RE: [Fis] leteral comment - reductionism

Aleks,Pedro,Bob

Thanks for your 'leteral' (at the quantum concurrence of the literal and the lateral?) comments.

Aleks -
<We are not being reductionists reducing information to joules and degrees centigrade. <Instead, we're thinking on what corresponds to "joules" and "degrees centigrade" at the <information level...

<We naturally think in terms of metaphors and analogies. Why deny that?
<Why is the crisp and dry metaphor of mathematics nonarbitrary, and the
<free-flying metaphor arbitrary?

Yes, can't information embody both symbol and energy (energeia)?

Reductionism haunts this forum like Banquo's apparition at Macbeth's feast - and 'information' is the free-flying Fleance whose whereabouts are unknown at the end of the play. (In cybersemiotic literary criticism Macbeth himself is a Posthumanist tragically embroiled in the conflict between dynamis (power) and energeia (ambition - his entropic
quest for the joules). Banquo's ghost is white noise produced by the babbling guests at the banquet which itself symbolizes the temporary success of Technology <:)

The problem is not reduction per se - a useful tool bequeathed to us by Descartes and now a time-honoured method of digesting an intractable problem one bite at a time.

I have a real problem with the -ism at the end - the original sin of scientific thinking - or imitative scient-ism. If von Foerster (and Godl) were right and science is ultimately about subjective narratives then Marx could never be a Marxist, Nietzsche wouldn't be a Nietzschean and Jesus Christ wasn't a Christian Scientist (or even a Christian). The noun from which 'scientist' is derived is 'scientism'. Wouldn't we be better off calling ourselves 'sciencists'? In French science and knowledge conflate in 'la science' and the pluralistic 'connaissances'. The English language has created the unfortunate duality of 'science' and 'knowledge' and left us with the legacy of 'two cultures'.
  
The noble art of reduction shouldn't be confused with the contemporary trend to compartmentalise science, reduce it to mechanistic explanations and dodge the
implications of complexity.

Sloppy terminology leads to confusion (which is the original meaning of 'war').

For example, any discipline which gives itself a name by pluralising an adjective must be suspect - like economics, linguistics, informatics and not forgetting mathematics and physics. The spawn of contemporary -ics is a legacy of that cacozelia and has itself contributed to the specialist compartmentalisation of learning. At least biology, geology, medicine and law got their monikers right. Alfred Korzybski might have been correct when he blamed Aristotle (anagrammatically the 'totaliser' of knowledge) for the 'binding' of science in its own classification systems and nomenclatures. Then the Count gave us his opaque General Semantics in 'Science and Sanity' which only compounded the problem.

Which leads us back to Stanley's call for an epistemology of 'vagueness' and the simplicity/complexity dilemma. What could be more illustrative of this than the label 'quark'(why not 'Snark'?)in subatomic physics with the crisp and dry attributes 'truth''beauty' etc?

Pedro Marijuan wrote:

> Economy is not a domain of energies and entropies but of information and knowledge...

I can't agree with you Pedro in excluding energy from our notions of economy or information.
Few if any of the other 50 million species on this planet have developed symbols metaphors
or natural language but most partake of informational exchange. We cannot survive on imagery (or software) alone. What we need is broader non-energeticist notions of 'energeia' and 'dynamis' which includes and transcends entropy - the phenomenology of Bob's 'underlying networks of material and energy flows'.

John H

-----Original Message-----
From: fis-bounces@listas.unizar.es
[mailto:fis-bounces@listas.unizar.es]On Behalf Of Aleks Jakulin
Sent: Thursday, 19 May 2005 23:01
To: Pedro Marijuan
Cc: fis@listas.unizar.es
Subject: Re: [Fis] leteral comment

Pedro Marijuan wrote:
> Economy is not a domain of energies and entropies but of information and
> knowledge --entirely within the symbolic realm. Only one species among
> 10 millions on Earth (over 40 or 50 millions?) has developed such
> sumperimposed world of "economy".

We naturally think in terms of metaphors and analogies. Why deny that?
Why is the crisp and dry metaphor of mathematics nonarbitrary, and the
free-flying metaphor arbitrary?

A plant is paying the bee with sugar to disperse the pollen. A potato is
paying humans with carbohydrates to disperse the plant. A cherry tree
pays the bee first for doing the matchmaking, and the bird later for
doing the child-rearing. Lice pay the ants to guard them. Plants release
distress signals when attacked by lice to call the predators. Flowers
smell and look good so that the bees don't need to think that much to
find them (how strange that we like what the bees like?). When I go for
a walk around the bushes, I am saddened to see the prickly dog rose
plants loaded with the rotting red fruit that the birds no longer "buy"
(they prefer sunflower seeds). Food is money: ATP is cash, glucose is
bonds, fat is property.

As a human, I don't feel that our monetary economics is *that*
special... It just operates on a higher level, but there is nothing
conceptually different, if you allow for the inter-level
self-similarity. The message of entropy and energy is that essentially
the same descriptors can be applied to any level. We are not being
reductionists reducing information to joules and degrees centigrade.
Instead, we're thinking on what corresponds to "joules" and "degrees
centigrade" at the information level.

When you spend energy, you pay. When you obtain energy, you are paid. We
are all paid here by the Sun to do something. We, humans, are paid to
maintain an ecosystem of symbols and thoughts, not to generate entropy.
Anyone who's talking here is selling ideas, and those who are listening
are buying them. As long as there are sellers and buyers and profit for
both, the forum exists.

There is a distinct tendency for ideas to disperse. Eventually, each of
us might know everything. There will no longer be a gradient, and there
will no longer be trade. That's when the entropy will win, and that's
when it will be the death of the forum.

Both selling and buying of ideas, even listening to them involves
spending energy at the lower level (our breakfasts). When there will no
longer be bread that can be used for thinking, the ideas and the medium
in which they dwell (us), both of them will be gone.

The ideas can consume their owners (suicide cults, self-sacrifice,
workaholism, university education), and the ideas can make their owners
multiply (Bring forth with you every living thing that is with you of
all flesh, including birds, cattle, and every creeping thing that creeps
on the earth; that they may breed abundantly in the earth, and be
fruitful, and multiply on the earth.�)

Culture is an ecosystem that maintains and nurtures a particular set of
ideas and values (is it prolific, is it sustainable?). Knowledge is
granary of ideas (will you ever eat it, or will it rot? does all the
knowledge make us obese? will anyone buy it?)

> Unfortunately, social information is misunderstood yet (and
> pragmatically mistreated by social disciplines). How could one run a
> discussion on computing &software in entropy grounds?,

Let me try: Computation is a set of constraints you place on the flow of
energy. Some computations reinforce the flow in an autocatalytic fashion
(software you want to buy; the software that thus gets reproduced, like
we let good potatoes reproduce), others just produce entropy ("10 goto
10" that makes your computer suck electricity and pump hot air out from
itself). Viruses and worms are selfish autocatalytic loops, and we pay
for antivirus software to get rid of them, just like we have to pay for
the immune systems in our bodies. Operating systems are
centrally-managed artificial ecosystems that maintain order and allocate
resources. Etc.

--
mag. Aleks Jakulin
http://kt.ijs.si/aleks/
Department of Knowledge Technologies,
Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
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