[Fis] [Fwd: Re: Information is a linguistic description of structures]--Terry
Pedro C. Marijuan
pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
Mon Sep 28 17:18:08 CEST 2015
From Terry...
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Fis] Information is a linguistic description of structures
Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2015 22:13:14 -0700
From: Terrence W. Deacon <deacon at berkeley.edu>
To: Pedro C. Marijuan <pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es>
CC: Günther Witzany <witzany at sbg.at>, <farah at howardbloom.net>, fis
<fis at listas.unizar.es>, Emanuel Diamant <emanl.245 at gmail.com>
References: <000201d0f68c$77d02b50$677081f0$@gmail.com>
<0D34F6EF-19E6-4C9C-A9D3-ABA4F5F2E7C7 at sbg.at> <56053208.2000406 at aragon.es>
As exemplified in Guenther's auxin example, and Pedro's worries about
the procrustean use of language metaphors in the discussion of inter-
and intra-cellular communication, it is likely to be problematic to use
language as the paradigm model for all communication, much less as the
foundation upon which to build a general theory of information. From an
evolutionary point of view, language is a highly derived human
idiosyncratic form of communication that evolved only very recently in
vertebrate phylogeny, in only one species, and is supported by a vast
semiotic cognitive and social infrastructure. Communication in a more
general sense is vastly older and far more generic. For this reason, it
is wise to avoid talking in terms of the semantics of a cough, the
meaning of a piece of music, or the syntax of a skunk's odor. The use of
Carnap's approach to language semantics and various other uses of
linguistic categories in information theoretic analyses needs to be
understood as a special case, not the generic form. I would recommend
that presentations and comments to them be framed with appropriate
caveats, indicating whether they address such special cases of human
information or are intended to be generic.
On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 4:37 AM, Pedro C. Marijuan
<pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es <mailto:pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es>> wrote:
Dear FISers and all,
I include below another response to Immanuel post (from Guenther). I
think he has penned an excellent response--my only addition is to
expostulate a doubt. Should our analysis of the human (or cellular!)
communication with the environment be related to linguistic
practices? In short, my argument is that biological self-production
becomes "la raison d'etre" of communication, both concerning its
evolutionary origins and the continuous opening towards the
environment along the different stages of the individual's life
cycle. It is cogent that the same messenger plays quite different
roles in different specialized cells --we have to disentangle in
each case how the impinging "info" affects the ongoing life cycle
(the impact upon the transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, etc.)
There is no shortcut to the endless work necessary--wet lab & in
silico. So I think that Encode and other big projects are quite
useful in the continuous exploration of biological complexity and
provide us valuable conceptual stuff--but looking for hypothetical
big formalisms (I quite agree) is out sight. Molecular recognition
which is the at the fundamentals of biological organization can
only provide modest guidelines about the main informational
architectures of life... beyond that, there is too much complexity,
endless complexity to contemplate, particularly when we try to study
multicellular organization. Anyhow, this topic of the essential
informational openness of the individual's life cycle appears to me
as the Gordian knot to be cut for the advancement of our field:
otherwise we will never connect meaningfully with the endless info
flows that interconnect our societies, generated from the life
cycles of individuals and addressed to the life cycles of other
individuals. Info sources, channels for info flows, and info
receptors are not mere Shannonian overtones, they symbolically refer
to the very info skeleton of our societies; or looking dynamically
it is the engine of social history and of social complexity.
Well, sorry that I could not express myself better.
all the best--Pedro
Günther Witzany wrote:
> Dear all!
>
> What is the opposite of a linguistic description? a non-linguistic
> description? Please tell me one possible explanation of a
> non-linguistic description. So Im not convinced of the sense of
> the term "information".
>
> Concerning the "difference" of physical and semantic information:
> What would you prefer in the case of plant communication. Does the
> chemical Auxin represent a physical or a semantic
> information? Auxin is used in hormonal, morphogenic, and
> transmitter pathways. As an extracellular signal at the plant
> synapse, auxin serves to react to light and gravity. It
> also serves as an extracellular messenger substance to send
> electrical signals and functions as a synchronization signal for
> cell division. At the intercellular, whole plant level, it
> supports cell division in the cambium, and at the tissue level,
> it promotes the maturation of vascular tissue during embryonic
> development, organ growth as well as tropic responses and apical
> dominance. In intracellular signaling, auxin serves in
> organogenesis, cell development, and differentiation. Especially
> in the organogenesis of roots, for example, auxin enables cells to
> determine their position and their identity. These multiple
> functions of auxin demonstrate that identifying the momentary
> usage (its semantics) is extremely difficult because the context
> (investigation object of pragmatics) of use can be very
> complex and highly diverse, although the chemical property remains
> the same.
> Yes, mathematics is an artificial language. Last century the
> Pythagorean approach, mathematics represents material reality, (if
> we use mathematics we reconstruct creators thoughts) was
> reactivated: Exact science must represent observations as well as
> theories in mathematical equations. Then it would be sure to
> represent reality, because brain synapse logics then could express
> its own material reality. But this was proven as error. Prior to
> all artificial languages we learned how to interconnect linguistic
> utterances with practical behavior in socialisation; therefore the
> ultimate meta-language is everyday language with its visible
> superficial grammar and its invisible deep grammar that transports
> the intended meaning. How should computers extract deep grammar
> structures out of measurable superficial syntax structures? In the
> case of ENCODE project (to find the human genome primary data
> structures) this was the aim which got financial support of 3
> billion dollars with the result of detecting the superficial
> grammar only, nothing else.
>
> Best Wishes
> Guenther
> Am 24.09.2015 um 07:47 schrieb Emanuel Diamant:
>
>> Dear FIS colleagues,
>>
>>
>>
>> As a newcomer to FIS, I feel myself very uncomfortable when I
>> have to interrupt the ongoing discourse with something that looks
>> for me quite natural but is lacking in our current public dialog.
>> What I have in mind is that in every discussion or argument
>> exchange, first of all, the grounding axioms and mutually agreed
>> assumptions should be established and declared as the basis for
>> further debating and reasoning. Maybe in our case, these things
>> are implied by default, but I am not a part of the dominant
>> coalition. For this reason, I would dare to formulate some
>> grounding axioms that may be useful for those who are not FIS
>> insiders:
>>
>>
>>
>> 1. *Information is a linguistic description of structures
>> observable in a given data set*
>>
>> 2. Two types of data structures could be distinguished in a data
>> set: primary and secondary data structures.
>>
>> 3. Primary data structures are data clusters or clumps arranged
>> or occurring due to the similarity in physical properties of
>> adjacent data elements. For this reason, the primary data
>> structures could be called physical data structures.
>>
>> 4. Secondary data structures are specific arrangements of primary
>> data structures. The grouping of primary data structures into
>> secondary data structures is a prerogative of an external
>> observer and it is guided by his subjective reasons, rules and
>> habits. The secondary data structures exist only in the
>> observer’s head, in his mind. Therefore, they could be called
>> meaningful or semantic data structures.
>>
>> 5. As it was said earlier, *Description of structures observable
>> in a data set should be called “Information”. *In this regard,
>> two types of information must be distinguished – *Physical
>> Information and Semantic Information*.
>>
>> 6. Both are language-based descriptions; however, physical
>> information can be described with a variety of languages (recall
>> that mathematics is also a language), while semantic information
>> can be described only by means of natural human language.
>>
>>
>>
>> This is a concise set of axioms that should preface all our
>> further discussions. You can accept them. You can discard them
>> and replace them with better ones. But you can not proceed
>> without basing your discussion on a suitable and appropriate set
>> of axioms.
>>
>>
>>
>> That is what I have to say at this moment.
>>
>> My best regards to all of you,
>>
>> Emanuel.
>>
>>
>>
>
>
--
-------------------------------------------------
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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--
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 (& 6818)
pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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