[Fis] Commutativity

Mon Nov 7 12:02:05 CET 2016

Dear Karl and All,

I believe I have right to this message at the start of a new week. Apologies if this is not the case.

Unfortunately, while I am glad to agree with some of Karl's remarks, I must categorically reject others as 'dead fish', both those that are attributed to me and some which are not:

You wrote:
1. ...whether one is more attracted to monotheistic or rather polytheistic general explanations of reality. The model’s algorithms proposed are of the polygenetic school of thought: aspects of a+b=c are in an eternal battle of pre-eminence among each other.
Tokens are but symbols . . . 

I can accept this approach provided a, b and c are no longer considered 'tokens'. What Logic in Reality does is to define the evolution of this battle in energetic logical terms, where a, b, and c are elements of processes.

2. We will certainly agree on a Pythagorean basis, that meditating on the relations among numbers will educate the open-minded about main properties of Nature.
The model builds on cyclic permutations being the fundament of thinking and counting, therefore the basic fundament of imaginations about Nature.

I disagree radically with these statements. If that makes me closed-minded so be it.

3. The picture resulting will by all means benefit from a bit of getting used to, but on the other hand, it is free of contradictions, consistent in itself, appears to model Nature quite well

For the reasons stated in 3., these statements are also unacceptable. Consistency and freedom from contradiction are characteristics of abstract logic, mathematics and number theory, not of Nature, including information and probability. I suggest they stay where they belong.

I do not want anything I say to be accepted as 'God's gift to information theory'. That principle should apply generally.

Thank you.

Joseph

----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Karl Javorszky 
  To: Joseph Brenner 
  Cc: Terrence Deacon ; fis ; John Collier ; Gyorgy Darvas ; Bob Logan ; Andrei Khrennikov ; rafael at capurro.de 
  Sent: Monday, November 07, 2016 10:22 AM
  Subject: Re: Commutativity

  Dear Joseph,

  your well-chosen words about the logical obsolescence of commutativity as a basic rule express the idea on a verbal level. My approach was on the level of combinatorics. Common is to both conceptions of the same problem that an era has come to an end. We have to confront a new concept of reality.

  The model investigates how logical conflicts will be consolidated. The logical conflicts do not appear visible until one imposes sequential order on the elements. The main idea is that we enter a field of schizophrenia: logical systems do not contain contradictions but we have here a logical system that does contain contradictions. Is the reality full of contradictions? Is it possible to create a consistent, logical picture of the world that is self-contradictory? How is it possible to have a logically sound current moment in life while the process in which each transversal moment is logically true, nevertheless the same process is, at least at times, along a longitudinal axis logically inconsistent and ends in discontinuities?

  The answer lies in the steps of transition from one sequence into a different sequence. This is a very basic way of creating a picture of reality. Pythagoras would have introduced it and Euclid had written a book on it – if they had had computers at their disposal. One needs computers to deal with the sheer quantity of numbers. No human brain can keep track of the complicated patterns that stitch the elements of reality together.

  The reorganisations weave a grid-cum-web of the patterns of movements of parts. There are typical patterns of movements if one reorders logical tokens that are individually numbered. The tokens are but symbols, like the symbols one gives to one’s teddy bears or dolls or tin soldiers. Now one enters a detailed dreamery about which teddy bear changes place with which other token. One will want to make use of a computer to follow this exercise of imagination through to the very end. The tokens are themselves devoid of movement. It is the human brain that imagines that they move from a place to a different place while the assembly is being reordered.

  Your question, to which general concepts of the world will be of no use a model that depicts Nature as being of a dual character, always in a compromise between conflicting requirements: this question is comparable to a meditation about whether one is more attracted to monotheistic or rather polytheistic general explanations of reality. The model’s algorithms proposed are of the polygenetic school of thought: aspects of a+b=c are in an eternal battle of pre-eminence among each other and agree or do not agree on the occupation of available places by transitory elements. It shows a much more Hindu variant of a basic concept of the world than the monoideistic ones. 

  We will certainly agree on a Pythagorean basis, that meditating on the relations among numbers will educate the open-minded about main properties of Nature. We also agree that rules can be changed and that the time seems to have come to question the usefulness of the commutativity doctrine. The actual tool I respectfully put forward for the use of the scientific community is a positive, constructive contribution to the dissonance you have so elegantly addressed. We say as a chorus: it is time to do away with commutativity. Then you say about how this affects the teachings, and I say: ok, and this is what we shall do to replace and improve on commutativity. Let us take a collection of tokens and sequence them. Then we resequence. Then we observe the place changes. The rest is a simple continuation of this, like the repeated applications of rules of elementary algebra, or even elementary arithmetic, will give rise to mighty tools of decision-making calculations. The basis is indeed very simple. The literature knows the artefacts of reorderings under the name “cyclic permutations”. The model builds on cyclic permutations being the fundament of thinking and counting, therefore the basic fundament of imaginations about Nature. The picture resulting will by all means benefit from a bit of getting used to, but on the other hand, it is free of contradictions, consistent in itself, appears to model Nature quite well and demonstrates how a change in a sequence of 4 symbols on 3 positions will affect the properties of multidimensional assemblies. To my understanding, this is what was needed. Here it is, now.

  You have spoken out clearly – and the elite understands you, because you talk their language – that something new has to come now that commutativity is as credible as a dead fish. Thank you for being the first to stand up and declare that a long era of simplified thinking has come to an end.

  Karl

  2016-11-05 11:15 GMT+01:00 Joseph Brenner <joe.brenner at bluewin.ch>:

    Well, Karl, it still takes some reading of what I have written to find important points of agreement as well as disagreement. In my 2008 book I noted that /both/ commutativity and distributivity should not be required in descriptions of real systems:

    In LIR, since no individual term is an identity, that is, unconnected to other terms, one has the same relation as that between a term and the context that perturbs it. Both the commutative law of standard logic, (a + b) + c  =  a + (b + c) and the distributive law between conjunction and disjunction                                                 

    do not hold. Any applicable formalism is, accordingly, non-Abelian and non-Boolean respectively, and the resulting probability distributions are non-Kolmogorovian. The detailed mathematics remain to be worked out for the LIR description of reality values as ‘probability-like’[1]. 
    [1] These values are like objective probabilities which do not indicate limits of knowledge, but are about the properties that things objectively have.

    I feel that no notion of real use can be clear and concise. The elements of logic are not 'tokens', a term that conveys something inert, lacking its own dynamics (ability to change). There are, as I hope we could agree, details of reality also lost in the use of your 'sequencing' tool.

    You could help to resolve the issue with one simple comment: to what complex processes does your approach NOT apply? 

    Thank you.

    Joseph

      ----- Original Message -----  
      From: Karl Javorszky 
      To: Joseph Brenner 
      Cc: Terrence Deacon ; fis ; John Collier ; Gyorgy Darvas ; Bob Logan ; Andrei Khrennikov ; rafael at capurro.de 
      Sent: Friday, November 04, 2016 9:43 PM
      Subject: Re: [Fis] Is quantum information the basis of spacetime?

      Well, Joseph, you don't have to go far to get the desired definition of information as an operator (produced quantity).

      The only prerequisite is to be ready to discard the practice, ideas, philosophy and ideology of the definitions relating to commutativity.

      This is heresy, I understand. On the other hand, time may now have come to face up the truth. We see that (a,b)->c is different to (b,a)->c. We have learnt that this obvious difference is to be disregarded. We wish the clearly visible difference away so we get a picture of the world which is easier to work with. Of course, if I say that it makes no difference whether a or b has a positional advantage /pace opinion research questionnaries/, I don't have to worry about the endless complications arising from the question, which was first, a or b.

      The system simplified as it is in use presently is not versatile, detailed and nuanced enough to allow for the introduction of words that describe the ideas.

      One cannot explain trigonometry as long as the definition is in power that all triangles are to be seen in their unified variant and the proportion of the sides to each other is by definition irrelevant.

      Come the day you want to find a clear, concise, operator based tool to measure information content (based on properties of natural numbers), please look up my book Natürliche Ordnungen, available thru morawa or amazon etc.

      It is a completely new world out there if one stops thinking in a world made up by wishing away important details. There is power in them there sequences. No wonder Nature uses them in perpetuating life. Let us no more pretend commutativity is without alternatives. We have computers. We can keep track of the problems arising from actually observing and using sequential properties of logical tokens. That one can explain what the term "information" amounts to is just one of the discoveries one makes while using the tool of sequencing.

      Do look it up. It has been made for your use. 

      Respectfully
      Karl

      On 4 Nov 2016 18:06, "Joseph Brenner" <joe.brenner at bluewin.ch> wrote:

        Dear All,

        I agree with the consensus I see emerging. Andrei shows the problem of trying to pin down a complex process with a single term - information. And I agree with Rafael that information must have a valence. On the other hand, as such, information cannot be completely defined mathematically, pace Karl, any more than anything living can be.

        It is discouraging to see how reductionist theories like 'It-from-Bit' get reproduced and disseminated by Scientific American, which used to be a good journal. One cannot simply ignore the reactionary sub-text of such 'science', even if a product of the "Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics".

        One could say rather that quanta, not quantum information, are the basis for spacetime. At the sub-quantum level, I think we have already said that whatever the way in which energy is exchanged, nothing is gained by calling it information. (We may make an exception for the case of non-locality defined by Bell inequalities.) 

        The only nuance I would add is that although we can speak of biotic and Shannon information (better, today, Shannon-Boltzmann-Darwin as in Terry's explication), the properties of information_as_process have not been completely described. I would like to see the concept of information as an operator, causally effective because of its being energy, explored further.

        Thank you and best wishes,

        Joseph

          ----- Original Message ----- 
          From: Rafael Capurro 
          To: Bob Logan ; Andrei Khrennikov ; Gyorgy Darvas ; John Collier ; fis 
          Sent: Friday, November 04, 2016 3:47 PM
          Subject: Re: [Fis] Is quantum information the basis of spacetime?

          Andrei, maybe the concept of message as already used by Shannon and Weaver in specific engineering contexts (this must not be always the case) is more appropriate and also able to speak about 'information' as what is 'in' a message 'for' a receiver. Best. Rafael

            Hello Andrei - I am with you - sharing you sentiment. Information only pertains to living organisms and entails some signals that help them make a choice. A black hole makes no choices - it is ruled by the laws of physics. Abiotic systems have no information. A book is a set of signals that a reader can convert into information if they know the language which the book is written. A book written in Urdu contains no information for me other than this appears to be a set of signals that contains information for a reader in the language in which this book was written. Who reads a black hole. How does it contain information that makes a difference. When we launch a satellite to orbit the earth we do not say that the sun is informing the satellite how to behave. The satellite is just following the laws of physics. It has no choice and so it is not being informed. There are many different forms of information (biotic and Shannon as found in the 2007 paper Propagating Organization: An Inquiry by Kauffman, Logan et al. in Biology and Philosophy 23: 27-45)      so we do not need to complicate things even more by ascribing the laws of physics as the communication of information. 
            ______________________

            Robert K. Logan 
            Prof. Emeritus - Physics - U. of Toronto  
            Fellow University of St. Michael's College
            Chief Scientist - sLab at OCAD 
            http://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertKLogan 
            www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan
            www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Logan5/publications

            On Nov 4, 2016, at 4:17 AM, Andrei Khrennikov <andrei.khrennikov at lnu.se> wrote:

                 Dear all, 
            I want to comment so called information approach to physics, by speaking with hundreds of leading experts
            in quantum foundations, I found that nobody can define rigorously the basic term "information" which is so widely 
            used in their theories and discussions, the answers are as "information is the basic entity" which cannot be defined 
            in other terms. Well, my impression is that without novel understanding and definition of information all these "theories" 
            are practically empty, well very good mathematical exercises. May be I am too critical... But I spent so much time by trying 
            to understand what people are talking about. The output is ZERO.

            all the best, andrei        

            Andrei Khrennikov, Professor of Applied Mathematics,
            Int. Center Math Modeling: Physics, Engineering, Economics, and Cognitive Sc.
            Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden
            My RECENT BOOKS:
            http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/p1036
            http://www.springer.com/in/book/9789401798181
            http://www.panstanford.com/books/9789814411738.html
            http://www.cambridge.org/cr/academic/subjects/physics/econophysics-and-financial-physics/quantum-social-science
            http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783642051005

            ________________________________________
            From: Fis [fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es] on behalf of Gyorgy Darvas [darvasg at iif.hu]
            Sent: Thursday, November 03, 2016 10:23 PM
            To: John Collier; fis
            Subject: Re: [Fis] Is quantum information the basis of spacetime?

            John:
            The article describes very really the conflicting attitudes. Interesting to see the diverse arguments together.
            I agree, some think so, some do not. I do the latter, but this does not make any matter.
            Gyuri

            On 2016.11.03. 19:52, John Collier wrote:
            Apparently some physicists think so.

            https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tangled-up-in-spacetime/?WT.mc_id=SA_WR_20161102

            John Collier
            Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Associate
            Philosophy, University of KwaZulu-Natal
            http://web.ncf.ca/collier

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-- 
Prof.em. Dr. Rafael Capurro 
Hochschule der Medien (HdM), Stuttgart, Germany
Capurro Fiek Foundation for Information Ethics (http://www.capurro-fiek-foundation.org)
Distinguished Researcher at the African Centre of Excellence for Information Ethics (ACEIE), Department of Information Science, University of Pretoria, South Africa.
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