Re: talking exactly about what we are talking about

Dear Karl, Rafael, Werner, Pedro and All

This message seeks to address several related points and hence is a
bit long. The topic of this thread is exactly the related points to
which I am referring. I close this long message with a plea for HELP!

First, thank you Rafael for your excellent summary of the
philosophical history of the concept of "thingedness." It covers the
history up to the middle of the last century nicely. However, in the
last fifty years, our basic understanding of life and being has been
altered by the progress in molecular recognition, molecular biology,
molecular nutrition, molecular neurology, etc. The basic premise of
chemistry, that all (stable) matter of ordinary experience is
composed from atoms of the atomic table has been shown to apply to
life itself. This is a radical change in our knowledge of
ourselves. Thus, the need for a new metaphysics.

So, what is the metaphysics of information? My dictionary defines metaphysics

> >1. A branch of philosophy that deals with first principles of things,
> >including such concepts as being, substance, essence, time, space,
> >cause, and identity; theoretical philosophy as the ultimate science
>of being and knowing.

This definition shows correspondence relations between basic concerns
of science, space, time, substance, identity and cause and the basic
concerns of metaphysics.

What can metaphysicians contribute to this discussion of information?

I argue that information is a concept related to communication.
Thus, when Werner argues that:

(I cannot understand why several FISers like to consider information as
a property of a system itself, like mass, energy, momentum in physics.
To me and I believe to any engineer,
information is binary as interaction in physics it is a relation between
two things),
(See below, Werner and Shannon appear to be in full agreement on this point.)

I strongly support Werner's view (except for the possible ambiguity
of the reference for usage of "binary". Chemical communication is
between two things but a chemical communication is not via a "binary"
object.)

As pointed out in my extended abstract, the notion of communication
is derived from the root of "common" and hence tightly associated
with the concept of community. From this perspective, which draws
upon radically different metaphysical foundations, information is
seen as a relation between two things (objects, entities, beings).
This relation can be a simple binary relation (such as a bit, or it
could be more complex, a signal, a molecule, a set of molecules, a
page of a written transcript, a musical score, etc.

This metaphysical perspective of information recognizes that
information flows can be "one to many" or "many to one", as well as
binary. (See the book by Biosot referenced in my extended abstract.)
Shannon information, as defined, must conform to a bijection, in
Shannon's terminology, "to reproduce the message" exactly.

My view of "information as a relation between two" (or more) things
was motivated from Shannon's model by relaxing the presupposition
that communication is merely for engineering purposes. From a
metaphysical perspective, I presuppose that a community of
individuals communicate about matters of common concern to the
community. (This FIS list is an example of the preceding sentence)

(The exact quote from Shannon (page 31):
"The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing a
message at one point either exactly or approximately a message
selected at another point. Frequently, messages have meaning, that
is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with
certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of
communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.")

A second metaphysical problem concerns the metaphysics of time as it
relates to information, particularly the mathematics of information
of Shannon.
 From logic, we know that mathematical symbols are arbitrary. Thus
the meaning of a symbol depends on the assignment to a particular
concept, thing, entity, idea, relation, etc.

Shannon's mathematical symbols are assigned to mean a relation to
time intervals for transmission of a symbol.
Mathematical symbols for entropy are assigned to mean a relation with
Heat and with other thermodynamic parameters which form the bilinear
group of thermodynamic equations.

The metaphysical problem, from this perspective, if one desires
relate the symbols of information with the symbols of heat, is to
find a conversion factor or a narrative or a myth which creates a
bijection between heat and time.

Rafael - your comment on these views from your perspective of
metaphysics would be warmly welcomed.

Karl: I found much to agree with in your response. We concur on the
need for a public language. (This concept is closely related to the
concept of communication in a community; a public language is
essential to form a community of individuals.)

We also agree that on the central role of thingedness in the material
world. Your views are close to the typical view of a chemist /
biochemist. (I have referred to similar, but conceptually abstract,
views as "radical materialism".)
But, as noted above, progress in chemistry has given us material
descriptions of most "things" in terms of chemical structures and
associated chemical agglomerations and often these descriptions are
strongly supported by quantum mechanical calculations grounded in
physics. Many advances of technology are directly relatable to our
new understandings of the dynamical structures of simple components
of complex objects.

But, do physicists agree that this is a source of solutions to "deep problems"?
And, it appears to me that the recent advances in the chemistry of
life have created vast new problems for the philosophers. (The
relevance of this comment is questionable... given the nature of
philosophical problems.)

Could you say more about what you mean by "pre-logical"? I do not
understand this usage at all.

With regard to number theory, I remain pretty much in the dark as to
your meaning. I certainly concur that numbers play a critical role
in science and technology and human communication in general. The
fact that numbers can be used indexically is crucial. And, numbers
are critical for creating correspondence relations between the
external world (thingedness) and our internal mental images.
Furthermore, numbers play a central role as a central "generator" of
mathematical objects of many types (ie, the concept of species in
category theory).

I wrote:
>Your "very technical approach" could be translated as a special type
>of super-reductionism by incorporating temporal relations and
>conditional propositions into materialism. Can you relate this "very
>technical approach" to complex systems and such problems as
>evolution?
>
>Once we have agreement on the existence of a mathematical entity
>that behaves like a thing (or "carrier of potential information" in
>Rafael's parlance) then we shall be able to use this building block
>to build structures with no end in sight. Like once we define this
>is a Lego building block, we can build very complex and useful
>models. Indeed, my theory is a fine example of a super-reductionism.
>It investigates the translation between logical structures and
>carrier objects on which one can observe the logical structures. The
>theory does allow rather complex evolutionary processes.

Intuitively, I find your response very appealing, but I do not
understand how this is to be done. A central problem is the
irregularity of the mathematics of chemical systems. This implies
also the mathematics of living systems. The irregularity of chemical
structures and chemical dynamics (living structures and living
dynamics) denies me access to

  "the translation between logical structures and carrier objects on
which one can observe the logical structures"

I am denied access to this route by the fact that chemical structures
are mathematically expressed in terms of labeled graphs and that
these labeled graphs can not be placed in correspondence with the
natural numbers. In short, each chemical identity (entity, compound,
object, thing) is a unique category.

I wrote:
>the concept of time is intertwined with the concept of number. How
>do you justify this interrelation? At issue is the nature of
>continuity.
>
>I find one of the strong suits of my theory that it uses any kind of
>sequence and relates its information-carrying capacity to the
>information-carrying capacity of any kind of contempororary
>assembly. One is free to give a sequence (a mathematical entity) an
>interpretation as time slices. If you can number it consecutively,
>then it is a sequence. I look into the interdependence between
>cross-sectional and longitudinal collections of objects (carriers of
>symbols /information/). In everyday speak this means: I look into
>the relations between collections that are here all at the same time
>and collections that come one after the other. In a heroic allegory
>about a theoretical living organism: the theoretical cell's
>constituents are all present at the same time and all (each) of them
>is relevant at the same moment, while the theoretical DNA gets read
>off from start till the end, one (triplet) at a time, one after the
>other. In the sequence, it is the neighbourhood relations that count
>(this comes after that), while in the contemporary assembly the
>inclusion relations matter (this is like these and like those).
>Continuity and discontinuity are discussed at great length and
>detail also.

Ok. I now understand part of the mathematical approach. The
metaphysical issues concerning time are critical. Would it be fair to
state that the metaphysical symbol exchange for "time - heat" is
simpler than your proposed symbol exchange for "time - matter"?

You wrote:

>I propose to transcend the gap between well established principles
>of number theory and the concepts of communication between two
>collections of message carriers by following steps:
>1) extend number theory to include multidimensional partitions,
>hitherto left undefined;
>2) introduce the concept of the structure of a set by discussing
>properties of multidimensional partitions;
>3) introduce the technique of linearisations of structured sets;
>4) discuss congruence relations between neighbourhood relations on a
>sequence and structures in a set.
>I'd prefer not to call neither a structured set (a contemporary
>assembly) nor a sequence a system, but the interplay between these
>two constitutes a system.

Your agenda is clear. Have you published works concerning these
topics? I would be very interested in the details or in receiving
electronic copies.

Congratulations to all who have read this far!

Can others contribute to the task of creating a new metaphysics that
can be inclusive of information?

Cheers

Jerry LR Chandler
Received on Thu May 30 19:54:18 2002