Dear John and colleagues:
The issue is, in my opinion: under which conditions is the emerging system
able to develop an additional degree of freedom? If this is the case, the
situation cannot be contained in the phase space ex ante.
I cannot oversee this for biological systems. It seems to me that they are
able to provide meaning to the events (Maturana), but that this meaning
cannot again be communicated. Language provides us with evolutionary
achievement to communicate both (Shannon-type) information and meaning
(although meaning remains elusive as an order of expectations). Meaning is
provided with hindsight; a meaning-processing system can develop a model of
the system to which meaning is provided and thus develop Rosen-type
anticipation.
Would this all be contained ex ante, or would it add a dimension to the
information processing? The number of dimensions is a property of the model,
in my opinion. One would need one more dimension to model a
meaning-processing system than one which would only process (Shannon-type)
information, wouldn't one? For example, the system would need this
additional dimension in order to play with time as a degree of freedom (for
the anticipation).
Am I still communicating? Anyhow, this is my second mail for this week and
given Pedro's rule, the communication comes now to an end.
The point about mutual information in three dimensions relates this
discussion to the one which I sometimes entertain with Aleks Jakulin.
(Aleks, you have still two opportunities!) The configuration within the
system can (by chance?) develop into one which reduces the uncertainty when
three subsystems operate upon one another. This reduction of the uncertainty
can be considered as a variant within the phase space or as selection by an
hypothesized next-order (emergent?) system. Since this system would have the
status of a hypothesis, it would all depend on the model and not on the
system under study. This external referent ("the phase space") would remain
tangential.
With best wishes,
Loet
________________________________
Loet Leydesdorff
Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR),
Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam.
Tel.: +31-20- 525 6598; fax: +31-20- 525 3681;
[email protected]
; http://www.leydesdorff.net/
> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Collier [mailto:collierj@ukzn.ac.za]
> Sent: Friday, January 27, 2006 10:46 AM
> To: Loet Leydesdorff; fis@listas.unizar.es
> Subject: RE: [Fis] biological "dynamics"
>
> 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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> <<<<gwavasig>>>>
>
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Received on Fri Jan 27 12:06:29 2006
