Re: [Fis] leteral comment

Re: [Fis] leteral comment

From: Aleks Jakulin <[email protected]>
Date: Thu 19 May 2005 - 15:00:47 CEST

Pedro Marijuan wrote:
> Economy is not a domain of energies and entropies but of information and
> knowledge --entirely within the symbolic realm. Only one species among
> 10 millions on Earth (over 40 or 50 millions?) has developed such
> sumperimposed world of "economy".

We naturally think in terms of metaphors and analogies. Why deny that?
Why is the crisp and dry metaphor of mathematics nonarbitrary, and the
free-flying metaphor arbitrary?

A plant is paying the bee with sugar to disperse the pollen. A potato is
paying humans with carbohydrates to disperse the plant. A cherry tree
pays the bee first for doing the matchmaking, and the bird later for
doing the child-rearing. Lice pay the ants to guard them. Plants release
distress signals when attacked by lice to call the predators. Flowers
smell and look good so that the bees don't need to think that much to
find them (how strange that we like what the bees like?). When I go for
a walk around the bushes, I am saddened to see the prickly dog rose
plants loaded with the rotting red fruit that the birds no longer "buy"
(they prefer sunflower seeds). Food is money: ATP is cash, glucose is
bonds, fat is property.

As a human, I don't feel that our monetary economics is *that*
special... It just operates on a higher level, but there is nothing
conceptually different, if you allow for the inter-level
self-similarity. The message of entropy and energy is that essentially
the same descriptors can be applied to any level. We are not being
reductionists reducing information to joules and degrees centigrade.
Instead, we're thinking on what corresponds to "joules" and "degrees
centigrade" at the information level.

When you spend energy, you pay. When you obtain energy, you are paid. We
are all paid here by the Sun to do something. We, humans, are paid to
maintain an ecosystem of symbols and thoughts, not to generate entropy.
Anyone who's talking here is selling ideas, and those who are listening
are buying them. As long as there are sellers and buyers and profit for
both, the forum exists.

There is a distinct tendency for ideas to disperse. Eventually, each of
us might know everything. There will no longer be a gradient, and there
will no longer be trade. That's when the entropy will win, and that's
when it will be the death of the forum.

Both selling and buying of ideas, even listening to them involves
spending energy at the lower level (our breakfasts). When there will no
longer be bread that can be used for thinking, the ideas and the medium
in which they dwell (us), both of them will be gone.

The ideas can consume their owners (suicide cults, self-sacrifice,
workaholism, university education), and the ideas can make their owners
multiply (Bring forth with you every living thing that is with you of
all flesh, including birds, cattle, and every creeping thing that creeps
on the earth; that they may breed abundantly in the earth, and be
fruitful, and multiply on the earth.�)

Culture is an ecosystem that maintains and nurtures a particular set of
ideas and values (is it prolific, is it sustainable?). Knowledge is
granary of ideas (will you ever eat it, or will it rot? does all the
knowledge make us obese? will anyone buy it?)

> Unfortunately, social information is misunderstood yet (and
> pragmatically mistreated by social disciplines). How could one run a
> discussion on computing &software in entropy grounds?,

Let me try: Computation is a set of constraints you place on the flow of
energy. Some computations reinforce the flow in an autocatalytic fashion
(software you want to buy; the software that thus gets reproduced, like
we let good potatoes reproduce), others just produce entropy ("10 goto
10" that makes your computer suck electricity and pump hot air out from
itself). Viruses and worms are selfish autocatalytic loops, and we pay
for antivirus software to get rid of them, just like we have to pay for
the immune systems in our bodies. Operating systems are
centrally-managed artificial ecosystems that maintain order and allocate
resources. Etc.

-- 
mag. Aleks Jakulin
http://kt.ijs.si/aleks/
Department of Knowledge Technologies,
Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
fis@listas.unizar.es
http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Received on Thu May 19 16:29:28 2005


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 on Wed 15 Jun 2005 - 12:06:44 CEST