Re: [Fis] About entropy metaphors

From: <[email protected]>
Date: Sat 10 Apr 2004 - 02:58:45 CEST

Dear FIS colleagues,

On Apr 8, 2004, at 1:45 AM, Lauri Gr�hn wrote:

> One can use concepts of physics as metaphors only
> when discussing about (human) information.

My position is that physics is all there is in the universe, and I
reject appeals to metaphysics as maneuvers to imply the existence of
unobservable black boxes where causation occurs so as to support one's
preconceived notions. I am curious whether the claim above represents
the view that (human) information is metaphysical, or that it doesn't
really exist at all. The latter might suggest that the notion of
information is merely a human construct that we use as a heuristic
device.

To help clarify the paragraph above, consider the proposition that
"ideas", memories, mental images, ..., may exist as physical patterns
of neural connections in our brains. In other words, these phenomena,
which we often consider information residing in our minds, might exist
only because they are physical. I find the notion that all information
exists in physical form, and that there is no "disembodied"
information, appealing.

> One can't prove anything by using metaphors.
> Using BAD metaphors is just waste of time...

I agree (certainly with the last bit). This comment, however, inspires
me to describe an interesting little study on information and metaphor.
  A molecular evolutionary biologist, Jody Hey, did an interesting study
of the way scientists describe fuzzy vs. crisp objects while he was on
sabbatical a few years ago. He used this as a way to better understand
how biologists deal with biological species, which are inherently fuzzy
objects. I should say up front that my interpretation of his results
are quite different from Jody's. He sent emails to the biologists
represented in his list of email addresses (including me) along with an
attached image. In the email he asked his colleagues to describe their
image as clearly as possible. The goal should be to maximize the
chance that another biologist could accurately draw the image based
only on reading the description. Half of his subjects received a crisp
image of three white geometric shapes on a black background. As I
recall, the shapes were a triangle, a square and an ellipse, which
varied somewhat in size and orientation. These shapes were more or
less randomly located in the three dimensional space. The other half
of his subjects received a very fuzzy version of the same image. This
is the one I received. You could not discern any approximation of
geometric shapes; instead some parts of the space had a greater density
of white pixels than other parts, and white and black pixels were mixed
in most regions. The centers of the places where crisp white objects
would have been were densely white and the places furthest from any of
those places were densely black. The data basically showed that
descriptions of the fuzzy images used fewer words, which Jody
interpreted to suggest that those images had a lower information
content (or at least that the biologists described them as if this were
the case). However, he noted that most descriptions of the fuzzy image
resorted to the use of metaphors, whereas the descriptions of the crisp
image did not. My interpretation of these results is that it would
take MANY more words to effectively describe the fuzzy images than the
crisp images. Resorting to metaphor was a strategic short cut on the
part of subjects, like myself. I mentioned, for example, that the
image looked like two amorphous galaxies touching each other so that it
would be hard to assign the stars at the interface to either galaxy.
The use of metaphor allowed me to say much more than I could otherwise
communicate with so few words because it evoked a rich, well-formed
image in the mind of the reader (at least that was my unconscious
strategy).

I hope this story was not too far off topic here. To connect my point
back to Lauri's statement, I would say that metaphors can be efficient
communication tools and therefore useful elements in scientific
argumentation. I agree that they are not proofs of anything in
isolation.

Cheers,

Guy Hoelzer

Department of Biology
University of Nevada Reno
Reno, NV 89557

Phone: 775-784-4860
Fax: 775-784-1302

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Received on Sat Apr 10 02:59:44 2004

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