
 
> 3. THE INFO AND THE PHYSICS PARADIGMS, AND LIFE
>
> 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.
>
I believe that our current state of knowledge is sufficient to organize
systems in terms of the "degrees of organization" - which may be related
to Pedro's 'vertical' information.
The problem becomes how to define the interrelationships between
structures of different degrees of organization - such as an atom, a
cell, a human being and a social system. Is the difference between
these objects merely information or is it also scale and materiality and
relationships with external systems?

Jerry LR Chandler
George Mason University
Received on Thu Jan 22 04:14:43 1998