RE: [Fis] Re: gravity and symmetry - hormesis?

Pedro, Mark

I think there might be some interesting parallels between hormesis
and informational psychology - worth exploring.

A small amount of relevant 'information' (say an article abstract
or a fortuitous analogy) often stimulates the growth of individual
knowledge while a superfluity of data can lead to 'disintermediation'
and information overload. This is one of the key problems of IS.

One of my medical research colleagues admitted he had never
read an article in its entirety - only the abstract, methodology
and conclusions. I suspect that's not uncommon.

There may be a hormetic process within human
cognitive experience which is a reflection and
continuation of the biochemical one.

However Harold Boxenbaum's criticism leaves us with a salutary rider:

"Hormesis is a hodgepodge of biological phenomena/events, lacking focus,
uniformity and objective significance. Unless and until hormesis is better
defined, it will continue to be ridiculed and ignored.
Confidence in any scientific principle is roughly proportional
to its conceptual precision. Viewed thusly, hormesis is promiscuous,
credulous and inane. Our challenge is to survey, condense, simplify,
infer, define, dissect, categorize, focus, restrict, etc. � to order
the relevant information from the sea of data in which we are adrift.
But does anyone think this can be done without knowledge of mechanism?
We don't even concur if hormesis is an event, an outcome, both or neither." http://www.belleonline.com/n3v83.html

Doesn't that remind you of our erstwhile FIS discussions about 'information'?

John H

-----Original Message-----
From: "Pedro C. Mariju�n" [mailto:marijuan@posta.unizar.es]
Sent: Monday, 10 March 2003 22:22
To: fis@listas.unizar.es
Subject: Re: [Fis] Re: gravity and symmetry

At 10.18 6/3/03 +0100, you wrote:
>Dear Pedro and FIS colleagues,
>I have not read Smolin's book, but you can find find similar issues and much
>more in my preprint "How we count or is it possible that two times two is not
>equal to four." You can read this preprint at the following address:
>
>http://www.mathpreprints.com/math/Preprints/
>Sincerely,
>Mark Burgin

Dear Mark and FIS colleagues,

Many thanks for the reference (I could finally locate the paper after some
search in the site). The subject you treat looks quite relevant:
'non-Diophantine' arithmetics', like the well-known non-Euclidean
geometries. To the novice, it is amazing that the topic has transpired so
little into general scientific circles. Counting and natural numbers, as
you say, are taken as the last refuge of undiscussed mathematical 'truth'.

You mention several cases in economics, and another physicist (Zeldovich),
concurring on the idea that "fundamental problems of modern physics are
dependent on our ways of counting" (I had already mentioned Penrose and
Smolin, later on I have found in the web a very exciting paper by Smolin
and Stuart Kauffman more or less close to the idea:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/smolin/smolin_p1.html). But in any case, I
think it is in the biology of the cell where the best cases of non-regular
arithmetics can be found. When cells 'count' through their receptors, or
better throughout their signaling systems, the non-Diophantine arithmetics
appears to be the general rule. For instance, a very recent paper in Nature
on toxicology addresses this very issue: (Calabrese and Baldwin, 2003,
Nature 421, 691-2) rather than lineal responses with or without thresholds,
an 'hormetic model' is followed in most, most cases (like an U-shaped
curve, but very asymmetric). Apart from my tentative application of Karl�s
partitions to signaling systems, that I think is meaningful, your new
arithmetics could also work there...

all the best

Pedro

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