RE: Clarifying our aims

From: <[email protected]>
Date: Fri 24 May 2002 - 09:57:46 CEST

Dear FISers,

Our discussion is quite hot and it seems that the definition of information
becomes clearer. However a significant part of the discussion is rotating
around the old question what comes first, mind or matter. Is there
information in non-living physical world or not, etc. etc. Karl is right, if
you want to find it there, you will do this. But what is external world
without observation, i.e. without imposing to it some information? Only a
small subset of possible worlds would bear regularity of observation
(defined by a small and maybe unique subset of fundamental constants), thus
you will find information outside. But what was the choice of realization of
this world? In any realization we come to the antinomy of goal and
mechanism. Inconsistencies exist in many trivial phrases like "mechanism of
goal" or something similar. Such "mechanism of goal" will appear
simultaneously as the goal will disappear and also information will
disappear as a realization of a choice, but deterministic physical law will
appear. Actually this trick was realized in classical physics. It can
continue infinitely and we will not come to understanding what is
information. Mind and matter are the different embeddings of the same
reality (we could try to define it as information but this will also not be
useful).

If any mechanistic picture with classical physical laws contains information
not for us but by itself, this term is redundant. We are playing around old
paradoxes: we need some pre-existing information to define what is
information. By defining information we may come to the conclusion that it
is all (pan-informationalism or pan-semiotism), which is the same to the
statement that it is nothing. Information belongs to Vorstellung, which is
nothing without Wille. So (the structurized by Wille) Vorstellung contains
some information not by itself but for Wille, otherwise the term is
redundant. Deterministic physics could exist without this term, but
Aristotelian physics could not (I mean the correlates of this term like form
and entelechy). It is difficult to construct quantitative picture based on
qualitativism of the Aristotelian physics but quantum mechanics is developed
in this direction.

As I wrote earlier (and I would be in the line with Karl as well as with
James but maybe in other words and expressions), information exists where
some reflective system can choose its final state, it needs some knowledge
about this state and this knowledge is information. Is this tautology? Yes
and no. Information includes some (virtual) movement from future to present,
and as I wrote earlier, the statement of Socrates "knowledge is remembrance"
is quite useful. It seems to be a tautology, but this is a creative
tautology. Wisdom is a most perfect "remembrance". You cannot "remember"
future precisely, you may be only more or less correct. A message may be
read by different ways and to hold simultaneously a set of potential
readings in one superposition is important. However absolute relativism will
lead to the absence of information, so if our messages can be read by
absolutely different ways our discussion will not contain any information.
This may exist if we define similar terms differently and have no consensus
on that.

As for reductionistic definitions of information following Shannon, they may
be useful in concrete applications but not for general definition of
information. We need to interact with external reality by some way in order
to get measure of order or disorder. Such interaction will be uncontrollable
to the extent described by Zeno aporias, G�del theorem and Heisenberg's
uncertainty principle (actually these three are the same thing). Thus where
will be objective order or disorder measure? Robert Rosen stated that
complexity is not the property of a system, but the property of its
description (this includes its internal description). We can come to very
well ordered world, but this will be our world, not just external and it
cannot be completely described in terms of entropy.

As for positive definition of information, it could perfectly be as in the
letter of Karl from May 20 (the first definition as well as the second:
"Information points out one specific realization among several possible
realization"). Actually we cannot say afterwards that several realizations
existed after a choice has been made, and any definition of information will
be paradoxical. Further Karl develops some quantitative principles defining
objective value of information. Information exists for reflective systems
realizing measurement. It has pragmatic value and it has objective value not
is the sense of externality but in the sense of perfection of canons
realized during measurement process.

Best regards,
Andrei Igamberdiev
   
Received on Fri May 24 09:59:03 2002

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