Re: [Fis] About entropy metaphors

Supporting Guy's posting below, I like to put it more formally in the form
of a specification hierarchy, as {physical world {material world
{biological world {human sociocultural world}}}}. Each realm (or
integrative level) is a refinement of the more generally present ones,
emerging upon the appearance of new informational constraints. Here it is
clear that all phenomena are physical, even though many are more than
physical. But being more than physical does not equal transcedence. It
means that further constraints are bearing upon some systems, hemming them
in with a greater burden of information. To be human is to be more than
biological AND material AND physical. To be, say, an icicle is just to be
more than material and physcal.

STAN

>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 Tue Apr 13 21:06:59 2004