Re: [Fis] CONSILIENCE & interdisciplinarity

Commenting on Pedro's below, he said:

>Fis friends,
>A couple of brief comments to add:
>
>If I say that political knowledge on world problems has to follow the
>series of inclusive realms: (individuals (social groups (towns (regions
>(countries...)))), well, I do not think that my comment would be much
>illuminating for anyone. However, for a series of reasons, the discussion
>on the structure and dynamics of scientific disciplines has been left in
>such a state of sophistication --it has become merely a matter of
>'pragmatics' . We have to go beyond elementary notions only, if I may say,
>because the social dynamics of knowdlege is becoming a pressing problem for
>a sustainable world (perhaps the best new ideas on the interrelationship of
>scientific disciplines among themselves and with social life is coming from
>that direction --towards a "New social contract for science" --Gibbons).
     SS: I agree that the specification hierarchy of discourses is really
just a beginning. But, as a starting point, it does have implications for
how to proceed beyond the stage of relating the realms generally in this
way.

>Another point relates to the comparison of information science with
>Tribology. We may share a common basis: "making & breaking of bonds" and a
>similar vastness of scopes (as they reach up to planetary tectonics too).
>But they do not have that dramatic divide that we have in info sci, between
>the animate and the inanimate.
     SS: Here I am moved to comment that the term ' animate' is often
misunderstood as synomymous to 'living' We cuould have {inanimate {animate
{living {mechanistic}}}}, where animate refers to abiotic dissipative
structures. The living have added internal information to animate
frameworks.

Actually, once we cross information physics
>and enter into the bioinformation realm, all type of thermodynamic
>improbability, combinatoric span, and molecular diversity estimators scale
>up in multiple orders of magnitude respect the inanimate (including an
>amazing disposability of the own components--protein degradation,
>apoptosis--not really for senescence reasons but for adaptability
>purposes!). The threshold towards neural information is even more
>fascinating (consciousness lies behind that), not to speak about
>the contemporary "information society" or "information revolution" ....
>Beyond fads and fashions, somehow at fis we have to attempt explorations in
>strategic checkpoints where most of the complexity is dormant and left
>outside scores of conventional disciplines and new interdisciplinary
>domains, stating the overall goal -- why not?-- that we have to build a
>general consilience in the sciences around informational themes.
     SS: Note that the above kind of hierarchy {most general realm {more
particular realm}} is in fact a matter of having imposed new information in
order to have the more particular emerge from the more general. It is a
hierarchy of informational constraints.

STAN

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Received on Sun Oct 10 21:26:08 2004