Re: [Fis] (no subject)

Butting in on Pedro's to Koichiro, see interleavings:

> Dear Koichiro,
> Many thanks for your inspiring opening of the New Year. Time is perhaps
>the most elusive aspect of information. As was said once in this list, we
>can make interesting taxonomies and structural analysis on information
>categories, but when we focus on information dynamics, on its variation in
>time, things get amazingly difficult.
      SS: I suppose it is redundant on this list to name two books:
Dretske, 1981, Knowledge and the Flow of Information
Barwise & Seligman, 1997, Information Flow

> Given that we are facing a discussion on "autopiesis and meaning" pretty
>soon (see note below), let me get ahead connecting with it and wondering
>how your reflection on the need to focus attention "on the distinction
>between present progressive and present perfect tense" would apply to the
>meaning problem.
      SS: As one who has been taught by Koichiro, I could take a crack at
this. The present perfect registers what IS now, at this moment (i.e.,
what has just happened in the progressive in the passing moment). If the
system is material, as the next perfect emerges, the last one gets stored
into a record. The configuration (implications) of that record is the
locale of meaning.

> Also, retaking Rafael's point on the "mortal bucket", another germane
>concern would be towards what kind of cellular-molecular operations could
>be somehow 'decomposed' our meanings and their load of time-related
>problems. In my hunch, there is a bandwagon of associated concepts that
>conventionally are worlds apart, but they look quite close to each other
>under the information perspective: meaning, value, utility, fitness,
>knowledge.
      SS: Technically, in the Darwinian discourse, fitness (of a population)
is something which, like entropy in an isolated system, MUST increase, or
the system will fail. Do the others NEED to increase? Some kinds of value
in some systems, maybe. Knowledge, it may be too. In my view, continued
information loading into a material system leads to senescence (via
information overload), and recycling.

  Adumbrating the time conflicts (and different time regimes?) inherent of
these fuzzy concepts emerging out from biological (cellular)
self-production and adaptation looks a crucial part of our information
agenda.
> Even more, looking at human knowIedge (that perhaps is not so especial
>and is caught under similar premises to biological knowledge), from a
>multidisciplinary perspective, I would put that 'all knowledge is local'
      SS: Shades of Clifford Geertz! This is a postmodern perspective,
which denies global knowledge ideologically, and is related to Quine's
impossibility of translation.

>and that there is not such thing as a 'disembodied knowledge'.
      SS: Putative global knowledge is embodied in books, films, computers,
steles, even in machines (which are the "word" made material).

>Through the multiple differences introduced by venues, corporate bodies,
>social institutions, and cultures our local knowledge circulates and, by
>doing so, it becomes 'closer' to universal and cosmopolitan
      SS: d'accord.

STAN

_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
fis@listas.unizar.es
http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Received on Mon Jan 12 11:48:00 2004