Re: [Fis] 2004 FIS session: concluding comments

Pedro said:

>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 scientific
>pretensions or credentials of this other narrative, almost having the same
>ingredients but changing a little the proportions and the emphasis?

      Regarding which way we go: either {physical world -> {material world
-> {biological world -> {sociopolitical world }}}}, which models the
historical adding of informational consraints as: {vague precursor ->
{{{increasingly definite embodiments in many branches of a tree of realized
possibilities}}}}. Going the other way, {{{{concrete sociopolitical
configurations} -> biological precursors } -> precursors in dissipative
structures } -> physical precursor } involves the removal of information
in the creation of generalities. Both directions represent work and the
production of physical entropy. The first (generative) path, if we take it
to model the develpment of the world, produces informational entropy as
well, as the informational constraints get reduced to information neat, and
this information begins to mutate and recombine (-- a process that gets
amplified in the biological and sociopolitical realms). The second
(analytical) path generates a small amount of information (rather a kind of
redundancy!) but little informational entropy. It doesn't seem to model
some natural process -- but, who knows? The chain of (material)
implication -- e.g., {{sociopolitical configurations} IMPLY biological
configurations}, etc. may represent some kind of (?) process (?) constraint
on processes. Of course, it is in the form of one of Aristotle's final
causes -- the pull of a telos on a developing system, and this has always
fascinated me.

STAN

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Received on Sun Jun 20 21:23:05 2004