Hi Jerry,
Your recurring concern with the 'nomenclature' problem is I think vital for our
overall information theoretical (and interdisciplinary) issues in this forum.
Did you and Rafael make any progress on your ad hoc info semantics workshop?
The intricate path to the theoretical 'realm of information'leads down the Valley of Language - natural, metaphorical and artificial - and through the sticky web of human language over time. Koichiro's concern with the Planckian metaphor of 'tense' takes us in the same direction as does I.M. Cohen's linguistic (subject-object) model of non-hierarchical immune cognition - i.e. to the interesting intersection of linguistics, information science and biology - not yet fully addressed IMO by the cybersemiotic school.
Maybe IS and nomenclature/scientific discourse is an item for a future session?
Your comment that
<A metaphor for this situation would be that the same sentence ("I love you.") could be expressed in three languages and the meanings would correspond with one another.>
is open to refutation.
Having done that (with my wife in French Dutch and English) I must confess that each linguistic utterance provided a different emotional experience. 'Je t'aime' is
much more romantic than the prosaic rhyming 'Ik hou van jou' or even "I love ya."
This reminds me of Saussure's dictum about the 'arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign'
and the debate between Whorfian relativists and Cartesian universalists.
IMO the historical limitation of human language to 'sign systems' since Morris, CS Peirce and Saussure parallels the reduction of 'information' and 'number' to material entities/operations.
Is 'chemical syntax' (like Koichiro's 'present progressive v present perfect' tense)
not itself a metaphor(like the language of music, mathematics etc)? Are there intrinsic logical 'correspondences' between natural and notational languages, between Swedish and say PERL?. Frankly, I'm agnostic about that. Posthumanism is not rooted in
inductive logic but in an I/O binarism which dispenses with consilience.
Can we say the syntactic operations of natural language (subject verb predicate: "I rob you") share the same logic as that of "2 minus 1" or a small molecule binding with DNA? IMO the relationships between oneness and twoness or between different atomic weights are less arbitrary than the grammatical connections between the words in this sentence.
What Koichiro once said about the notion of time in a postmodern world applies
equally to natural language and its bastard progeny, scientific nomenclature -
"a vicious virus infecting the otherwise healthy body of modernist science."
No better example of this pathology exists than Claude Shannon's arbitrary use of the word 'information' to badge his theory of entropy. Now we've all got the virus.
Cheers,
John H
-----Original Message-----
From: fis-bounces@listas.unizar.es
[mailto:fis-bounces@listas.unizar.es]On Behalf Of Jerry_Lr_ Chandler
Sent: Thursday, 4 November 2004 14:40
To: fis@listas.unizar.es
Subject: [Fis] Number theory and chemical syntax
Dear Karl and Rafeal and All:
This email addresses your posts concerning counting, number and philosophy from the perspective of chemical syntax.
karl writes:
"The numbering system
is flexible enough to privide a transportable background on which we can
calculate and predict the effects of a position change of a genome in the
same classical fashion as we are able to calculate and predict the
occurrence of the next eclipse of the Moon in Central Europe. One has only
to understand the tricks the numbering system plays when describing
diversity, similarity, probability and size. The size attribute of an
interdependent, autoregulated system is of a secondary importance. It
appears that the more diverse the parts of an assembly are, the more "inner
tension" (maybe, energy) is there. The size itself is not the important
attribute when discussing the inner diversity of subsets of a set. (In
actual fact, there is - to top it off - a super little trick concerning
size: if one categorises sets according to their inner diversity, there are
two virtually equivalent sizes.)".
karl clearly expresses the power of calculations with numbers.
But, the source of the power of calculations is not merely the numbers themselves. The arithmetics operations are essential as well. By arithmetic operations I mean addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and exponentiation and roots - the ordinary operations taught in primary schools.
>From the perspective of definition, an atom is "indivisible". Thus, the atomic number of an atom is not divisible by an arithmetic operation. Note that ordinary physical syntax, mass is often expressed a real number and divisibility is not an issue.
So, I conclude that the concept of number as described by karl is not applicable to chemical syntax. Nevertheless, I doubt if anyone (perhaps Stan is an exception!) will argue against the concept of the atomic number and the natural language correspondence between particular atomic numbers and particular chemical elements.
Karl further writes:
"We have to capture the obvious feeling:
"this is the same just bigger / smaller" in order to begin understanding
phaenomena which appear to belong to different sciences. We have to come to
terms about what we do as we recognise two things that are the same (but
bigger or smaller) before we can attack the task of describing what we do as
we compare two things that are different in order to find similarities among
them. "
What exactly does karl wish to imply with the phrase:
"we recognise two things that are the same (but bigger or smaller)"
I do not understand what is the meaning of "the same" in this context. Nevertheless, I can construct large sets of numbers, each with the have same numbers of divisors (for example , the primes). The difficulty of untangling the similarity from the homology from the analogy from the metaphor can be be overwhelming at times.
Rafeal writes:
"the only problem I see with your materialistic stance is... that numbers are not material! so your whole underlying (ontological) argument (being=being material) is constructed upon a contradiction."
>From the perspective of chemical syntax, it appears if Rafeal is staking a particular argument of epistemological uniqueness on the concept of number. (Or, have I not understood the argument?) The atomic numbers are referenced in both natural language as a object and as a counting number in the sense of mathematics. Thus, the atomic numbers form a logical 'commutative diagram' with references in three distinctive languages - natural language, arithmetic language and chemical language. The logical coherence of chemical syntax is not violated by the three sources of reference - the three references merely correspond with one another. A metaphor for this situation would be that the same sentence ("I love you.") could be expressed in three languages and the meanings would correspond with one another.
If this issue were addressed from the perspective of phenomenology, is the same phenomena under description / narrative construction?
Cheers
Jerry
_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
fis@listas.unizar.es
http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
SOUTH EAST HEALTH CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE
This email, and the files transmitted with it, are confidential and intended solely for the use of the individual or entity to whom they are addressed. If you are not the intended recipient, you are not permitted to distribute or use this email or any of its attachments in any way. We also request that you advise the sender of
the incorrect addressing.
This email message has been virus-scanned. Although no computer viruses were detected, South East Health accepts no liability for any consequential damage resulting from email containing any computer viruses.
_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
fis@listas.unizar.es
http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Received on Mon Nov 8 07:40:42 2004
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Mon 07 Mar 2005 - 10:24:47 CET