[Fis] Krassimir's Notes . . .

Thu Jun 18 01:17:50 CEST 2015

In a message dated 6/17/2015 8:30:33 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es writes:

Dear Steven and FIS  Colleagues,

Your message has arrived to the list perfectly: fears are  unjustified. 
There is no censorship in this list --and never will be any  (well, as 
the movie tells "never say never again"!). Anyhow, I would  dis-dramatize 
the discussion. The Vienna conference has been very exciting  and full of 
oral discussions that somehow continue now. Quite many of  those good 
ideas have been rediscussed in the exchanges of these days.  However, for 
my taste, the essential connection between information and  life has not 
properly surfaced yet.

hb.  have you  seen Guenther Witzak's When Competing Viruses Unify or my 
book The God  Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates?  both have clues to the  
relationship between information and life.  mere clues.  but a good  start.

 The explosion of  complexity in the living and the 
explosion of complexity in modern  societies is clearly depending on 
information and communication flows (or  whatever we may denominate). 
Comparatively with the complexity of merely  physical systems, there is 
no point about that.  Apart from following  the physics, most of the 
alternative approaches so far discussed go for  the discursive, 
conceptual domain as the place where information should be  
ascertained... What if information belongs to action,

hb: good  question.  what is the relationship between information and 
action?   what is the relationship between stimulus  and response?  another  
topic in The God Problem.

 to the adaptive  
changes arranged by the living  and socioeconomic agents, to the  
tentative advancement of their life cycles, to the difficult achievement  
of their fitness in an ever changing environment as communicating  
members of bigger entities and societies... then we are leaving that  
action track of life just as a fragmented scenario of multiple  
specialized points of view--or tying it unpropery. As Goethe put in  
Faust "At the beginning was the deed" Helas not the Verb!

In Vienna  I agreed with Marcin's pragmatic approach to the "liquidity" 
of  information. Maybe it is too long to argue, and sure he can do better 
than  me. But getting to terms with the factic undefinability of the term 
may  help quite a bit to the practice of information science research by  
people  with empirical and naturalistic orientation. 

hb: from The God  Problem: "information  is anything that a receiver can 
decode.   Information is anything a receiver can translate.  Information is 
anything that a  reciever can understand.   Information is in the eyes of the 
beholder."  how do we  know when information has hit home?  stimulus and 
response.  action.  the verb.

One should not feel  
forced to define a fundamental concept (on a pair with "time" and  
"space"--basic forms of information indeed) 

hb: this is  intriguing.  how  do you interpret time and space as  
information?  they do tell particles where to go.  and particles  respond by moving. 
is that it?

plus a cohort of other  
"impossible" related terms (meaning, knowledge, intelligence)

hb: from the god problem re the meaning of  meaning: "If  meaning is 
anything that a receiver can understand, if meaning is anything  that an entity 
can interpret, if meaning is in the eye of the beholder, then  how do you know 
when a thing or a person “understands” something? Follow the  B.F. Skinner 
rule.  Watch his or  her behavior.  Watch for the signs  of stimulus and 
response.  Watch  to  see if the receiver does  something in response to the 
stimulus.   Watch to see if the receiver moves.  Quarks exchange meaning with 
stimulus  and response.  So do gas whisps  competing to swallow each other. 
  And so do would-be planets using their gravity to snag and cannibalize  
comets and space debris.    How do we know the receivers get the meaning?  
All of them respond to the signals  they receive.  They move.  They move 
toward each  other."

one  more word.  from the work of Valerius Geist, author of Life  
Strategies.  all communication comes down to two elements: attraction  cues and 
repulsion cues.

 in order 
to  practice good info science research. Acknowledging that, could be a 
first  step to achieve a consensus on some basic principles of 
information  science that would allow the disciplinary construction and 
all the  multiple diversity within. It will take time and patience. So, 
our "market  of conceptual exchange" should continue unabated. 
Particularly, continuing  the debate on the 4 th Great Domain of Science 
can help us to have a big  picture where our more immediate, particular 
goals might one day  dovetail.

hb: i'm a newcomer to these  discussions.  what is the fourth great domain 
of  science?

with  warmth and oomph--howard

Best --Pedro

PS. The servers of University of Zaragoza are  terribly sensitive to spam 
suspiciousness, even my own messages have been  rejected occasionally. I 
can do little about that.

Steven  Ericsson-Zenith wrote:
> Dear Pedro,
>
> My fears appear  justified, the FIS server has begun bouncing my posts.
>
> I wish  to say the following:
>
>
> I fear that I may risk the life  of a child, in addition to encouraging 
> additional irrational calls  for banishment, by adding simple 
> encouragement to this point of  view.  I essentially agree with the 
> points that Marcus makes.  The essence of which, I believe, is that 
> many endow the notion  “information” with an existential status beyond 
> its due. A role that  it is patently ill equipped for.
>
> He is right to highlight how  the notion of information is being 
> shoe-horned into the gap caused by  the epistemic crisis that now 
> appears across science. Serious  consideration of the context, why this 
> crisis exists in the first  place, is required. In large part it is, in 
> my view, because of the  neglect of natural epistemology and 
> existentialism in  science.
>
> I would also point out that this crisis is apparent  in the words of 
> many modern physicists. Who have argued things like  “falsification is 
> unnecessary” and “falsified theories are not  fundamentally wrong” - in 
> addition to pursuing nonsensical physics in  which they make egregious 
> mistakes. 
>
> The simplest  examples of these mistakes being 1. the idea of “multiple 
> universes”  (that appears to simply be a misuse of English) and even 
> “The Big  Bang” as a creation theory (leaving room for all kinds of 
> nonsense,  including naive conceptions of “God”).
>
> The problem in general  is, I fear, the “shut up and calculate” 
> generation - who have focused  upon complex purely mathematical forms 
> and forgotten the necessity to  include humanity and all life in its 
> considerations, and - as a  consequence - they have sacrificed the 
> simplicity and pragmatism of  science.
>
> The fault lies in part, I know, with the Logicists,  distracting us 
> from the bridge building required between pure  mathematics and the 
> physical sciences, advocated first by Benjamin  Peirce (1809-1880). The 
> focus upon binary valued systems, entirely  discredited by Godel (to 
> whom we listened poorly), has not served us  well.
>
> Regards,
> Steven
>
>
>  --
>     Dr. Steven Ericsson-Zenith, Los Gatos,  California. +1-650-308-8611
>     http://iase.info  <http://iase.info/>
>
--  
-------------------------------------------------
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 (&  6818)
pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
-------------------------------------------------

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----------------------
Howard  Bloom
Howardbloom.net
Author of: The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific  Expedition Into the Forces 
of History ("mesmerizing"-The Washington Post),  
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st  
Century ("reassuring and sobering"-The New Yorker), 
The Genius of the  Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism ("A 
tremendously enjoyable book."  James Fallows, National Correspondent, The Atlantic), 
The God Problem: How  A Godless Cosmos Creates("Bloom's argument will rock 
your world." Barbara  Ehrenreich), 
How I Accidentally Started the Sixties (“Wow! Whew! Wild!  Wonderful!” 
Timothy Leary), and 
The Mohammed Code (“A terrifying book…the  best book I’ve read on Islam.” 
David Swindle, PJ Media).
Former Core  Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute; Former Visiting 
Scholar-Graduate  Psychology Department, New York University
Founder: International  Paleopsychology Project. Founder: The Group 
Selection Squad; Founder, Space  Development Steering Committee. Board Member and 
Member Of Board Of Governors,  National Space Society. Founding Board Member: 
Epic of Evolution Society.  Founding Board Member, The Darwin Project. 
Founder: The Big Bang Tango Media  Lab. Member: New York Academy of Sciences, 
American Association for the  Advancement of Science, American Psychological 
Society, Academy of Political  Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, 
International Society for Human  Ethology. Scientific Advisory Board 
Member, Lifeboat Foundation. Advisory  Board Member, The Buffalo Film Festival. 
Editorial board member, The Journal  of Space Philosophy.  

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