Fw: [Fis] "The fiction of function".

----- Original Message -----
From: Igor Rojdestvenski
To: Jerry LR Chandler
Cc: fis@listas.unizar.es
Sent: Friday, October 07, 2005 2:58 PM
Subject: Re: [Fis] "The fiction of function".

Dear Jerry,

Thanks for your post. I meant to be provocative. Once we begin to absolutise our theories or even our systems of symbols, we drift away from natural physics, that is, become metaphysical. The question I still strive to get an answer to is, simply put, as follows:

Is information physical or metaphysical?

This question, in principle, may be
1) Answered either way, depending on the definition of information.
2) Eliminated, if it is possible to show (see some modern and not so modern quantum mechanical speculations) that physical and metaphysical are inseparable, that the physics of processes in the nature depend on those who observe them (see directed mutations in biology, quantum entanglement and such like in physics, "El Farol bar" problem in economics, etc).

I am merely listing the possibilities here and not advocating any of these alternatives. But we should be aware of the playground. Otherwise we will be entangled in an endless web of oxymoronic tautologies.

Igor

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Jerry LR Chandler
  To: fis@listas.unizar.es
  Sent: Friday, October 07, 2005 9:00 AM
  Subject: [Fis] "The fiction of function".

  Dear Igor:

  The assertions in your post are very, very provocative.

  Science and information theory have generated a number of symbol systems in order to facilitate human communication.

  At times, one symbol system expresses certain concepts more efficiently than others. No one symbol system can be shown to be superior to all others for all circumstances. The symbol system of chemistry expresses empirical observations.

  One must be aware that the objects of biology - the cellular parts and pieces, exist. Living systems are composed from chemical entities, not physical theories.

  By exist, I mean an intimate association between the concept of existence, the concept of properties and the concept of name. For every chemical entity, the concept of existence is necessary in order to assign properties. The assignment of a name depends on a logic proof of the associations as exhibited by the properties. Chemical proof theory is an exact accounting of positions of electrical particles and a consistent grammar of composition.

  From the vantage point of these philosophical generalities, I address particular points in the post.

    From: Igor Rojdestvenski
    To: Kevin Kirby (by way of Pedro Marijuan<marijuan@unizar.es>)
    Sent: Saturday, October 01, 2005 9:15 AM
    Subject: Re: [FIS] Re: What is information?

    Dear Kevin and others,

    Very interesting post, the more interesting to argue. The ribosome does not have a function. We assign its behavior a certain goal which we call "function". A very interesting treatise on this can be found at

    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/utils/lofref.fcgi?PrId=3051&uid=14555626&db=PubMed&url=http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/pmidlookup?view=reprint&pmid=14555626

    The article is called "The fiction of function".

    The existence of a network in physical sense is also highly questionable.

  Chemical networks are not physical networks. This is well known. Chemical network terminology describes reaction sequences as directed graphs, not mathematical functions.

    I may seem boringly formal, but as long as we do definitions here, we should be.

  In the absence of a formal theory of chemistry, I do not know how we could hope to do this.

    There are no metabolic networks in the Nature, but pools of interacting substances (molecules).

  Metabolic networks are integrated over evolutionary time spans. The concept of a "pool" is remote from the abstract concept of the intimacy of dependencies within a metabolic network.

    Really physical is a molecule and interactions between the molecules.

  I do not know the meaning of this sentence. Physical philosophy is not a chemical object, is it?

    All the rest, like chains of reactions, metabolic networks and so on -- all this is our "model", our "explanation" certain chains of events and concomitant interactions.

  The unity of life is not merely a local phenomenon, but comparable dynamic flows distributed over comparable chemical structures. Chemical structures are not variables nor do they correspond exactly with the notion of mass. Mathematically, each structure is a particular graph, not a point - mass. Each chemical structure is a unique object.

  I believe that one can accept the power of physical methods and mathematics while preserving the empirical validity of chemistry and biology. Is this hypothesis untenable from a physical view point?

    It is like in the world of Feynman diagrammes some diagrammes are called "watermelons" for their shape, but nobody expects them to really taste sweet and fruity.

  I fail to see any similarity between the jargon of watermelons and the logic of physics. perhaps you could explain this?

  Cheers

  jerry
Received on Sat Oct 8 15:19:55 2005