Re: [Fis] 2004 FIS session: concluding comments

Dear colleagues,

There are so many interesting issues and messages to pay attention that one
cannot even cite them. Overall, although important disagreements remain, I
reaffirm the impression that a new treatment of the relationship
info/entropy looks feasible and closer. A curious observation to make is
that in each one of the two sides, the founding fathers of the fields
left a little chin on the shoe that has caused a lot of nuisances later
on: entropy as disorder (Boltzmann) and information as a 'flow' (Shannon).

I will not insist on the former and will add a recent comment from Bennet
and Shor (2004) where they respectfully kick (I think) the 'hydraulic
metaphor' on information enshrined by Shannon: source, channel, capacity,
carrying rate..., and they ultimately aspire to a new "accurate
understanding of quantum information as the natural generalization of its
classical forebear." Information as a flow has conflated well with the
disorder interpretation and both of them with the mechanistic-reductionist
visions (sorry for using these trite terms, I do not demeanor them as such,
only when they get loose from the multidisciplinary checks and balances
needed in the knowledge world). Shannon himself was comfortable within the
mechanistic approach to life and mind (I have a quotation somewhere)... I
think that Aleks' and Guy's recent postings are somehow close to the info
taxonomies problem that need to be adumbrated to try to go beyond the 'flow
of items' and the direct probabilistic interpretation that I do not share
(in past years there were quite many exchanges about this theme in the fis
list, including Stonier, Werner, Igor, Wolfgang, John, myself, etc.
---perhaps just for laziness we have not gone now, but presumably we will
retake the different information-genera matter on future bioinformation
discussions).

Stan's big narrative also relates to the above. It is an intriguing text
(already commented by other parties), but what would happen if it had been
constructed the other way around? Starting with info/entropy in the social
sustainability problems, then going to the role of science in contemporary
society, the cognizing problems of the human subject, the informational
arrangements of life, the singularity of biological emergence, inanimate
matter, cosmology... What does one spontaneously say about the sicentific
pretensions or credentials of this other narrative, almost having the same
ingredients but changing a little the proportions and the emphasis? In
particular, implicit prejudices on Information and Entropy have a lot to
say respect the contemporary "Disorder of the Sciences" --which undoubtedly
has many causes, and to some degree it is a healthy condition ('the
constancy of surprise' in multi-scale entropy that Dante Chiavo was
postulating for pysiological adaptability). But I am intruding into
'consilience' problems that tentatively will be handled in the next fis
session.

To conclude, let me put into English some brief comments from Antonio
Garcia (of this list) in defense of Tsallis' entropy versus Boltzmann's and
Sannon's. Or better, please, go to Entropy 2000, 2, 172-177, where
Sotologongo-Costa, Rodriguez, and Rodgers make a convincing argument on the
elegant generalization of the scaling phenomena (power laws!) by using the
maximum entropy principle on fragment size distributions in application of
Tsallis entropy. Antonio and me have just published a paper in BioSystems
(2004, 1-3, pp. 63-71) making some connections of power laws with Karl's
multidimensional partitions ---we postulate the existence of a 'partitional
canon' in a variety of organizational phenomena: perhaps our naive
discovery of Tsallis vigency in the partitional/fragmentational realm.

best regards

Pedro

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Received on Fri Jun 18 14:31:58 2004