[Fis] Steps to a theory of reference & significance

[PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ]

Thanks for the response Jeremy. I appreciate the rigor of your piratic comments (perhaps at fis we are more relaxed concocting the arguments; rather than a tightly-knit discussion group, fis is more like a caravan of very heterogenous "knowledge traders")... Anyhow, concerning the plausibility of approaching the prokaryotic, it is an attempt that my mini-group has developed in several works (not very successfully attracting the attention of peers; but, helas, that's quite another matter!), see: "On prokaryotic Intelligence..." (Marijuan et al., BioSystems 99,2,94-103, 2010) which is perhaps the best exemplar. Also del Moral et al. in Kybernetes<http://juliette.lsi.us.es/Bibliography.aspx?query=%22Kybernetes%22>, 43(6):846-864, 2014, and several others focused in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Even at the very elementary level we have worked, there seems to be ample room for advancing in information-related directions. Perfectly congruent with the main theme of this discussion too (reference & significance). Beyond the single cell level, there are several information-thresholds of communication-thresholds in biological evolution that need to be understood better. Once crossed, complexity runaways take place ... (also in our societies). I think the story would make better sense if the intertwining of self-production flows and communication flows is contemplated differently, entering the idea of "absence" too (at least, I have also attempted!). Although minimally, we should be able to contribute to the social-informational arena of our times. See for instance the great works on "social physics" by Alex Pentland (shouldn't it be "social information science"?). But in order to do that, we should take care that the microphysical advances in the foundations of information can escalate with some parsimony...

These comments have become pretty "tangential" --but often at fis we draw this sort of free wheeling tangents!
best ---Pedro

________________________________
De: Jeremy Sherman [mindreadersdictionary at gmail.com]
Enviado el: viernes, 09 de enero de 2015 0:39
Para: PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ
Cc: fis
Asunto: Re: [Fis] Steps to a theory of reference & significance

Hi Pedro,

Jeremy Sherman here, a long-time pirate. Pleased to meet you. You say:

I am also critical with the autogenesis model systems--wouldn't it be far clearer approaching a (relatively) simple prokaryotic cell and discuss upon its intertwining of the communication and self-production arrangements? The way a bacterium "sees" the world, and reorganizes its living, could be a very useful analysis. I think it leads to a slightly different outcome regarding reference/significance, and meaning/value/fitness.

Terry and the Pirates have a long standing rule: One cannot employ as explanation that which hasn't yet been explained. Failing to hold this standard opens researchers up to merely taxonomical work, positing forces, properties and capacities defined solely by their consequences, in effect mistaking questions as answers. Hence, our focus on exploring reference at its earliest possible emergence, and explaining exactly how that emergence occurs, since emergence is also a question, not an answer, an explanandum not an explanan.

Somewhat related, I recently came across this:

Epistemological particularism is the belief that one can know something without knowing how one knows that thing.[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemological_particularism#cite_note-1> By this understanding, one's knowledge is justified before one knows how such belief could be justified. Taking this as a philosophical approach, one would ask the question "What do we know?" before asking "How do we know?" The term appears in Roderick Chisholm<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roderick_Chisholm>'s "The Problem of the Criterion<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_the_Criterion>", and in the work of his student, Ernest Sosa<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Sosa> ("The Raft and the Pyramid: Coherence versus Foundations in the Theory of Knowledge"). Particularism is contrasted with Methodism<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methodism_(philosophy)>, which answers the latter question before the former. Since the question "What do we know" implies that we know, particularism is considered fundamentally anti-skeptical, and was ridiculed by Kant<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant> in theProlegomena<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prolegomena>.

We Pirates do what we can to stay on the epistemological methodist side of things.

Even the simplest prokaryotic cell is extraordinarily complex. We don't want to run before we can walk.  The briskest runners-before-walkers are those who want to go straight from physics to human consciousness, a leap that we think makes the endeavor thoroughly intractable.

Best,

Jeremy

On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 4:48 AM, Pedro C. Marijuan <pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es<mailto:pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es>> wrote:
Dear Terry and colleagues,

Thanks a lot for the opening text! It is a well crafted Essay full of very detailed contents. My impression is that the "microphysics" of information has been solved elegantly --at least at the level of today's relevant knowledge-- with your work and the works of related authors, one of them Karl Friston, who could be linked as a complementary approach to yours (in particular his recent "Life as we know it", Royal Society Interface Journal, 10: 20130475). His Bayesian approach to life's organization, coupled with (variational) "free energy" minimization principle, conduces to the emergence of homeostasis and a simple form of autopoiesis, as well as the organization of perception/action later on. Thus, quite close to your approach on autogenic systems. About the different sections of the Essay, the very detailed points you deal with in section 4 ("steps to a formalization of reference")  are, in my opinion, the  conceptual core and deserve a careful inspection, far more than these rushed comments. In any case, the relationship Boltzmann-Shannon entropies has been cleared quite elegantly.

However, for my taste the following sections have not sufficiently opened the panorama. And with this I start some critical appreciations. Perhaps the microphysics of information is not the critical stumbling block to me removed for the advancement of the informational perspective. We could remain McLuhan's stance on Shannon's information theory and von Neumann's game theory... yes, undoubtedly important advancements, but not the essential stuff of information. But in this list there are people far more versed in McLuhan's contents and whether the caveats he raised would continue to apply (obviously in a different way). I am also critical with the autogenesis model systems--wouldn't it be far clearer approaching a (relatively) simple prokaryotic cell and discuss upon its intertwining of the communication and self-production arrangements? The way a bacterium "sees" the world, and reorganizes its living, could be a very useful analysis. I think it leads to a slightly different outcome regarding reference/significance, and meaning/value/fitness.

If we look at the whole view of the "information world" (human societies, behaving individuals, brain organization, cellular processes, biomolecules) and how a myriad of information flows are crisscrossing, ascending, descending, focusing, mixing and controlling energy flows, etc. we may have an inkling that this evanescent world paradoxically becomes the master of the physical world (the "fluff" versus the "stuff", Lanham 2006), and that is organized far beyond the rules of the micro-macro-physical world. But how? What are the essentials of this magnificent "castle in the air" (reminding Escher's engrave: http://fis.sciforum.net/ )?

In next exchanges I will try to ad some more specifics on the above "fluffy" comments, derided from a fast reading of the Essay. Thanks again, Terry, for providing us this discussion opportunity in the New Year.

best  ---Pedro


_*Steps to a theory of reference & significance in information
*_*FIS discussion paper by Terrence W. Deacon (2015)*

This is the link to download the whole paper: https://www.dropbox.com/s/v5o8pwx3ggmmmnb/FIS%20Deacon%20on%20information%20v2.pdf?dl=0

/"The mere fact that the same mathematical expression - Σ pi log pi occurs both in statistical
mechanics and in information theory does not in itself establish any connection between these
fields. This can be done only by finding new viewpoints from which thermodynamic entropy and
information-theory entropy appear as the same concept." /(Jaynes 1957, p. 621)

/"What I have tried to do is to turn information theory upside down to make what the
engineers call 'redundancy' [coding syntax ] but I call 'pattern' into the primary
phenomenon. . . . “/ (Gregory Bateson, letter to John Lilly on his dolphin research, 10/05/1968)

*Introduction*

In common use and in its etymology the term ‘information’ has always been associated with
concepts of reference and significance―that is to say it is about something for some use. But
following the landmark paper by Claude Shannon in 1948 (and later developments by Wiener,
Kolmogorov, and others) the technical use of the term became almost entirely restricted to refer
to signal properties of a communication medium irrespective of reference or use. In the
introduction to this seminal report, Shannon points out that although communications often have
meaning, “These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem”
which is to provide a precise engineering tool to assess the computational and physical demands
of the transmission, storage, and encryption of communications in all forms.

The theory provided a way to precisely measure these properties as well as to determine
limits on compression, encryption, and error correction. By a sort of metonymic shorthand this
quantity (measured in bits) came to be considered synonymous with the meaning of
‘information’ (both in the technical literature and in colloquial use in the IT world) but at the cost
of inconsistency with its most distinctive defining attributes.

This definition was, however, consistent with a tacit metaphysical principle assumed in the
contemporary natural sciences: the assertion that only material and energetic properties can be
assigned causal power and that appeals to teleological explanations are illegitimate. This
methodological framework recognizes that teleological explanations merely assign a locus of
cause but fail to provide any mechanism, and so they effectively mark a point where explanation
ceases. But this stance does not also entail a denial of the reality of teleological forms of
causality nor does it require that they can be entirely reduced to intrinsic material and energetic
properties.

Reference and significance are both implicitly teleological concepts in the sense that they
require an interpretive context (i.e. a point of view) and are not intrinsic to any specific physical
substrate (e.g. in the way that mass and charge are). By abstracting the technical definition of
information away from these extrinsic properties Shannon provided a concept of information that
could be used to measure a formal property that is inherent in all physical phenomena: their
organization. Because of its minimalism, this conception of information became a precise and
widely applicable analytic tool that has fueled advances in many fields, from fundamental
physics to genetics to computation. But this strength has also has undermined its usefulness in
fields distinguished by the need to explain the non-intrinsic properties associated with
information. This has limited its value for organismal biology where function is fundamental, for
the cognitive sciences where representation is a central issue, and for the social sciences where
normative assessment seem unavoidable. So this technical redefinition of information has been
both a virtue and a limitation.

The central goal of this essay is to demonstrate that the previously set aside (and presumed
nonphysical) properties of reference and significance (i.e. normativity) can be re-incorporated
into a rigorous formal analysis of information that is suitable for use in both the physical (e.g.
quantum theory, cosmology, computation theory) and semiotic sciences (e.g. biology, cognitive
science, economics). This analysis will build on Shannon’s formalization of information, but will
extend it to explicitly model its link to the statistical and thermodynamic properties of its
physical context and to the physical work of interpreting it. It is argued that an accurate analysis
of the non-intrinsic attributes that distinguish information from mere physical differences is not
only feasible, but necessary to account for its distinctive form of causal efficacy.

Initial qualitative and conceptual steps toward this augmentation of information theory have
been outlined in a number of recent works (Deacon 2007, 2008, 2010, 2012; Deacon &
Koutroufinis, 2012; Deacon , Bacigaluppi & Srivastava, 2014). In these studies we hypothesize
that both a determination of reference and a measure of significance or functional value can be
formulated in terms of how the extrinsic physical modification of an information bearing
medium affects the dynamics of an interpreting system that exhibits intrinsically end-directed
and self-preserving properties.

[...]

A model system
To test these principles and their relationship to reference and significance, I and my
colleagues have conceived of an empirically realizable and testable thought experiment. As in
most efforts to formalize basic physical properties it is useful to begin with a simple model
system in which all aspects of the process can be unambiguously represented. For our purposes
we describe a theoretical molecular system called an autogen, which maintains itself against
degradation by reconstituting damaged components and reconstituting system integrity. This
model system involves an empirically realizable molecular complex described previously
(Deacon 2012; also in Deacon & Cashman 2012; and also called an autocell in Deacon 2006a,
2007; 2009; and Deacon & Sherman 2008).

[...]

In this way we can use formal and simulated versions of autogenesis to develop a measure of
relative significance, in the form of “work saved.” I hypothesize that this simple model system
exemplifies the most basic dynamical system upon which a formal analysis of informational
interpretation and significance can be based.

[...]

In both forms, modifications of the autogenic process is provided with information referring
to its own preservation via boundary conditions (external or internal) that are predictive of
successful self-preservation. The significance of information of either sort is assessed by the
relative minimization of work per work cycle, and therefore the decreased uncertainty of selfreferential
constraint preservation. In this way interpretation is analogous to the decrease in
uncertainty that is a measure of received information in Shannonian theory, but at a teleodynamic
system level.

Using these three variants of a simple model system I claim that we can precisely analyze the
relationships between information medium properties, intrinsically end-directed work, and the
way these enable system-extrinsic physical conditions to become referential information
significant to system ends. These relationships are not only simple enough to formalize, but they
can be simulated by computer algorithms at various levels of logical and physical detail. I
believe that creating and experimenting with these simulated autogenic systems will enable us to
reframe the mysteries of reference and significance as tractable problems, susceptible to exact
formal and empirical analysis. This is still a far cry from a theory of information that is
sufficiently developed to provide a basis for a scientific semiotic theory much less than an
explanation of how human brains interpret information, but it may offer a rigorous physical
foundation upon which these more complex theories can be developed.


*― Terry*
Professor Terrence W. Deacon
University of California, Berkeley

-------------------------------------------------
Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526<tel:%2B34%20976%2071%203526> (& 6818)
pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es<mailto:pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es>
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
-------------------------------------------------

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