Loet (and the list),
Actually, I have no problem with your description below, depending on
the meaning of 'emergent'. In my original complaint I was objecting
to the idea that sociality alone is sufficient to produce new
information (or new information capacity). The issue is similar to
that of whether or not neural nets can produce anything new
(substitute social nets to get the argument for the social case
mutatis mutandis). Jerry Fodor argues that they cannot, since space
of possibilities is not increased by anything that happens in the
net. Fodor is famous for his 'language of thought' hypothesis,
according to which there are no new ideas: all are innate. His
argument was designed to show that connectionism, as it is commonly
understood, cannot evade his argument for innateness. In the social
case, without further argument for a strong form of social emergence,
all meaning would be similarly innate, by a Fodorian argument to the
effect that all the possibilities must be inherent in the original
capacities of the underlying system.
At 11:17 AM 2006/01/27, Loet Leydesdorff wrote:
> > Incidentally, this was what I was trying to lead Loet to a
> > while back when I argued that no new information arises from
> > sociality alone. This is just one of many difficult cases.
> > Many physicists will say (as they have to me) that the phase
> > space of the system is a given, and thus all of the
> > information in the system is given in advance by that
> > structure of that phase space, so new information is
> > impossible. I say that if we have dissipation of the same
> > order as that of a central property of the system (especially
> > its cohesion, or dynamical individuating property -- see,
> > e.g. Collier and Hooker, "Complexly Organised Dynamical
> > Systems", Open Systems and Information Dynamics , 6 (1999):
> > 241-302), then new information can appear, in the sense that
> > a) it cannot be computed from the original system, as long as
> > its properties are localized, and b) nothing can control the
> > system to select one attractor over another (unless it uses
> > high power and substantially changes the phase space itself).
> >
> > What I was trying to lead Loet to was the requirement of
> > additional conditions on mere sociality, but he cleverly
> > blocked my attempt to illuminate him.
>
>Dear John and colleagues,
>
>I understood the argument which you made in Behavioral and Brain Sciences
>27(5), 2004, 629-630, but I did not understand why this would preclude the
>possibility of another circulation process--generating probabilistic
entropy
>in another dimension--at the level of the emergent system.
That level being emergent in some strong sense is crucial. Otherwise there
is no 'other dimension'. All the dimensionality is in the original phase space.
>The argument was about whether meaning could circulate at the level of the
>social system in addition to and possibly in interaction with the
processing
>of information (uncertainty in the distributions) in this system. Note
that
>the communication of meaning is not observable, but one can entertain the
>hypothesis that meaning is communicated in social and psychological
systems
>(Husserl). For example, a statement can be expected to contain information
>and to be provided with meaning both by individuals and in discourses. The
>two (analytically distinguished) communication processes mutually inform
>each other. This mutual information would be equal to the meaningful
>information which is selected from the circulation of the uncertainty.
Of course, there are philosophers who argue that all meaning is social
(e.g., Wittgenstein). I am inclined to agree with this myself, so without
sociality, I would say, there is no meaning. So I was restricting myself
to the dimensionality part of your argument.
>If I correctly remember your point was that this emerging system of meaning
>circulation would not contain information, but it seems to me that this
>depends on the operationalization. For example, in the economy one might
>argue that the circulation of goods is valued (and in this sense provided
>with meaning) by the circulation of prices. The circulation of goods and
>prices can be measured independently. When more than two levels can thus
be
>distinguished, mutual information in three dimensions can even be
negative.
>Thus, the next-order system may locally reduce the uncertainty.
No, at least my argument was intended to address only the dimensionality
issue. If I did not make that clear, my apologies. I am afraid I do
not understand
your reference to negative information above. I do understand the idea of
mistakes that need correction, and of practical inconsistencies, and that it
can require effort to correct these, but I am not clear how either would imply
negative information. Entropy, in general is the complement of information
within a clearly defined statistical system, but maximum entropy is just
zero internal information. I would take it that mistakes and formal
inconsistencies are forms of entropy, and hence "neginformation", to
use an ugly analogy to the word 'negentropy'. The effort of correction
is required to overcome this entropy (reverse it).
>Perhaps, I still miss out what I seem to have blocked. :-) Thus, the above
>provide sufficient material for the further illumination?
I hope this helps to explain better what I meant, Loet. I was not saying
specifically that you were wrong, but questioning what would make you
right, since, as I said, sociality alone is not enough to get new dimensions
under typical treatments of phase spaces.
John
----------
I might have thought that the new ideas were correct, if they had not
been so ugly.
Paul
Dirac to Freeman Dyson
Professor John Collier collierj@ukzn.ac.za
Philosophy and Ethics, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 4041 South Africa
T: +27 (31) 260 3248 / 260 2292 F: +27 (31) 260 3031
http://www.nu.ac.za/undphil/collier/index.html
http://www.kli.ac.at/research.html?personal/collier
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Received on Fri Jan 27 10:44:02 2006
