Nature of Counting and FIS

Dear Colleagues:

This message addresses several posts from recent weeks. Response to
Karl, Pedro and Christophe are included.

First, Karl's innovative post of Tue, 24 Sep 2002 13:00:57 +0200 (MET
DST), deserves further consideration. (It is possible that some have
already deleted this post so the entire post is attached at the
bottom of this message.)

Karl's brings several important issues into the discussion,
scientific issues that are critical to a coherent philosophy of
science and for FIS.

One issue is the concept of "optimization" in biology. Generally
speaking, I fail to find a substantial basis for the concept of
"optimization" in biology or medicine. While local behaviors may
appear to be quite desirable, the mathematics of optimization require
a maximum or minimum. But how is a concept of maximum or minimum to
be applied to a living system where the flow relationships between
internal and external processes are continuous? It seems that one or
the other must be held constant in order to invoke an optimum. But
in biological systems, both internal values and external values are
variable - this is the very concept adaptability of which we speak!
Any suggestions on how to address this dilemma? (Such dilemmas are
avoided by the Herbert Simon's concept of "satisfactory and
sufficient".)

The second issue of periodicity and the origin of natural
periodicity. I conur with Karl's comments. The period of biological
orbits can be highly irregular. Searching for the source of these
orbits is a critical problem in theoretical biology and medicine.
These orbits are closely related to the structure of diseases -
displacement of attractors from normal flows. FIS should be actively
involved in creating a solid basis for the description of such
orbits, in my opinion.

Karl's discussion of the role of counting is critical. Again, I
concur with the general trust of his remarks, but note some important
distinctions.

The nature of counting is part of the philosophy of mathematics. In
modern educational systems, counting assumes a central role in
information processing. Karl correctly points out that such simple
views do not correspond with most biological phenomenon. I would add
that counting in chemistry is highly complex and simple enumeration
of the elements present is only the first step. The distinction
between counting with reference to abstract rules and the countings
of the natural sciences with reference to natural objects is a
critical distinction.

Karl lists his view of the basic attributes of counting. I concur
that these attributes are important ones, but wish that Karl had
selected a different word than "element". The chemical "elements"
**DO NOT** follow these simple rules. For examples, the chemical
elements are not "equidistant" apart; the chemical elements end after
a short series.

Karl suggests a "dual way" of counting, going back to the sequence.
One reading of his paragraph suggests he is thinking of the complex
numbers to generate cyclicities, but I suspect he is not referring to
the complex plane.

How is the specificity and sensitivity of biological communication
generated? If not from the natural numbers or the complex numbers,
then how?

Karl: Is chemical and biochemical counting sufficiently complex to
address your concerns about the nature of counting in FIS? Is
correspondence with chemical counting a necessity for biological
counting?

Pedro re-visits to the issue of "Doctrine of Limitations" but I
remain unclear about how such philosophy relates to FIS. I remain
concerned that the philosophical doctrines bring hidden sources of
causality into the discussion, thereby creating logical fog which may
obscure logical clarity.

Christophe:

Thank you for your responses.
I remain somewhat perplexed concerning the potential relations of
your MGS and subjectivity.
When you say (Thu, 3 Oct 2002 22:59:07 +0200 (MET DST):

"All components of a signal are information. But an information is
not always meaningful. Only information that has been produced by
an Meaning Genarator System (MGS) is meaningful (and there can be
an infinity of MGSs). The meaning is not "something else" added to
information that makes it becoming meaningful. The meaningfulness
of an information comes from the origin of the information."

I ask:

Can you provide an example of an MGS that produces meaningless information?
Can you provide an example of a message that has different meaning
for two different meaning generating systems?

Cheers to All.

Jerry LR Chandler

Karl's post: Tue, 24 Sep 2002 13:00:57 +0200 (MET DST)

>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 Mon Oct 7 05:43:45 2002