Re: talking exactly about what we are talking about

From: Rafael Capurro <[email protected]>
Date: Thu 30 May 2002 - 22:18:33 CEST

Jerry,

The question concerning metaphysics is
a difficult one and it is for me impossible
to make a short and understandable
comment on it, particularly within a forum
of natural scientists who may not have
the philosophical background which I use
with dealing with this question and which
is related not only to the long history of
this question (the question of being)
(starting with the Presocratics...) and
geting into Heidegger's basic distinction
between metaphysics and ontology as
well as into the postmodern debate (particularly
in the US (Quine, Rorty, Davidson, Putnam etc.),
France (Derrida), Italy (Vattimo)...

I like very much Vattimo's insight, that Being is
not any more a strong and leading concept in
philosophy (and science?), i.e. that we cannot
construct any more a perennial building called
'reality', not even saying, as you seem to suggest, that
all reality is 'made of' atoms (or energy, or...)

This does not mean, I believe, that we cannot
effectively work (=do good science) with, for
instance, the atomistic paradigm (or the
informationistic one!), but that we have no
constraint to create a new metaphysics. The
alternative to this is a plurality of ontologies
i.e. of conceptions of what we suppose to be
'real', taking for instance the axiom: everything
is made of atoms (or whatever)...and looking
if and how 'reality' answers to our ontological
castings. In this sense. In other words, we
give up a 'strong' (or 'metaphysical') foundationalist
ambition (and this has also valuable practical
consequences for everyday life...). Put it more
simply: reality (or 'nature') seems much more rich with
regard to its ontological dimensions as we can ever (?) imagine.

The consequence of this is a little bit more
common sense in our ideas (and discussions) i.e.
a little bit less ambitious (scientific or other kind)
thinking. My colleague Luciano Floridi from
Oxford University has written a paper on information
ethics which is indeed based on a metaphysics (!)
of information (i.e. of the idea that 'everything' is
information: http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~floridi/ie.htm
I believe that this is a kind of puting the 'digital'
(and informational) view of what reality (or 'nature')
is supposed to 'be' as 'the' absolute one, i.e.
creating a metaphysics, instead of considering it
'just' as an ontology. This last position creates a
tension between, for instance, nature and digitality
that may be fruitful also in practical life. I have
written this in a contribution to a conference
in Brussels in August: http://www.capurro.de/patent.html
(the paper deals particularly with the question of
patenting organic life). See also my 'digital ontology'
which is in German, sorry, I will prepare an English
translation for Floridi next year:
http://www.capurro.de/digont.htm

It seems to me that we should be aware of different
ways of addressing reality, at least a scientific and
a philosophical one in the sense that philosophy starts
questioning what scientific (normal) paradigms take
for granted. The very simple fact of astonishing 'that
things are' may lead us (as Aristotle puts it) to ask
for 'reasons' why things are like they seem to be, but
maybe we should then go back to a kind of second
order astonishment that allows us not to remain
within the metaphysics of our scientific explanations.
This makes us able to continuing the process of
responding to 'what is'.
Cheers and sorry for being too long (and this is
also enough for this week! my bank account of
contributions is now 0
Cheers
Rafael

Prof. Dr. Rafael Capurro, FH Stuttgart, Hochschule der Medien (HdM)
University of Applied Sciences, Wolframstr. 32, 70191 Stuttgart, Germany
E-Mail: capurro@hdm-stuttgart.de; rafael@capurro.de
Tel. : +49 - 711 - 25 706 - 182
Universit�t Stuttgart, Institut f�r Philosophie, Dillmannstr. 15, 70049 Stuttgart, Germany
Private: Redtenbacherstr. 9, 76133 Karlsruhe, Germany. Tel.: +49 - 721 - 98 22 9 -22 (fax: -21)
Homepage in German/English/Spanish/French: www.capurro.de
ICIE (International Center for Information Ethics): http://icie.zkm.de
  -----Urspr�ngliche Nachricht-----
  Von: jlrchand@erols.com
  An: Multiple recipients of list FIS
  Gesendet: Donnerstag, 30. Mai 2002 19:52
  Betreff: Re: talking exactly about what we are talking about

  Dear Karl, Rafael, Werner, Pedro and All

  This message seeks to address several related points and hence is a bit long. The topic of this thread is exactly the related points to which I am referring. I close this long message with a plea for HELP!

  First, thank you Rafael for your excellent summary of the philosophical history of the concept of "thingedness." It covers the history up to the middle of the last century nicely. However, in the last fifty years, our basic understanding of life and being has been altered by the progress in molecular recognition, molecular biology, molecular nutrition, molecular neurology, etc. The basic premise of chemistry, that all (stable) matter of ordinary experience is composed from atoms of the atomic table has been shown to apply to life itself. This is a radical change in our knowledge of ourselves. Thus, the need for a new metaphysics.

  So, what is the metaphysics of information? My dictionary defines metaphysics

>1. A branch of philosophy that deals with first principles of things,
>including such concepts as being, substance, essence, time, space,
>cause, and identity; theoretical philosophy as the ultimate science

>of being and knowing.

  This definition shows correspondence relations between basic concerns of science, space, time, substance, identity and cause and the basic concerns of metaphysics.

  What can metaphysicians contribute to this discussion of information?

  I argue that information is a concept related to communication. Thus, when Werner argues that:

  (I cannot understand why several FISers like to consider information as
  a property of a system itself, like mass, energy, momentum in physics.
  To me and I believe to any engineer,
  information is binary as interaction in physics it is a relation between
  two things),
  (See below, Werner and Shannon appear to be in full agreement on this point.)

  I strongly support Werner's view (except for the possible ambiguity of the reference for usage of "binary". Chemical communication is between two things but a chemical communication is not via a "binary" object.)

  As pointed out in my extended abstract, the notion of communication is derived from the root of "common" and hence tightly associated with the concept of community. From this perspective, which draws upon radically different metaphysical foundations, information is seen as a relation between two things (objects, entities, beings). This relation can be a simple binary relation (such as a bit, or it could be more complex, a signal, a molecule, a set of molecules, a page of a written transcript, a musical score, etc.

  This metaphysical perspective of information recognizes that information flows can be "one to many" or "many to one", as well as binary. (See the book by Biosot referenced in my extended abstract.) Shannon information, as defined, must conform to a bijection, in Shannon's terminology, "to reproduce the message" exactly.

  My view of "information as a relation between two" (or more) things was motivated from Shannon's model by relaxing the presupposition that communication is merely for engineering purposes. From a metaphysical perspective, I presuppose that a community of individuals communicate about matters of common concern to the community. (This FIS list is an example of the preceding sentence)

  (The exact quote from Shannon (page 31):
  "The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing a message at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently, messages have meaning, that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.")

  A second metaphysical problem concerns the metaphysics of time as it relates to information, particularly the mathematics of information of Shannon.
  From logic, we know that mathematical symbols are arbitrary. Thus the meaning of a symbol depends on the assignment to a particular concept, thing, entity, idea, relation, etc.

  Shannon's mathematical symbols are assigned to mean a relation to time intervals for transmission of a symbol.
  Mathematical symbols for entropy are assigned to mean a relation with Heat and with other thermodynamic parameters which form the bilinear group of thermodynamic equations.

  The metaphysical problem, from this perspective, if one desires relate the symbols of information with the symbols of heat, is to find a conversion factor or a narrative or a myth which creates a bijection between heat and time.

  Rafael - your comment on these views from your perspective of metaphysics would be warmly welcomed.

  Karl: I found much to agree with in your response. We concur on the need for a public language. (This concept is closely related to the concept of communication in a community; a public language is essential to form a community of individuals.)

  We also agree that on the central role of thingedness in the material world. Your views are close to the typical view of a chemist / biochemist. (I have referred to similar, but conceptually abstract, views as "radical materialism".)
  But, as noted above, progress in chemistry has given us material descriptions of most "things" in terms of chemical structures and associated chemical agglomerations and often these descriptions are strongly supported by quantum mechanical calculations grounded in physics. Many advances of technology are directly relatable to our new understandings of the dynamical structures of simple components of complex objects.

  But, do physicists agree that this is a source of solutions to "deep problems"?
  And, it appears to me that the recent advances in the chemistry of life have created vast new problems for the philosophers. (The relevance of this comment is questionable... given the nature of philosophical problems.)

  Could you say more about what you mean by "pre-logical"? I do not understand this usage at all.

  With regard to number theory, I remain pretty much in the dark as to your meaning. I certainly concur that numbers play a critical role in science and technology and human communication in general. The fact that numbers can be used indexically is crucial. And, numbers are critical for creating correspondence relations between the external world (thingedness) and our internal mental images. Furthermore, numbers play a central role as a central "generator" of mathematical objects of many types (ie, the concept of species in category theory).

  I wrote:

    Your "very technical approach" could be translated as a special type of super-reductionism by incorporating temporal relations and conditional propositions into materialism. Can you relate this "very technical approach" to complex systems and such problems as evolution?

    Once we have agreement on the existence of a mathematical entity that behaves like a thing (or "carrier of potential information" in Rafael's parlance) then we shall be able to use this building block to build structures with no end in sight. Like once we define this is a Lego building block, we can build very complex and useful models. Indeed, my theory is a fine example of a super-reductionism. It investigates the translation between logical structures and carrier objects on which one can observe the logical structures. The theory does allow rather complex evolutionary processes.

  Intuitively, I find your response very appealing, but I do not understand how this is to be done. A central problem is the irregularity of the mathematics of chemical systems. This implies also the mathematics of living systems. The irregularity of chemical structures and chemical dynamics (living structures and living dynamics) denies me access to

  "the translation between logical structures and carrier objects on which one can observe the logical structures"

  I am denied access to this route by the fact that chemical structures are mathematically expressed in terms of labeled graphs and that these labeled graphs can not be placed in correspondence with the natural numbers. In short, each chemical identity (entity, compound, object, thing) is a unique category.

  I wrote:

    the concept of time is intertwined with the concept of number. How do you justify this interrelation? At issue is the nature of continuity.

    I find one of the strong suits of my theory that it uses any kind of sequence and relates its information-carrying capacity to the information-carrying capacity of any kind of contempororary assembly. One is free to give a sequence (a mathematical entity) an interpretation as time slices. If you can number it consecutively, then it is a sequence. I look into the interdependence between cross-sectional and longitudinal collections of objects (carriers of symbols /information/). In everyday speak this means: I look into the relations between collections that are here all at the same time and collections that come one after the other. In a heroic allegory about a theoretical living organism: the theoretical cell's constituents are all present at the same time and all (each) of them is relevant at the same moment, while the theoretical DNA gets read off from start till the end, one (triplet) at a time, one after the other. In the sequence, it is the neighbourhood relations that count (this comes after that), while in the contemporary assembly the inclusion relations matter (this is like these and like those). Continuity and discontinuity are discussed at great length and detail also.

  Ok. I now understand part of the mathematical approach. The metaphysical issues concerning time are critical. Would it be fair to state that the metaphysical symbol exchange for "time - heat" is simpler than your proposed symbol exchange for "time - matter"?

  You wrote:

    I propose to transcend the gap between well established principles of number theory and the concepts of communication between two collections of message carriers by following steps:
    1) extend number theory to include multidimensional partitions, hitherto left undefined;
    2) introduce the concept of the structure of a set by discussing properties of multidimensional partitions;
    3) introduce the technique of linearisations of structured sets;
    4) discuss congruence relations between neighbourhood relations on a sequence and structures in a set.
    I'd prefer not to call neither a structured set (a contemporary assembly) nor a sequence a system, but the interplay between these two constitutes a system.

  Your agenda is clear. Have you published works concerning these topics? I would be very interested in the details or in receiving electronic copies.

  Congratulations to all who have read this far!

  Can others contribute to the task of creating a new metaphysics that can be inclusive of information?

  Cheers

  Jerry LR Chandler
Received on Thu May 30 22:19:48 2002

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