Re: [Fis] 2004 FIS session: concluding comments

Pedro said:

>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.
    SS: This is easily explained by the fact that effective work is only
on average about 50% energy efficient. That is to say that most of
whatever happens is taxed by the Second Law in the Universe's drive to
equilibrate. If I decide to typea paper, I am also deciding to advance the
ewuilibration of the Universe by a very small amount.

>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).
     SS: I agree strongly.

>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.
     SS: I think we need all four!

>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').
     SS: Well, I have the sense that these scale-free, power law, 1/f
distributions, since they seem to be found partout (in data from both
material and immaterial realms) are not specfically informative of
anything. Likely they are artefacts of analysis!

>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.
     On convergences, note that these take place everywere as well, but
real explanations are needed. They range from vortical phenomena in all
media (even electronic) through evolutionary convergence in biology (say,
the unrelated mammals wolverine, Tasmanian devil and southern African
ratel, or seahorse and chamaeleon) to ecological similarities in far flung
biotas (like "meditteranean biotas in the Andes mountains, along the coast
of the Meditteranean Sea and some Australian biomes, where the species are
all diferent, but the roles they play are the same -- same play, different
actors). At present I invoke "structural attractors" to explain such
phenomena, but no one knows what they might be.

STAN.
>
>best regards
>
>Pedro
>
>_______________________________________________
>fis mailing list
>fis@listas.unizar.es
>http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis

_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
fis@listas.unizar.es
http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Received on Sat Jun 26 22:12:12 2004