[Fis] Information and Locality.

[Steven Ericsson-Zenith]

Dear Christophe,

(You confirm, btw, that servers in France are not blocked by the Spanish Spam filters. My posts comes to you the same way.)

Recall that I started out this series by establishing the environment. And in all that I have said the environment only is the source. This is all that any agent can expect or know. 

Communication is only truly established by conventions. Conventions are the record of history, embodied as Pedro would say. It is the record of past impressions. And this leads me to speak of memory.

In the model I spoke of earlier, a memory corresponds to a shape in structure. A memory is a shape upon the cell or membrane, formally the state of a holomorphic functor. There is nothing like the storage model in Turing computation. “Familiarity” is simply how readily the shape forms again. So the sensation of a “memory" is simply the formation of a shape upon your cell or membrane structure. In terms of locality in structure, it does not matter where upon your structure the shape forms, it will always be the same “memory.” This allows for the integration of inputs.

One of the potential features of the new universal that I discussed is that it does not appear to matter where in the structure the shape has formed, as long as it has formed somewhere in the structure. This is the source of individuation in structure, it is what brings about the sense of “self.” But, obviously, this is a prediction of the model that is on the roster of predictions to examine.

Because of my strict application of the term “locality” I prefer to call the embodied states “contexts.” So an agent embodies a variety of contexts. And in this sense a convention is such a context. So I apprehend from the environment, it is my sole source. And I use conventions of one kind or another to enable me to say that A “communicated" with B. 

“Meaning generation” is an ambiguous phrase. I must assume that you are referring to to the action potentials between sense and response in an organism.  

Now in computing machinery conventions may be hardwired. For example an early transputer link, a hardwired point-to-point communication, may be considered such a convention. But a network interface, a packet routing system much like Shannon’s telephony conventions, has much the same challenge as any sensory device, electronic or biological. The origination data of the packet may lie. 

In biology, the integration of inputs is much more flexible and requires this independence upon structure. 

And let me be clear, it is far from certain that the universe was ever abiotic (although I do not speculate about effects at large scales at this juncture), just as it is not at all clear that there is a state in which gravitation was absent. The universal, like gravitation, has always existed. And while it is possible to consider states with one universal aspect alone, such as a falling body. To be truly rigorous you must consider them all. For example, if you want to account for the effect of the kicking and screaming of the falling body as it falls, you would need to consider the chemistry, the electro-thermodynamics, the allosteric conformances and sense response dynamics of the new universal. But for all practical purposes considering gravitation alone is good enough.

This is not to say that “rocks” think and feel, they are not flexible closed structures. And this is an important caveat.

In the derived cosmology I do consider light and gravitation alone at large scales with the caveat that this cannot possibly be the existential case, because to have a rigorous explanation of any action you must apply General Covariance. 

In other words, this absence of locality is primal. It cannot be something that exists in our special case.

In my next post I get into the broader physical and social issues.

Regards,
Steven



> On Sep 22, 2015, at 11:35 AM, Christophe <christophe.menant at hotmail.fr> wrote:
> 
> Steven, 
> The relations between meaning and information have been addressed several times in the FIS forum. I agree with Francesco that these relations should be explicited in your approach. 
> Your wording: ‘meaning refers to the responsive behavior of an apprehension’ does not tell that much about origin and nature of meaning. It would be interesting you address the meaningful/meaningless aspect of information for an agent as well as their relations with the behavior of the agent.
> Regarding meaningful information and locality, I agree that they are tightly linked. Interpretation (meaning generation) is done by an agent that has a locality. 
> More can be said. You may remember about an evolutionary perspective on locality starting within an abiotic universe populated with ubiquist physico-chemical laws applying averywhere. Life emerged in that universe as a far from thermodynamical equilibrium status that maintained itself localy. The satisfaction of a local constraint was something new in a universe submitted to ubiquist laws. And such local constraint satisfaction naturaly introduces meaning generation with links to teleology, agency, autonomy, and of course life  (see Chart 10 in https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279941646_Biosemiotics_Aboutness_Meaning_and_Bio-intentionality._Proposal_for_an_Evolutionary_Approach <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279941646_Biosemiotics_Aboutness_Meaning_and_Bio-intentionality._Proposal_for_an_Evolutionary_Approach>). 
> But I’m not sure how that fits with your approach. 
> 
> best 
> Christophe
> _____________________________________________________________________________________________________
> 
> From: steven at iase.us
> Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2015 01:17:41 -0700
> To: 13francesco.rizzo at gmail.com
> CC: fis at listas.unizar.es
> Subject: Re: [Fis] Information and Locality.
> 
> On Sep 21, 2015, at 11:19 PM, Francesco Rizzo <13francesco.rizzo at gmail.com <mailto:13francesco.rizzo at gmail.com>> wrote:
> Assisted translation to English:
> I bring the thought of Chilean neuro-biologist Maturana: "The experience of the physical, that deals with classical physics, relativity or quantum, does not reflect the nature of the universe, but the 'ontology of the observer as a living system, because he "operates linguistically" while achieving physical entities and the operational coherences of their domains of existence. As Einstein said' theories (explanations) of science are free creations of the human mind ‘" (Maturana, 1993).
> 
> In this context, "operate linguistically" means being and living in language, cooperating behavior, recursive and described semantically. Everything exists and takes place within the communication, not outside. And that is why one can not ignore the relationship between information and meaning.
> 
> It is important to have a clear epistemology. 
> 
> Einstein, in fact, said many things of epistemic merit and he was very clear to draw the distinction between existence (ontology) and merely language. So for me your presentation here does not hold. I have no doubt, however, that he said that theories are the "free creations of the human mind.” But he did not intend to imply that physics arises as a consequence, he clearly believe in the process of empirical science. 
> 
> Now he is known to engage in speculation, for example asking the question is the moon still there if no one is looking. Einstein was very much a determinist and absolutely did believe in a world independent of our ideas.
> 
> Maturana seems too vague to me, but his idea of autopoiesis is interesting.
> 
> I started this discussion with a very clear description of the relation between information and meaning. 
> 
> To recap, meaning refers to the responsive behavior of an apprehension. Even referential meanings are captured by this definition. We have no need to say that “this does that” or “A is a B” and suggest anything in the world. 
> 
> We may say, for example, that "this train takes me to the city” and the meaning of this sentence is that I get onto the train and am taken to the city. I may say that “pretty flowers grow in spring” but the meaning of this sentence is that I pick those flowers in spring and give them to someone I love, for you it may simply mean that you have an allergic response when in their proximity.
> 
> In this way we can, for example, determine the meaning of the Spanish text you sent me, for my case - its meaning is that I immediately translated it to English text and then wrote this email. 
> 
> In short, the sentence alone holds no meaning, it is merely a sentence, marks upon paper. Interpretation cannot be fixed.
> 
> Meaning is only present when we act upon the apprehension of such a mark. Language is simply a convention that tells me how to treat marks of this kind and provides some social pragmatics. When I hear the sentence that “this train takes me to the city” I know that it means I may act and use the train to travel to the city. If I ignore the sentence then it has no meaning to me, it has no effect.
> 
> A = B, only has meaning to those who act upon apprehending it. 
> 
> Also note that, for me, communication is simply a way of speaking about the engineering of machines and the activity of social groups. In essence communication is simply a convenience, a way to speak about a group of apprehenders, be they machine or human.
> 
> Similarly “intelligence" is also a way of speaking about actions that we deem are the product of intent.
> 
> The bottom-line is that if you live only in language then you live in an impoverished world.
> 
> Of course all theories are the free creation of the mind, it is what comes next that matters.
> 
> This inevitably leads me to the work of Benjamin Peirce, who may have been the first to observe that all the laws of nature are necessarily the algebraic sum of their action together. The idea was developed by Einstein, though Einstein was motivated by Maxwell’s work on covariance, as General Covariance and emphasizing that the natural laws are necessarily independent of any particular coordinate system.
> 
> The challenge that Benjamin Peirce saw was how to unify this purely mathematical view with the physical sciences. I believe he set both of his sons James and Charles upon this task.
> 
> This goal of unifying pure mathematics and the physical sciences has yet to be achieved, although I am hopeful. In particular the movement against truth value systems may be gaining momentum.
> 
> And this leads me to mention locality because Einstein was concerned by concerns that I share. It is certainly the case that in GR we can speak only of the local event but if you want to solve real problems you yourself provide the unification of calculations, for example, to take man out of the solar system. 
> 
> Indeed, to do anything at all requires that we provide the missing locality.
> 
> Regards,
> Steven
> 
> 
> --
>     Dr. Steven Ericsson-Zenith, Los Gatos, California. +1-650-308-8611
>     http://iase.info <http://iase.info/>
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