Re: [Fis] 2004 FIS session: concluding comments

Dear FIS Colleagues,

It is funny that after 218 messages exchanged we keep pounding on and on
about the info& entropy topic --inexhaustible. Yesterday, Alexey's
reference to "The Second Law Mystique" and his related comment that "a
belief is the basis of our knowledge" has reminded me a very curious
statement by the distinguished physico-chemist Peter Atkins (2002): "The
fact that men have nipples is a direct consequence of the common origin of
animals and of the Second Law, that drives nature forward making do with
what is available, always blindly, without foresight." Amazing, isn't it?
One can put almost any "fact" at the beginning of the sentence and
"explain" it away at the expenses of the poor Second Law.

After watching so cavalier a jumping across existential realms, let me try
a more modest one in relation with the recent exchanges about 'hierarchies'
(Stan, Viktoras). I copy from Stan's:

>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.

The twist, or the jump, I would like to introduce in the above paths is
that the ways and means to move among those hierarchies are far from
trivial. They represent true 'phase transitions' more genuinely occurring
in the informational sense that in the accompanying energy and entropy
processes (basically decoupled). To clarify, without cell signaling systems
there is no multicellularity; without nervous systems there is no animal or
human societies; without currencies and entrepreneurial 'signaling systems'
(accounting systems) socio-economic complexity is not conceivable. These
transitional places or 'information gateways' --I take the term from the
work of Dail Doucette and his colleagues-- are thus very special sites
where very special information processes are operated so that the further
realm of complexity associated to each one may pop out into existence. The
confluence of 'ascending' and 'descending' waves of causality (and their
potential conflicts) basically occur throughout these info gateways
---arguably, they would instantiate at least a couple of Aristotelian causes.

Perhaps it is in this very context where we should consider the need of
more fine-tuned conceptualizations on information /entropy. For instance my
mild criticisms on Shannon's overextensions in last posting (Aleks was
right saving the cleanliness of his formalism assumptions) and 'power law'
inspired approaches to entropy such as Tsallis. In network analysis,
something similar has already happened ---Barabasi and Albert, working on
real-world networking. Scale-free nets' signatures can be found in
the market and companies distributions (Internet structure too), in
nervous systems, in protein networks... curiously, the very info gateways I
was mentioning above (and the old fis theme of info 'model systems': cells,
brains, companies). It is also curious that previous to Barabasi and Albert
papers, research on networking was classically dominated by Paul Erdos and
Alfred Reny's views on random networks (mandating a Poisson distribution in
the links). The paper I mentioned last week by Dante Chiavo was advancing
not so disparaging views (with his 'multiscale entropy').

Shouldn't we devote a future fis session to these fascinating novelties and
exploratory convergences? We could put some informational 'flesh' to the
formalisms developed, mostly, within the complexity arena.

best regards

Pedro

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Received on Fri Jun 25 14:31:25 2004