[Fis] dimensions and symmetries... About KP Collins

[Pedro C. Marijuan]

Dear Arturo and FISers,

The last paragraphs of your chess game, pretty exciting, remind me 
strongly on the role that I have been attributing to cellular signaling 
systems, and the radical difference they have with metabolic cellular 
networks, although finally both are interrelated into the advancement of 
a life cycle at the cellular scale. As I have often commented, it is 
like reading the newspaper versus eating a sandwich, or better reading 
the menu carte versus devouring it.

Going back to nervous systems, the approach presented reminds me, more 
and more, the work of Kenneth Paul Collins in late 1980s and early 90s. 
His work was condensed in : /"On the Automation of Knowledge Within 
Central Nervous Systems."/ Unpublished Manuscript, presented as a poster 
at the AAAS Meeting in 1991, Boston. (Sorry Malcolm for giving the 
"reference" so late). I talked with him there, and was impressed by his 
work and kept in touch with him for several years. With his permission, 
I translated it into Spanish, changing some not well-solved aspects and 
adding a few more stuff: /"El Cerebro Dual: Un Acercamiento 
Interdisciplinar a la Naturaleza del Conocimiento Humano y Biológico" 
/Authors: KP Collins and PC Marijuan, published by /Editorial Hacer, 
Barcelona (1997)/. "The central principle of Duality Theory [am quoting 
from Kenneth, p.3] is that the neural arrays of the vertebrate Central 
Nervous System are physically organized so that their functioning will 
blindly minimize the sum of the topologically-distributed ratios of 
excitation to inhibition that occur within them."

Many more interesting quotations could be cited. But his manuscript of 
more than 100 dense pages did not attract any attention except a very 
few parties (essentially, me). He went down and down and my final 
indirect news were from some discussion lists where he was trolling in a 
sick way. At that time, I had received some alarming news from himself 
about his own deteriorating mental health... (late 90s/early 2000s).

Anyhow, in 1997 I published /"The Topological Inventions of Life: From 
the Specialization of Multicellular Colonies to the Functioning of the 
Vertebrate Brain."/ World Futures, 1997. 50. 617-631., where I was 
summarizing the basic tenets of his theory, and I have kept mentioning 
him in some of my publications. The point is that his work anticipated 
basic ideas nowadays developed by Arturo and James, Friston, Sengupta, 
etc. about CNS overall optimization principles, entropy/information, 
symmetries & antisymmetries, dynamic connectome, learning & trophic 
mechanisms, behavioral propensities, etc. He was particularly great 
connecting the abstract processing of neural information with human 
behavior, learning biases, emotional reactions ("the prejudice towards 
the familiar", violence, depression). With today's' new knowledge, some 
gaps in those views may be filled in, and viceversa, we could work and 
throw a new light upon his great behavioral insights. That's my personal 
opinion, of course, that was not very well received when I tried to talk 
about with relevant neuroscientists.

Well, it was a good occasion to tell this story in the list, that has 
always troubled me, and that now finally has found avantgarde germane 
developments.

Best wishes--Pedro

//

El 12/12/2016 a las 16:44, tozziarturo at libero.it escribió:
>
>
> Coming back to our chessboard, this means that information can be 
> studied in terms of systems’ symmetries and changes in dimensions, 
> rather than in terms of entropies and energetic gradient descents. 
>   An object (on an event) embedded in an environment encompasses a 
> certain amount of information, but such information increases when you 
> add a further dimension to the environment (NOTE: non necessarily a 
> spatial dimension, but also other possible ones, such as an increase 
> of complexity).  Indeed, a dimension more gives you a coordinate more, 
> and therefore more information.  To make the usual example, the 2D 
> shadow of a cat encompasses less information than a 3D cat.  Some 
> authors start from a very low number of dimensions (e.g., the 
> holographic Universe of t’Hooft and Susskind), others from an high 
> number (claims dating back to Spinoza and Kant and going through our 
> Universe made of eleven-dimensional Kaluza-Klein manifolds and 
> subsequent decrease of dimensions, until our 3D plus time perceivable 
> environment).  It does not matter: when projecting among levels, 
> information is always a function of the number of dimensions.
> In such a framework, the role of energy is different from the role of 
> information: the energy is something "injected" from the external 
> "environment" into the system, in order to produce the change of 
> coordinates into the system; on the other side, the changes of 
> information can be detected into the system, and depend on the energy 
> just indirectly (second-hand).  In other words:
> a)  the system's change of dimensions  dictates the change in 
> information, while
> b) the changes in energy dictate the projective mechanisms that allow 
> the changes in system's dimensions.
> It is a subtle, but foremost difference, that can be highlighted just 
> taking into account a very general topological framework.  This is one 
> of the examples of the importance of the  topological meta-language in 
> the study of science foundations.
>
> Arturo Tozzi
>


-- 
-------------------------------------------------
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 0
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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