Dear Aleks and colleagues,
In our culture the "meta-thinking" reshapes the underlying reality in a
techno-economic evolution. In my country, for example, "nature" is a polder
vegetation, while there was a lake there originally. Nobody remembers the
lake except that it is in the name of the area. Similarly, almost nobody
remembers why one had to let people bleed when they felt ill in the Middle
Ages. The "meta-thinking" does penetrates the underlying reality and changes
it at the level of the social system.
For example, we still use currency like coins, but most of our payment
system is in terms of accounts. This has become part of our physical
reality. Thus, the model of a reality out there, and us here with
meta-thinking is no longer valid. The meta-thinking has got a dynamics of
its own and this dynamics has become part of our knowledge-based reality.
This does not preclude our freedom to think; on the contrary, our individual
ideas and phantasies provide the variation from which the supra-individual
transformation of culture "lives". "Nature" then becomes a provisional
definition of the previous state of the system. Before the polders we had
lakes (in the 17th century). Before the computers we had typewriters; before
the banknotes we had coins which had value (like energy). The more complex
solutions can sometimes replace the previous ("natural") ones.
"All that is solid melts into air" (Marx, Communist Manifesto, 1848). Marx
believed that there was a solution to this dialectics. However, as soon as
it is a tialectics, there is no solution but a temporary one. The movement
is ongoing because it enables us to process more complexity. Perhaps,
subsystems (e.g., nations) compete in terms of processing complexity (like
in my example of New York versus Calcutta). "Nations" and "nature" refer to
the Latin verb "nascere": to be born. All systems which are born and exhibit
a life-cycle are still material. Informational systems as part of social
systems do not have to be born, but are generated by interhuman interactions
and scientific discourses. (We can use the metaphor of a "life-cycle", but
that is just for convenience.) The dynamics of this cultural evolution are
different from biological evolution in important respects. The specification
of these differences perhaps may help to move the cultural evolution forward
by making it more "self-" knowledge-based.
With kind regards,
Loet
> -----Original Message-----
> From: fis-bounces@listas.unizar.es
> [mailto:fis-bounces@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Aleks Jakulin
> Sent: Sunday, May 29, 2005 6:40 PM
> To: Pedro Marijuan; FIS
> Subject: [FMG-SPAM] - Re: [Fis] leteral comment -
> reductionism - Bayesian Filter detected spam
>
> Loet stresses that the mathematics of information can be
> applied to conceptualize anything. This notion also appears
> in Pedro's separation of information as parallel to the
> scalar levels of reality. Rafael reminds us of "being
> inside", with many interesting references. Pedro makes a
> beautiful example of energetic value vs psychological value.
>
> I think these issues pinpoint the relation between physics
> and information. The "systemic" perspective tried to propose
> metaphors of
> reality: where is the information in this reality? But there
> is a parallel world of information, and it can be studied for
> its own sake.
>
> I will now try to apply some Aristotelian analogies to
> information, attempting to define it. The central element is
> "model", and there are four causes to it. My "model"
roughly
> corresponds to the notion of the Sign in semiotics. I think
> this representation may help illuminate some of the
> meta-level disagreements in the recent discussion, and
> perhaps reconcile the informational stream and the
> physicalist stream of thought. These two streams merely focus
> at two different aspects of the same thing: they don't
> exclude one another.
>
> 1. The constructs the thoughts are made of (the materiality
> of language, the building blocks of information)
>
> Pedro wrote:
> > So, discussing in depth the series of bio-economic
> metaphors raised by
> > Aleks would be quite interesting (impossible here, but just as a
> > detail, the ATP is presented as 'currency' in most
> textbooks: wrong,
> > at is just pure 'fuel'; the only cellular currency may be
> established
> > around "second messengers" cAMP,
> > Ca++, cGMP, etc.).
>
> In Mongolia the "currency" used to be chunks of dry blood:
> you could eat
> it in cases of emergency - so fuel can be currency. In the
> very old days
> in Europe the currency were chunks of bronze that you could
> convert into
> swords and those you could wield to obtain food. The currency a flower
> pays the bee is glucose. If you trace back the origins of
> currency, you
> arrive at fuel. If you trace back the origins of fuel, you arrive at
> energy. Pedro is right in saying that the thread is overstretched, but
> it's still a thread. The beginnings and the endings are lost in a blur
> of vagueness in becoming and ending. When is it currency and no longer
> fuel? When does a chicken stop being an egg? When is the egg
> no longer a
> part of the chicken?
>
> "Becoming" and "ending" are a reflection of the
"path" metaphor that
> Lakoff and Nunez wrote about (as Terry reminded us last
> year). We wield
> these metaphors to comprehend the world. But the actuality of
> the world
> is not made of beginnings and endings. Our *understanding* of the
> reality of the world is made of beginnings and endings. Beginnings and
> endings are the crayons we use to draw our mental maps.
>
> I think "information" in the context of FIS is the discussion
of
> metaphors the knowledge is built from, the structure of knowledge.
> Shannon information is one of those metaphors. Probability is yet
> another metaphor. Both of them rest on the kind of foundations of
> ennumeration that Karl often mentions. Igor and Bob speak of
> network and
> autocatalysis metaphors. Stan upholds the hierarchical metaphors.
>
> What metaphors are there? Can we build a dictionary of them? Can we
> build a grammar of them?
>
> ==
>
> 2. The shape of the information world (the formality to
> information, the
> constraints placed upon the information)
>
> Pedro wrote:
> > 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 biological information itself).
>
> Our minds and computers are all connected. Thoughts jump around, build
> up, collapse and flow. Symbols are made, forgotten, mapped
> and matched.
> Sometimes the realities thus constructed are well-connected to the
> unknown and often unknowable actualities below. A mental image of a
> castle perched on the cliff is matched by an actual pile of rock. A
> mental image of a castle on a cloud in the sky is not matched
> by any data.
>
> So, our minds construct all sorts of ideas. Some ideas are grounded in
> energetic reality down below, and some ideas are pies in the sky. Just
> as the wind can twist and heat the air to no avail, the same wind can
> blow a house away. Some ideas productively modify humanity, and some
> ideas make the humanity turn in aimless circles.
>
> We can thus examine how the parallel world of representations
> looks like
> (formal). We can think about what the representations are made of
> (material). We can study our minds that host and nurture the
> information
> (efficient). And we can wonder about the purpose of the information
> (final). Do these four causes define information science? Am
> I myopic in
> my thinking that "information science" is the study of models?
>
> No wonder that Pedro and others find systemic views reductionist: they
> indeed focus primarily on the efficient cause of information (where is
> information, what causes it?). Sometimes we look at the final cause of
> information (what is information good for? will it sustain itself?)
>
> So, if there is information in a cell: (formal, structure) What is it
> like? What does it mean? (material, elements) What is it made of? What
> is the language? (efficient, "how") what is its physical
nature? How
> does it work? (final, "why") Why is it used? What is it good
for?
>
> It's easier for a computer database information:
> * material: bits and bytes
> * formal: relational database
> * final: human users' proximate goals
> * efficient: computation
>
> Or for scientific information:
> * material: algebra, geometry
> * formal: empirical data
> * final: truth
> * efficient: maximization, computation
>
> For business thinking:
> * material: situations, actions, decisions (usually not explicit)
> * formal: market, resources
> * final: profit, values
> * efficient: maximization
>
> For (over)simplistic evolutionary models:
> * material: genes
> * formal: environment
> * final: survival, fitness
> * efficient: selection, mutation
>
> One might wonder whether the more specific notion of a FORMal cause
> would better capture the notion of "inFORMation". Formal
> causes are the
> constraints, the boundary conditions, but also the correlations. That,
> of course, is a possibility, but wait: if we are describing the real
> world, and we employ the formal cause as a descriptive metaphor, the
> formal cause is a model. The scientific "data" is not
objective, it's
> itsef a model (made of numbers or ponts, formed in tables or graphs,
> collected through measurements, and chosen to satisfy a scientist's
> ambitions).
>
> Of course, there may be better foundational metaphors for all
> this than
> my interpretation of Aristotelian causality. But to avoid too much
> confusion, "information=model=representation=signs" might be a
good
> definition that liberates information from its building blocks,
> meanings, purposes and mechanisms. It's about meta-thinking, where a
> thought, a model is in the focus. We can apply meta-thinking to the
> thought of a thinker. We can apply meta-thinking to the thought of a
> purpose. We can apply meta-thinking to the thought of a cause.
>
>
> 3. Aristotelian models vs semiotic signs
>
> I will try to map the four-fold causality to the notion of the sign. A
> sign is a trajectory from input (object) through mediation
> (representamen, vehicle) into an output (interpretant). The model in
> Aristotelian scheme corresponds to the Peircean output. The
> input is the
> formal cause of a model. But I decompose the mediation into
> generativity
> (material), mechanism (efficient) and purpose (formal).
>
> For an internalist the world should be pure firstness. But for a
> practical discussion, we use various metaphors to convert it into
> secondness and thirdness. In the example of scientific thinking, we
> pretend that the "data" is a correct representation of
firstness. An
> internalist scientist will be aware that this is already a
> simplification.
>
>
> I would be grateful for comments, criticism and corrections.
>
> --
> mag. Aleks Jakulin
> http://kt.ijs.si/aleks/
> Department of Knowledge Technologies,
> Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
>
>
>
>
>
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Received on Tue May 31 06:52:22 2005
