[Fis] Focusing on Narratives

Tue Dec 4 11:07:47 CET 2018

Dear Colleagues,

Thanks Pedro for introducing the important topic of narrative, many views of Loet, Joseph, Karl, of course Pedro, etc. are very profound.

After accomplished my first book to investigate various information and informational disciplines, my second book, Infordomics, will concentrate on discussing information issues in the Humanities and Social Sciences, narrative will be its main concern. I have collected a dozen of books about these aspects. Infordomics is a new discipline which I named. As far as the current information concerned, technological information, biological information, and social information are the three dominating types we have seen. Technological information has been exclusively studied by technological informatics (computer science, telecommunications science), biological information has been exclusively studied by biology, and only social information is a scattered topic in history, journalism, literature, art, religion, anthropology, sociology, and others, we haven’t a special discipline to deal with it so far. Therefore, I think that achievements on information for us are most likely in this field.

As far as the information issues we are concerning, Psychology discusses the processing of information, communication (Communicology) discusses the transmission of information, Semiotics (Linguistics) discusses the form of information, and Infordomics will discuss the remaining issues of information. At the beginning, I may concentrate on its structure problems. Psychology, Communicology, Semiotics (Linguistics), and Infordomics (other new disciplines on information may emerge in the future certainly.) constitute a systematic study about social/human information.

However, our FIS (including our IS4SI) is at a hard time now, and we need a firm and promising guideline and protocol.

Best wishes,

Xueshan

From: fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es <fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es> On Behalf Of Pedro C. Marijuan
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2018 4:10 AM
To: fis at listas.unizar.es
Subject: [Fis] Focusing on Narratives

Dear FIS Colleagues,

Some brief responses to Loet's and Jerry's comments.

To Loet, unfortunately real life does not allow such neat scheme of expectations, observations, and modifications/decisions--except in the abstract. Daily life is surrounded by multitude of behavioral cycles and happenstances from the subject himself and from the surrounding parties impinging on the subject. It is difficult to isolate mainstreams there, and it is difficult to know how to orient oneself for the troubled future. Besides, important decisions are often irreversible, they mark the course of life and there is no way to return to the initial conditions. How easily a promising young life can be wasted... And this is the role of traditional great stories/narratives: lecturing on how to realize the "potential" of one's life, orienting on the big unknowns that particularly the young party starting his/her social life has to confront. They orient, amuse, and "entertain"--all in one. In our parlance, they are highly efficient social information tools that contain important adaptive knowledge for flourishing in some concrete culture. I do not see much interest in what physicalist perspectives can say on that. Maybe I did not succeed with the terms, trying to connect the social potential with the general biological potentiality, but this was the gist.

In any case, there was a statement in my previous message "I do not consider unscientific the Jungian stance, but not quite scientific either" that in a second thought consider inappropriate. Rather, Jung's work in this realm should be taken as belonging to the Humanities. Just that. And to be fair he has provided a strong way to analyze stories/narratives which has been adopted by some of the most relevant commentators today (Booker, Bonnet). The further point, after acknowledging that scholarly fact, is whether that perspective can be improved... Probably. I already mentioned about the unconscious: that it could be more accurate considering the brain-rest activation of contemporary neuroscience (Default Mode Network) as taking charge of that involuntary emergence of impressions and deep memories. There are now ambitious theoretical schemes of neural information processing that could provide light on other points of the conscious, the emotional, the sensorimotor, the excitation/inhibition coupling, the optimization of neural entropy, etc. But they have to connect with natural behavior, and also finally with narratives. 

To Jerry's, after his four pages on perplex number system, I can only say that great, terrific. It could have been an interesting presentation for an ad hoc discussion session. I am tempted to twist a few sentences of his text and to intercalate four pages or so on signaling systems, or on the "sociotype", which is closer to the current session. But that is not the scholarly way of discussion.

To finalize, there is a provocative sentence in Bonnet's closing of his book: "The one who tells the stories rules the world."

Best wishes
--Pedro 

El 25/11/2018 a las 5:10, Loet Leydesdorff escribió:

Dear Pedro, Joseph, and colleagues, 

Let me side with Joseph in this instance.

memories? And, similarly, does not "potential" refer to cognitive/anticipatory capabilities that somehow detect higher fitness possibilities along some behavioral paths than others, and then conduce to the long term realization and flourishing of a life cycle? The potential belongs, say, to the "processual" not to the physical. In my view, the general challenge is to re-explain narratives, the fundamental commodity of social communication, in a more advanced conceptualization, beyond the Jungian, the Shannonian, or the corrosive fake-correctedness  of our times... It can be done. The neuroscientific approach would be badly needed to recreate the terminology and the fundamental ideas.

Perhaps, I miss the meaning of some of the wordings in this narrative :-), but it seems to me that there is something terribly wrong here. "The potential belongs ... to the "processual." We can consider this as "nom de gueux."

One always begins with the specification of expectations. I assume that these are then "processual"? Expectations (possible states) are tested against observations and can then sometimes be rejected.

For example: One can hypothesize that there are gender differences on this list. Then, one can cross-table those of us who on average publish 0, 1, or 2 postings with the gender differences (M/F).  This generates a 3 times 2  table. 

Using the margin totals one can compute the expected values of each cell and test the observed values against the expectations. The expectations are "processual"? Indeed, they are possibilities which do not have to be realized. That is an empirical question.

Unfortunately, Logic-in-Reality works as a logic with only two values (T/F). This may lead to a poor design when one needs more grey shades.

Best,

Loet.

  _____  

Loet Leydesdorff 

Professor emeritus, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)

 <mailto:loet at leydesdorff.net> loet at leydesdorff.net ;  <http://www.leydesdorff.net/> http://www.leydesdorff.net/ 
Associate Faculty,  <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/> SPRU, University of Sussex; 

Guest Professor  <http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/> Zhejiang Univ., Hangzhou; Visiting Professor,  <http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html> ISTIC, Beijing;

Visiting Fellow,  <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/> Birkbeck, University of London; 

http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ <http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en> &hl=en

Best regards
--Pedro 

 El 21/11/2018 a las 9:31, Joseph Brenner escribió:

Dear Colleagues,

Pedro’s approach, solidly anchored in biology, allows for progress in understanding. Two comments on his ‘logic’: 1) I would not call the ‘concoction’ within which we live imaginary. It is rather a set of real, dynamic mental processes, with actual and potential, effectively causal components. 2) ‘Complex life’ instantiates potential (and kinetic) energy not only in a ‘book keeping role’. Complex life is constituted by actual and potential energy evolving in cycles and stages. Some myths (Epimetheus and Prometheus) correctly express this duality and its evolution.

Unfortunately, there is another myth that I believe correctly models part of Jerry’s proposals. It is that of Procrustes, an innkeeper who stretched or cut the legs of his guests to make them fit the only available beds, until taken care of by Heracles. You write:   A lot more needs to be said about the intimate nature of relations among scientific narratives before one can bind the logic of the perplex number system to the grammars associated with mathematically structured anticipatory systems.

This sentence needs to be parsed, given the concatenation of terms: in my opinion, the purpose of understanding the relations among scientific narratives is to understand real anticipatory systems, whether or not mathematically structured. Perplex numbers are artificial numerological constructions with a corresponding logic that may or may not apply to other artificial constructions, such as abstract anticipatory systems, without dynamics. Narratives about real science could be applied in principle to such questions, but the implication must be avoided that such application would tell us anything about reality. 

I cannot accept any manipulation of numbers as being more than a posteriori. This applies also to Karl’s approach. Also, the concept of an ‘in-formed’ number is an oxymoron, although I understand the attempt to ascribe ‘value-by-association’, so to speak. Numbers cannot accept ‘form’, or its meaning; they exist, eternally, outside the world of form and change.  

I thus stress the importance of Pedro’s statement:  processes do not go smoothly upwards from the quantum level. As one proceeds to higher levels of reality, there are discontinuities and different laws apply. One only notes the presence of some isomorphisms, such as the failure of some macroscopic process equations to commute or distribute. Finally, I, at least, will resist any attempts to let in, through the back door, anti-scientific concepts of quantum processes in mind and cognition.

Best wishes,

Joseph

  _____  

From: Fis [mailto:fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Pedro C. Marijuan
Sent: mardi, 20 novembre 2018 21:15
To: fis
Cc: Jerry LR Chandler
Subject: Re: [Fis] Anticipatory Systems--"Potential"

Dear Jerry and FIS colleagues,

I wonder how big or how clever your Chemostat apparatus should be. There are thousands of metabolic intermediates in an organism, and there are another thousands of diversified signals. And we have in the order of 30 billion cells (trillions in the US system). Plus around 100 trillion of bacterial cells in the microbiome. "We" are the emergence all of that molecular diversity. It does not mean that life exactly "controls" all the details of the mega-information of this whole system... How that control is organized, the principles of biological information, so to speak, become another great question, but probably very different from the idea of mass control in a chemostat. In any case, the way you have argued it, seemingly smoothly going upwards from the quantum level, is beyond of what I consider feasible. Scientific overstretching of a reasonable paradigm perhaps.

Socially, indeed, we do not try to communicate around by following a colossal strategy of reducing happenstances to their quantum description; neither to the kind of meta-languages you mention. In general, social communication revolves around narratives. They are not free-wheeling constructions (at least referring to the "great stories" of all epochs) but optimized tools to guide individuals in the advancement of their lives, in the achievement of their "potential". Looking at the historical evolution of those great stories, they are teaching us about which were the cardinal aspects of common life to be specifically grasped by the child, by the adolescent, by the maiden, the artisan, the warrior, the priest... And in this social communication endeavors, life cycles do not appear as homogeneous linearly "timed". Human lives are continuously looking ahead, anticipating ("Prometheus" style) but simultaneously looking at the past and pondering on it ("Epimetheus" style). Although "presentists", we live within an imaginary concoction built of mosaic pasts and futures, "multi-timed" so to speak. The way to harmonize past, present, and future (vital information) is one of the leit motifs of those great stories.

And about cycles, so many of them can be found. At the scale of the organism:  cellular & tissular cycles, metabolic cycles, behavioral cycles, ultradian cycles, circadian cycles, seasonal cycles, yearly cycles, secular cycles, and many others related to social mores. Some of them can be arranged in a sort of hierarchy or inclusivity, but there is a fundamental diversity. That most of this orchestration of cycles does not require a conscious effort does not mean that we should ignore them concerning the roots of social communication. The cycles and stages (and "passages") within a life cycle have an ominous presence. As i was saying, the "potential" of each young life in ascend requires the reception of wisdom (via social communication narratives) to integrate the own individual path within the social matrix of the time.

Thinking twice about the "potential" of life, it might be something important to consider regarding any form or manifestation of life. Perhaps better than the Principle of Conatus from Spinoza I was referring days ago (the effort to self-maintain and flourish). Complex life has "potential" to advance along some multi-time, multi-cycle developmental path in the most complex of all environments: the social matrix. Is there some deep similarity of this potential with the role that "potential" energy plays in our book-keeping of energy conservation?

Thanking the comments,
Best--Pedro

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Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group

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http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/

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