[Fis] [Fwd: Re: Information is a linguistic description of structures]--T...

[HowlBloom at aol.com]

bob,
 
thanks for an extraordinary answer.  riddled with extraordinary  knowledge.
 
I've just bought your book from Amazon and it should be in my kindle  
momentarily.  if you'd like a copy of mine--The God Problem: How a Godless  
Cosmos Creates--i can email it to you.  and to anyone else on the FIS list  who 
wants it.  
 
our books intersect. we both attempt to lay out new assumptions for  
science.
 
most important, I agree with you and Terrence Deacon that our analysis of  
information should not be limited to the metaphors of language, code, and  
genomics.  a metaphor is a tool.  each metaphor opens a different  trove of 
insights.  so the more metaphors--the more tools--the  better.
 
with warmth and oomph--howard
 
____________
Howard Bloom
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).
www.howardbloom.net
Former Core Faculty Member, The Graduate  Institute; Former Visiting 
Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York  University.
Founder: International Paleopsychology Project; Founder, Space  Development 
Steering Committee; Founder: The Group Selection Squad; 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; Editorial Board Member, Journal of Space  
Philosophy; Board member and member of Board of Governors, National Space  Society.


In a message dated 9/29/2015 10:44:26 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
ulan at umces.edu writes:

Howard:

I applaud your critique of our legacy attempts to  render life meaningful
in terms of what you call "necrophilia" and Hans  Jonas has called an
"ontology of death".

In my last book, "A Third  Window", I attempted to develop the metaphysics
of a process ecology of  relationships as an alternative starting  point.
<http://people.clas.ufl.edu/ulan/publications/philosophy/3rdwindow/>

I  especially resonated with your mention of the failure of conventional
and  relativistic physics to explain the spiral arms of some galaxies. This
I  believe is due to the constraints of the continuum assumption laid down
by  Euler and Leibniz, which conflates cause with effect. One can get away
with  this assumption so long as the interval between cause and effect  is
virtually immediate. In a galaxy 100,000 light years in diameter,  however,
this assumption begins to fray. It likely breaks down altogether  across
intergalactic distances.

The continuum assumption leads to  symmetrical laws of nature, and as
Noether taught us, symmetry and  conservation are joined at the hip. Is it
any wonder, then, that  inconsistencies leading to the postulation of
"dark" matter and energy  should arise if one uses only symmetrical laws?

What is known to few is  that Newton (who ironically gets a lot of the
blame for the Eulerian  assumption) inveighed strongly against equating
cause with effect.  Historian of science, Ed Dellian, gives the full story
on his website.  <http://www.neutonus-reformatus.de/frameset.html> I offer
some  consequences in my talk at "Seizing an Alternative", which took place
back  in  June.
<https://www.ctr4process.org/whitehead2015/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/PhilPr
ax.pdf>

Having  thus waxed ebullient over your insights, I nonetheless tend to
agree with  Terry that discussion on communication or information should
not be  confined to language or genomics. In fact, I would contend that
information  should not be limited to association with communication. As
Stan Salthe  contends, it is more generally tied to any form of constraint.
John  Collier, for example, identifies such information as inheres in
structures  as "enformation", and this form is readily quantifiable using
the  information calculus of  Shannon.
<http://people.clas.ufl.edu/ulan/files/FISPAP.pdf> Such  reckoning permits
us to develop an alternative phenomenology to the "dead  objects moving
according to universal laws"  attempts to apprehend  life.
<http://people.clas.ufl.edu/ulan/publications/ecosystems/gand/>

Prodded  by Jonas, we need to give intensive effort to articulating an
"ontology of  life".

Peace,
Bob U.

>
> re: it is likely to be  problematic to use language as the paradigm model
> for all  communication--Terrence Deacon
>
> Terry  makes interesting  points, but I think on this one, he may be
> wrong.
> Guenther  Witzany is on to something.  our previous  approaches   to
> information have been what Barbara Ehrenreich, in her   introduction to 
the
> upcoming
> paperback of my book The God  Problem: How a Godless  Cosmos Creates, 
calls
> "a kind of  unacknowledged necrophilia."
>
> we've been using dead things to  understand living things.  aristotle  put
> us on that path  when he told us that if we could break things down to
> their
>  "elements" and understand what he called the "laws" of those elements,
>  we'd
> understand everything.  Newton took us farther down that  path when he 
said
> we could understand everything using the metaphor of  the "contrivance,"
> the
>  machine--the metaphor of  "mechanics" and of "mechanism."
>
> Aristotle and Newton were  wrong.  Their ideas have had centuries to  pan
> out, and  they've led to astonishing insights, but they've left us blind
>  to
> the relational aspect of things. utterly blind.
>
> the  most amazing metaphor of relationality available to us is not math,
>  it's not mechanism, and it's not reduction to "elements," it's  language.
> by
> using the metaphor of a form of language called  "code," watson and  crick
> were able to understand what a strand  of dna does and  how.   without
> language
> as  metaphor, we'd still be in the dark  about the genome.
>
>  i'm convinced that by learning the relational secrets of the body of  
work
> of a Shakespeare or a Goethe we could crack some of the secrets  we've 
been
> utterly unable to comprehend, from what makes the social  clots we call a
> galaxy's spiral arms (a phenomenon that astronomer  Greg Matloff, a  
Fellow
> of
> the British interplanetary  Society,  says defies the laws  of Newtonian
> and
>  Einsteinian physics) to what makes the difference between  life and  
death.
>
> in other words, it's time we confess in science just  how little we know
> about language, that we explore language's  mysteries, and that we use our
> discoveries as a crowbar to pry open  the secrets of this highly
> contextual,
> deeply relational,  profoundly communicational cosmos.
>
> with thanks for tolerating  my opinions.
>
> howard
>
> ____________
>  Howard  Bloom




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listas.unizar.es/pipermail/fis/attachments/20150929/4cf307ef/attachment.html>