[Fis] Fwd: What is life?

[Mark Johnson]

Dear Bob (Ulanowicz),

I hope I didn't come across as flippant about the political situation.
The world is obviously in a very frightening and perilous state at the
moment.

Regarding ecology, Shannon and IT, the common denominator is
"counting". This is far from trivial. The disastrous economic policies
which have delivered inequality and austerity... along with Brexit and
Trump... have relied on approaches to measurement and information
which we must now question. In my understanding of your work in
ecology, you count event regularities in the ecosystem.

A change to our understanding of number and counting would change the
way we see the world in a fundamental way (the recent discussion about
Joe Brenner's work on Lupasco is fascinating and it's my Christmas job
to dig into it). There's something important about a logic which
transcends binary distinctions (Spencer Brown and Lou Kauffman,
category theorists, etc all seem to be poking at this).

I remain optimistic. Governor Jerry Brown (Bateson student) gave a
wonderful defiant speech a couple of days ago. "sometimes people need
to have a heart attack to get them to stop smoking. We've just had a
heart attack."

Some fundamental root and branch rethinking is required.

Best wishes,

Mark

On 18 December 2016 at 23:34, Robert E. Ulanowicz <ulan at umces.edu> wrote:
>> Thank you Bob!
>>
>> The medium is a very restricted form of communication on the internet, of
>> course...
>>
>> Are our circular deliberations about information victims of the so-called
>> "information technology" which enables them? Is this a variety of
>> Wittgenstein's realisation that the problems of philosophy were problems
>> of language? Perhaps we cannot see the constraints that communications
>> technology itself has on our discourse. How might we try to see them?
>
> Mark, I have long argued against identifying IT with communications
> theory. You're right, doing so does place needless restrictions on the
> discourse. As an ecologist, I use IT to quantify constraint and freedom
> inherent in ecosystem trophic webs, which has nothing to do with
> communication theory. In fact the whole discipline can be treated as
> homologous to probability theory in total abstraction of communications.
>
>> Maybe this goes some way towards accounting for the strange political
>> situation we find ourselves in at the moment!
>
> Almost everyone I know is feeling depressed and dreadful in anticipation
> of what will happen after Jan 20. The feeling is that the Republic is very
> much at risk.
>
>> Best wishes,
>>
>> Mark
>
> Cheers,
> Bob U.
>



-- 
Dr. Mark William Johnson
Institute of Learning and Teaching
Faculty of Health and Life Sciences
University of Liverpool

Phone: 07786 064505
Email: johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com
Blog: http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com