[Fis] Focusing on Narratives. Infordomics

Thu Dec 6 09:07:22 CET 2018

Dear Joseph,

Very sorry for the late reply. I think all the questions you put forward hit
the points what I said and each one of them is crucial. Let me give you my
brief answers as follows.

1. The root -domos of the word Infordomics

Yes, the basic meaning of Greek root '-domos' is house or place, but in
older English dictionaries, it has another meaning: others, miscellaneous.

2. Semiotics as Linguistics and as a major stand-alone

This question is not difficult to understand. Saussure once said that
"Linguistics is a sign subject." In other words, there are many branches of
semiotics (just as there are many branches of information science).
Linguistics is only one of the most important, mature, and standard branch
of semiotics. In addition, we also have many other non-mainstream semiotics
branch to deal with body language, music language, dance language, painting
language and so on. All these are some human languages, and there are many
other natural signs to study yet. So we can only regard (human) linguistics
what we usually called as one of the branches of semiotics. Yes, you are
right, in my statement, the serious one should be: "Semiotics discusses the
form of information." Instead of: "Semiotics (Linguistics) discusses the
form of information."

3. Information, Meaning, Semiotics, and Semiotics

Just as Søren and I suggested in another place, we could consider
"Information, Meaning, and Sign" as a set of adjacent topics and should gave
a special concern. In order to maintain the unity of rhetoric, my suggestion
is: Information, Meaning, and Sign. (or Informatics, Semantics, and
Semiotics). I agree with your "Semiosis both as meaning and as a dynamic
process of reasoning and of generating meaning.", as for whether to add it
in this set or not, both will be OK. Generally speaking, you, Søren, and I
agree that Information, Meaning, and Sign are three basic concepts in our
study of social/human information and communication.

4. Meaning does not mean that it is an unscientific concept

As we can see, the relationship between information and meaning has been
discussed in our FIS forums for 20 years. Semantics of human natural
language has been studied for about 80 years. Meaning research in other
humanities (including a large number of philosophical and logical works)
even has a more longer history, but none of these studies has yet produced a
universally accepted explanation. Can our fundamental information science
explorers contribute a little to this? I'm looking forward to it.

When we read the works of biology, genetics, and genomics, the common
statement is that the four base combinations of A, G, C, and T constitute a
base sequence, and a group of base sequences constitute a gene. In
neuroscience, in astrophysics, there is only "information" but no "meaning".
In computer science, in Shannon's information theory, there is only
"information" but no "meaning" too. Therefore, when I discuss Inforware, I
define it as the three-level combination of "Information, Sign, and
Substrate" rather than the four-level combination of "Information, Meaning,
Sign, and Substrate". Very fortunately, Guoheng Jia, a Chinese situation
semantist, has given a preliminary judgment that "information" and "meaning"
could be equivalent. (I've invited him to come to our FIS to give a talk in
due course.)

FIS has been discussing for 20 years, and the fundamental exploration of
information science has been going on for decades. What is the contribution
of the researchers to it? Very little! We would fell relieved if we could
take even some small steps and make some small contributions to the basic
issues. Starting from some promising place and doing it down-to-earth, greed
has no future.

Best wishes,

Xueshan

From: fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es <fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es> On Behalf
Of Joseph Brenner
Sent: Tuesday, December 4, 2018 7:39 PM
To: fis <fis at listas.unizar.es>
Subject: Re: [Fis] Focusing on Narratives. Infordomics

Dear Xueshan,

Thank you for your proposal of a domain of Infordomics. I see it as a way of
furthering the useful insights that can be gained thorough classification,
guidelines and protocols of discussion. I note that –domics and domain have
the same Greek root ‘domos’ – house or place, hence, the place for
information.

However, I think that your proposed inclusion of Semiotics as Linguistics
and as a major stand-alone subject is problematic. This is in part due to
the absence, in your list, of an explicit reference to Meaning.

Sören has proposed as a subject, in another context, “Information, Meaning
and Semiotics”. For discussion here, I would have preferred Information,
Meaning, Semiosis and Semiotics. I see Semiosis both as meaning and as a
dynamic process of reasoning and of generating meaning. On the other hand,
Semiotics is rather a classificatory system applied to formal, structural
aspects of language. Of course, there is some overlap with meaning, but
Semiotics as most commonly used today suffers from its implied reference to
and dependence on the categories, logic and classifications of Peirce. It is
necessary to remind ourselves that the Peircean approach is only one among
others, and that more serious scientific and ontological commitments can be
made in some of the latter. 

The fact that Meaning in a sense in involved in all the fields you define
(psychology, communication, social information) does not mean that it is an
unscientific concept; it is that it, like information itself, requires some
additional dynamic dimensions for its description.

Best wishes,

Joseph

  _____  

From: Fis [ <mailto:fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es>
mailto:fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Xueshan Yan
Sent: mardi, 4 décembre 2018 11:08
To: FIS Group
Subject: Re: [Fis] Focusing on Narratives

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:  <mailto:fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es> fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es <
<mailto: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:  <mailto:fis at listas.unizar.es> 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&hl=en>
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&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>
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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-------------------------------------------------

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Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group

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