Stanley, Pedro
I like the 'ingredience' metaphor -
<What accumulated around this nail was variety of ingredients --
<indeed, the soup's informational entropy increased! This could be
<holistically assessed by taste, which would vary with the amounts of the
<various ingredients. The infrastructure here is the boiling pot, of
<course, and the infostructure the ingredients, which blended ever more upon
<cooking, become ever more dispersed among the others, achieving eventually
<a fine symmetry of structure.
An informational experience which binds the (primordial) soup and gives it
body, flavour and taste is like the herbs and spices which enhance the raw
(structural/hierarchical) ingredients as listed in the recipe. If we focus
on the boiling pot (systemic infrastructure) cookbook (systemic infostructure)
or the hierarchical levels (recipe instructions) we may never become experts
in the phenomenology of making and drinking soup - which often turns out to
be neither an elegant nor a symmetrical 'solution'.
<The nail returns to the one cent value ---end of the story
Isn't the 'nail' like Longinus's Spear, The Holy Grail and the medieval network of
relics and indulgences (continued today by E-Bay memorabilia, commodity fetishes,
the Movie Box Office and the cargo cult of IT)? Aren't these intangible indulgences the products of
Akerlof's Market for Lemons under conditions of asymmetric information?
Plus ca change...
John H
-----Original Message-----
From: fis-bounces@listas.unizar.es
[mailto:fis-bounces@listas.unizar.es]On Behalf Of Stanley N. Salthe
Sent: Sunday, 29 May 2005 8:09
To: fis@listas.unizar.es
Subject: Re: [Fis] nail found in Zaragoza
Reacting to Pedro's nail story, I have traditional story from Norway. A
person positioned him/herself on a well-used highway, and made a fire to
boil some soup. This person put into the water a nail, promising to make a
very delicious soup from it -- nail soup. As people went by carrying
different things, (s)he begged them to leave a little piece of whatever
edibles they might have in the soup. So one left a leek, another a fish
head, a pinch of salt,and so on, and when the soup was done, it was very
delicious indeed.
What accumulated around this nail was variety of ingredients --
indeed, the soup's informational entropy increased! This could be
holistically assessed by taste, which would vary with the amounts of the
various ingredients. The infrastructure here is the boiling pot, of
course, and the infostructure the ingredients, which blended ever more upon
cooking, become ever more dispersed among the others, achieving eventually
a fine symmetry of structure.
>Dear colleagues,
>
>After the recent exchanges, let me try a possible way to put economic
>things in a more clear sense. It could be through the distinction between
>"infostructures" and "infrastructures" --the former
built up upon our
>symbolic capabilities, neatly informational, and the latter being
>productive operations that by themselves involve the usual physical
>attributes and laws (not only entropy growth!). Conversely to Marxian
>views, the infrastructure would be docilely conduced by the infostructure
>(with dense feedbacks, of course, and admittedly following too schematic
an
>approach). The sort of infoeconomic or infodynamic processes governing the
>material part of the economy involve very familiar terms --eg, value--
that
>perhaps we can recast by some of the ideas argumented here, particularly
>by Bob and Igor. A little story on "the nail found in Zaragoza"
may be
>illuminating...
>
>In a very hot day, walking along the fields surrounding this very place
>(CPS, in Zaragoza ouskirts) a student finds a big nail, very old artifact,
>quite rusted, almost scrap. Its value: just as scrap iron, merely around
>one cent ---if any of the recycling companies could be interested buying
>it. However the student is curious, and takes the nail in order to show it
>to some historians. It looks interesting: its manufacture is genuinely
>medieval, it bears some marks or signs , etc. The value now ascends: one
>hundred euros are offered by these new interested parties. Well, an
erudite
>archeologist intervenes: those marks are inscriptions that can be
>deciphered and become latin & french anagrams, and who knows why, but
the
>nail is starting to attract big media coverage--- journalists, local
>museum, collectors, etc. Now all these new social networks which have been
>altered are escalating the value to several thousand euros. Unbelievable,
>but the most reputed erudite of this region (Aragon) reports that the nail
>itself belongs to... Roldan and Charlemagne themselves!!! To their joint
>war-chariot, in their frustrated siege of Moorish Zaragoza millennia ago).
>Big, big hysteria: regional and national politicians, journalists and
>novelists, all of Spanish and French Media, numerous TVs, Academies,
>European museums, Hollywood producers, treasure hunters.... The value
>emanating from the massive perturbation of a terrific number of flickering
>social networks ("disrupted bonds") is taking the value now to
the millions.
>
>Helas, as it frequently happens, it was an elaborated fake. Big scandal,
>dense silence. The nail returns to the one cent value ---end of the story
>(it literally happened in a museum in Israel, cheated around a King
>Salomon's artifact, priced around one million--the source of my little
>story on the nail).
>
>Sorry for the bla, bla, bla, and for conflating notions of value and of
>price. I just wanted to argue on the need to explore the info nature of
>value, reconceptualzed as "ascendancy" derived from the
activation of
>multidimensional networks, being symbolically proyected onto a single
>cardinality, and then becoming "prized". Yes, it deals with a
single event,
>but when we regiment in markets and accounting systems all the regularity
>of social production systems, we keep a strong record of the social
>ascendancy of all the parties and processes involved (eg, look at the
>enigmatic valuation of "art works" --the most expensive items of
>societies). It is along similar lines, I think, that we might re-enter
>notions of social entropy and other new ways of analysis, and not
literally
>as attempted in the present way by some.
>
>We are here, in this list, playing with several important pieces of
>knolwedge, from different individual sources, that we must massage and put
>together with a lot of patience and common sense. It might be finally a
>nicer story than the unfortunate "nail found in Zaragoza"
_______________
Loet said:
>Perhaps, we can use the mathematical theory of communication for
>understanding cultural phenomena, but only if we are able to free it from
>its physical (thermodynamic) and biological (Darwinian) connotations. The
>problems have to be specified at the systems level relevant to the
research
>question and then some math can sometimes be imported from other relevant
>sciences.
SS: As I see it, the mathematical theory of communication (Shannon entropy
= information carrying capacity) was freed from its physical connotations
by Shannon & Weaver by removing certain constraints from the Boltzmann
model of physical entropy. That is, the Shannon equation regarding variety
is a generalization of the Boltzmann equation regarding disorder (of
particles in a field). Thus freed, it can be applied to any field
containing an assessable amount of variety. The Darwinian connotation
(given in Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection) is that the
greater the variety of some field, the more rapidly it can evolve into a
simpler field, becoming thereby more specialized with respect to some
aspect of the environment surrounding the field. Both of these ideas are
general enough to be applied to any discipline or example where variety can
be assessed.
___________________
Pedro, in a complex message on Friday, said (among many other things):
> Several parties in this list have advocated systemic views (Stan a number
>of times!, Jerry also produced a vast systemic scheme). However, arguing
>seriously about systems theory, after the pioneering views of von
>Bertalanffy in the 60's, very little has been produced under the guidance
>of that school, and I really contend that, concerning the integration
>problem, anything but triviality and self-delusion can be found around the
>'level' stuff nowadays.
SS: If that is true, then, sadly, a number of folks are getting ready
to waste a lot of time, as the hierarchy / levels approach is attracting
considerably more interest these days than it had before the mid 90's. It
is worth pointing out, erhaps, that levels are established by information,
which is the topic of the current thread. Relations between levels are
informational.
>Then, a pressing issue to consider in this tentative revision of social
>ascendancy may be that social information is very largely
"decoupled" from
>entropy growth (as is biological information itself).
SS: Well, social information would be involved in setting up potential
kinetics to mediate energy flowing through a social system. Some channels
for flow may be used in some contexts, others in other contexts. Some
kinetics would impose more friction upon energy flow than would others.
So, I think the term "decoupled" here is dead wrong! My remarks here would
hold regardless of whether we think of a system as maximizing energy
throughput or not. That is, the information -> kinetics connection is
necessarily true regardless of how one visualizes the global behavior of a
system. As well, while it may seem that the intensity of energy flows
within a social system are unimportant, no materialist could take that
position.
STAN
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Received on Mon May 30 11:01:17 2005
