too much / not enough information

Dear FIS colleagues,

Following the recent exchanges on 'Is information a disease?' I would like
to add that the nervous system appears to be optimised for an environment
with a predictable amount of sensory input. See the classic rat experiments
--3 populations, "nirvana", "challenging" and "stressy" environments, with
luxurious, demanding and very overburdening surroundings. The animals in
the cage with "tasks of a middle complexity" had the longest survival. With
humans, sensory deprivation surroundings are a recognised form of torture.

So, the nervous system is definitely prepared for a middle amount of
changes in the surrounding space. This may go back to natural periodicities
and the revolving quality of the Earth (that sometimes it is dark /cold/,
sometimes sunny /warm/, imbedded into the succession of days, moon phases,
seasons, etc). One may wonder whether it is conceivable that life ever
evolved in a strictly stationary /stable/ surrounding. Indeed the basic
pattern of life is based on periodicity and cyclicity.

My contention --jumping to a theoretical science level-- is that we have to
let loose the conceptualizations transported by our way of counting
(1,2,3,...) because they carry in an implicit way of thinking that does not
agree with biological phenomena. The ideas behind a basic assumption about
the world that are implicit in counting like 1,2,3,... seem to be:

-- all elements are alike in their basic unit (there is only one kind of basic
units),
-- the distance between elements is the same,
-- the increase from one element to the next is the same (the basic element),
-- there is no end in sight to this series,
-- there are no preferred sizes to elements,
-- there are no two basic kinds of elements that cooperate in the
generation of a new element.

Instead, one might try to explore the use of an improved way of counting.
In that new way, one would count congruencies between two different ways of
counting, both going back to the sequence 1,2,3,... By following this dual
way of counting, we can engineer a system which:

-- uses periodicities,
-- uses cyclicities,
-- does have preferred sizes,
-- does have several different elementary units,
-- has two basic realisations, that in their co-operation evolve a new system,
-- there is a conspicuous generation of variety in the system.

The numbering system one uses impregnates one's ways of thinking very
deeply. Then - so have we learnt - if you can rely on something to be
actually true, then it is something we may publicly count. In fact, that is
the etalon on which we gauge whether we think correctly. The fundamentals
of our rational thinking go back to that basic counting ability which we
have learnt at the age of 6 years: "this is thinking". "These are the rules
how reasonable thinking happens". That style of thinking may be OK in
numerous fields of learning, but not really suitable for the contemplation
and representation of the living.

So the task for FIS is - in my eyes - to build the new logico-philosophical
foundations necessary for a rationally enlarged discourse about biology (&
neurosciences) and the whole humanities. Just like the Encyclopaedists
historically worked on a new catalogue of rational concepts...

Karl
Received on Tue Sep 24 13:20:25 2002