[Fis] picturing the concept of information

[Fis] picturing the concept of information

From: <[email protected]>
Date: Tue 31 May 2005 - 13:33:22 CEST

Dear All,

some posts ago, Pedro was accused of comparing "levels" of descriptions (in sociology, economics, physics, etc.) to partitions of a set, which he rightly bounced off as I was that person doing the reduction and simpification and abstraction. I should have reacted sooner correcting the misperception.
Now Pedro states that he has found results not agreeing with my calculations, and this of course severly discredits the argumentation I keep putting forward, namely, that what we talk about here in plain text (the levels of appearances and their relations among each other) can very well be modeled by using natural numbers as linguistic units and observe the levels they build.
I will not go into mathematical details here, but would look forward discussing the nuts and bolts of calculations relating to multidimensional partitions. What appears important to state to the FIS list, that insofar we understand each other, that part of it that we together understand can be translated into mathematics.
Let me see Pedro's comments:
>" An additional problem concerning Karl's
> partitional approach is that he has not developed
> a consistent methodology yet---and the attempts
> made by me and Morris a few years ago, produced
> contradictory results with him. So I friendly depart
> from his views when he heuristically establishes
> the number of multidimensional partitions."
as an invitation to raise and make known, that
a) yes, I have evolved a consistent methodolgy, and
b) the attempts of a few years ago may be useful as a basis from which to restart the investigations.
If the calculations re-made by Morris and Pedro would now show that the numbers fit well, would that transfer an importance, relevance, usefulness to the idea that intellectual concepts can be standardised, abstracted, reduced, structuralised and thus depicted by numbers?
If the re-calculations would bring forth, that the flip-flop between object and logical relations does not happen between 32 and 97 but, say, between 12 and 65 - or at 137 -, would that prove the concept wrong?
The term "information" is itself an abstraction rather near to the abstraction level used in mathematics. The concept of information is definitely within the topics of Logic, and of course in technics of messages transmissions, which does have a close relation to mathematics.
I cannot help but restate that information is the pointing out of an alternative among several. The collection of all alternatives among several is the set of partitions of a natural number.
As to the numerical differences found by Pedro and Morris, I shall be pleased to go thru them - maybe my communicational and didactical skills have improved the last few years.
Yes, I stubbornly insist that the key point is the shift of perspective between top-down and bottom up, groups vs. individuals, commutative or sequential enumerations of objects. It simply does not add up. There are number theoretical tricks which make the collection inherently instable (or quasistable), wanting, in a fashion, to degenerate into an entropic state (in optimising a mathematical optimalisation function), but, on the other hand, being forced by the counteracting mathematical arrangement to re-translate relation into object and object into relation, theerby creating and annihilating. The numbers show this, at least to me.
If I re-told the same story, clothed into self-regulation on the level of the experiences of a shring (how to dissolve tension, how to loosen up, how to remove objects from the center of the attention, etc.), would the concept then be understandable and interesting?

Thanks for your open-minden attitude.
Karl

_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
fis@listas.unizar.es
http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Received on Tue May 31 13:31:37 2005


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