[Fis] The unification of the theories of information based on the cateogry theory

[Howard Bloom]

Xueshan,


a huge thanks for your contribution to this  dialog.  here's mine


"information is anything  a receiver can interpret."  information is in the eye of the beholder.


for more, see my book The God Problem: How a Godless Cosmos Creates.


here's a sample:




If meaning is anything that a   translator can understand, anything that atranslator can interpret, anything that a translator can decode, then theamount of meaning in this cosmos is constantly increasing.  Meaning defies the law of entropy, the second law ofthermodynamics.  Meaning does not ebbaway.  It is not erased by disorder.  It is on the rise.  It is constantly piling up.  And its pile is reaching toward theheavens.  Not to mention pouring from theskies.
  
Let's take a simple example—starlight.  This planet, Mother Earth, pulled itself together fromrandom pebbles,iceballs, and supersized gravity balls 4.5 billion years ago.  For the first billion years of Earth'sexistence, streams of photons from emitters far, far away, rays of light from distant stars,  rays of light that looked like pin  pricks in the black of the night sky, hit thesurface of this Earth's stone and water, its land and seas.  And those beams of light found notakers.  They found no receivers, nointerpreters, no translators.  PlanetEarth’s stone and water were indifferent to the existence of light from stars.  They were literally not moved by starlight.The result?  Starlight had no meaning. 
 
Were these trickles of light from stars information yet? No.  Not by the standard of "information is anythingdecoded by a receiver."  And not bythe standards of Claude Shannon's "meaning."  But things would not stay that way forever.
 
Roughly 3.85 billion years ago, life assembled in the shallows and in the depths ofthe seas.  And roughly three hundred andfifty thousand years into life's existence, cells of life stuff first registered the existenceof light.  The lifeforms that pulled off this trick were cyanobacteria.  Cyanobacteria were single-celled creaturesthat live in societies of trillions.  Andcyanobacteria did more than merely register light's presence or absence.  They acted on what they “saw.”  They used light as a power source.  They used light to manufacture food.  And they used light to make copies ofthemselves.  They used light tomultiply.  They used light to conquer thenewborn Earth’s rivers, lakes, and seas.[i]  How? They invented photosynthesis. They invented an industrial process, aprocess of manic mass production, that turned light into polypeptides, sugars,hydrocarbons, and proteins.   A processof translation.  Translation from one medium to another.   A process of motion. Electron-and-atom motion.  Highlyorchestrated motion.  An extraordinarily sophisticated response toa stimulus.
 
Back to our question.  Was light information yet?  Yes.  Translators were decoding it.   Translators were interpreting it.   Translators were transforming it into energy conveyors like ATP (adenosine triphosphate)[ii]and social signalling molecules like N-acyl-homoserine lactones and cyclicoligopeptides.[iii]  Turning light into a new language.  A language of chemical sentences. What’s more, translators weregrabbing hold of light as a stimulus. And they were responding to it withaction.  With metabolism.  With movement.  With migration to new territories.  Was light information yet?  You bet. Why?  Because   translators had invented a meaning. A meaning for the light ofthe Sun. 
 
OK, that was true of sunlight. But what aboutstarlight?  Sorry.  It was too weak to register.  It still had no translators.  No interpreters.  So was starlight information yet?  No.  
 
Was starlight destined to be an informational orphanforever?  Was it condemned to go untoeternity without meaning?  Or, to put it differently, would starlight’slack of eager translators ever change?   
 
Over three billion years later, there were light translators all over this planet.  Not just in the sea.  They had also conquered the land.  They were plants.  And their ability to coat the planet withlight-translators—with the solar panels we call leaves—was astonishing.  Did this spread of plants, this astonishingincrease in the number of   translators,increase the amount of meaning “in” sunlight? Had rainforests and ocean kelp increased the number of implicit properties that the cosmos extracts from sunlight? Had they increased thetranslation of light from one medium to another? Or, to put it differently, had coating the land and lining the seas withphotosynthesizers increased the amount of Shannon's style of information?   Had it increased the raw total of responseto the stimulus of sunlight?  Again, theanswer is yes.  Absolutely.
 
But what about starlight? Still no takers.  So was starlightinformation yet?  Not so far as we know.
 
Let's skip ahead another 999 million years or so.  Let’s fast forward to humans.  Roughly 36,000 years ago,[iv] humans invented asimple isomorphic symbol set,  a systemof notation. And they carved their notes in mammoth, baboon, and eagle bones.[v]  What did they keep notes about? What did thesymbols try to capture?  What did theytry to translate? To what were they isomorphic? The phases of the moon.[vi]  The repetition roughly every thirty daysof  a cycle that sees the moon transformfrom a fingernail-like sliver, a thin crescent, to a fat and full circle oflight.  Theseearly Homo sapiens apparently usedtheir carved bones and tusks to keep track of something that they were in theprocess of inventing, the concept of time.  So moonlight now had translators andinterpreters.  Was moonlight informationyet?  You bet. Moonlight had meaning extractors. It had creatures that responded to its changes.  It had stimulus, response, and meaning.  Did that make it information?  I leave the answer  up to you. 
 
But what about starlight?  It appears that we humans didn’t make sense ofthe random spray of stars in the black of night until well after theinvention of agriculture 10,000 years ago. Then inroughly 4,000 B.C.E., the Babylonians got into the act and pioneered star-basedmythology, star-based astronomy and astrology. Two thousand years later theinhabitants of Britain and Scotland built hundreds of groupings of massiveboulders like Stonehenge and apparently used those boulder circles to translatealignments of the Sun, the moon, and the stars into a language whose letters were fashioned from stone.[vii]  And across the Atlantic Ocean, the Aztecs,Incas and Mayans, too, translated the connect-the-dots of the stars into stone,into ritual, and into the synchronized behavior of citizens far and wide.[viii] 
 
Which brings us back to the basic question.  The amount of sunlight has gone up twenty sixpercent since life firstevolved.[ix]  And old stars have died and new ones been born in the night sky. Butis that what has jacked up the amount of information on this earthly ball?  Not a bit. But has the information content onthis planet grown?  Has the meaning increased?  Have the number and variety of responses tolight's stimulus gone up?  Have the number of breakthroughs that lightinspired soared?  Have the number ofinventions that light triggered climbed?  You bet. 
 
So in the days of the henge-makers, was the cosmos following the second law ofthermodynamics?  Was the universe demonstrating entropy?  Was information sliding down a slippery slopeto disorder?  Not one bit. Claude Shannon’s style of information may or may not have been on theincrease.  But meaning was rocketing.
 
Then in the land between the two rivers, in Mesopotamia,came tribes, city states, and empires.  Withfull-time starpriests, full-time scribes who thought that they could read the secrets of theuniverse and the secretsof their politicians’ futures in the stars.  For one hundred generations—for roughly 2,000years[x]—theseastronomers and astrologers watched the stars for the kings of Mesopotamia, thekings of the thirty one cities of The Land of the Lords of Brightness.  For one hundred generations the professionalstar  translators made meticulousobservations, translated what they saw into the symbol set of cuneiform,recorded those cuneiform translations on clay hand tablets, and deposited thetablets in libraries of as many as twenty thousand clay tablets[xi]each in the palaces of kings. Today there are over 1.5 million cuneiformtablets in museums around the world.[xii]  Needless to say, not all of them concernastronomy.  But all are translations ofexperience into isomorphic symbol sets.  
 
How very much like cyanobacteria translating sunlightinto a language of biochemicals.  How very much like leaves translatingsunlight into panels, sheets, threads, and stems of cells.  
 
The Mesopotamian priestly tablets recorded the movementsof the constellations and the stars.  But that wasn’t all.  The Mesopotamian scribe priests built onelayer of symbol set upon another.  Thescribe priests invented three new symbol sets—written language, mathematical procedures, andcharts.  Why?  To understand the “messages” of starlight.  And they used those “messages” to read theminds of thegods.   What’smore, they advised that rulers act according to the stars’ “messages.” 
 
Had the amount of starlight making it to the surface ofthe Earth goneup?  Not a single iota.  But had the amount of information shotup?  Had the number of meanings and thenumber of creatures paying attention to those meanings skyrocketed?  Had responsesto the tiny bits of light from thestars beenfruitful and multiplied?  Even in ClaudeShannon’s crippled terminology, the amount of meaning had soared. 
 
Meanwhile, Babylon’s star priests were just startingstarlight’s informational  odyssey.  Today there are hundreds of thousands ofprofessional and amateur telescopes pointing at the heavens, and all of themare trying to find yet more meanings in starlight.  We've used our telescopes to see that somedots in the black heavens of night, dots that we originally thought were stars, are  sky-swirls, tiny spirals in the sky.  We've had the “Great Debate”  of April 26, 1920 between Heber Curtis andHarlow Shapley at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.,[xiii]a debate over whether those sky twirls are mere spirals of gas inside our MilkyWay, inside our star cluster, or whether they are swirls of something far moresubstantial than gas, whether they are swirls of stars.  We've had The Great Debate over whether thoseswirls are inside our star cluster, our "globular cluster," oroutside of it.  We've had the debate overwhether our globular star cluster is a spiral like those strange spiral wisps.  We've had the debate about whether ourglobular cluster is a tiny 30,000 light years across or a giant 300,000. We've had thegreat debate between Curtis and Shapley over whether this is a nice, cozyuniverse thatincludes only our star cluster or whether  the cosmos is an unimaginably vast space in which "island universes" likeours, things called "galaxies," exist at greatdistances from each other, huge, lonely, unimaginable distances.  We’ve seen a winner to that debate—theargument for many galaxies spread over unimaginable distances.
 
We’ve used lenses and mirrors to magnify starlight.  We’ve used drawings on paper and images on glass photographic plates and oncellulose film to capture the images of stars and to record their positions.  We’ve turned that data into electron flows, into Claude Shannon’s pluses andminuses, ons and offs, one and zeros, into binary numbers and into Shannon’sbrilliant language of electronic circuits—the language ofcomputers.  We’ve stored thesetranslations of starlight on magnetic film and hard drives.
 
And we've used starlight, the streams of photons from the stars, to theorize about theorigins of the universe and about the universe's future.  Our libraries of scholarly articles andpopular books about starlight-interpretation, starlight-translation, have grown huge.  So have the numbers of cosmologists, astrophysicists,and astronomers who’ve dedicated their lives to interpreting that trickle oflight from thestars.  What’s more, we owe everythingfrom Newton's physics and Einstein's relativity to NASA's space explorations to starlight.  Has the amount of starlight falling on thisplanet at night increased?  Not a sliver.  Not a scratch.  So what has gone up?   The quantity of interpretation. The quantityof translation. The quantity of response to a stimulus.  The quantity of action.  The quantity of repetition in a new context. The quantity of raw glass,iron, steel, and money dedicated to starlight. And most important, the quantityof  meaning.
 
What does this radical increase mean for the quantity ofinformation "in" starlight? What does it mean for the total amount of information and meaning on this third gravity ball from the Sun?  And what does it mean for the total amount ofinformation—the total amount of meaning—in the cosmos?
 
If information is anything a receiver can interpret,anything a translator can translate, has the amount of information goneup?  Or is this merely an explosion ofmeaning?  It's asemantic quibble.  A quibble you candecide better than I can.  But somethinghas been on the increase.  Something hasshot up dramatically. Something complex. Something extremely social.  Something profoundly conversational.  Something that utterly defies the pessimisticpredictions of entropy.  And something that seriously challenges aninformation theory without meaning.
 



[i] J.William Schopf & Cornelius Klein, TheProterozoic Biosphere: A Multidisciplinary Study (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 360.

[ii]Rafael Palacios, William Edward Newton, Genomes and genomics of nitrogen-fixingorganisms (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), p. 41.

[iii] ReinhardKrämer, Kirsten Jung, eds., BacterialSignaling (Weinheim: Wiley-VCH, 2010), pp. 7, 23-24.

[iv] PaulG. Bahn, Jean Vertut, Journey Through theIce Age (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1997),  p. 31. Bryan E. Penprase, The Power of Stars: How CelestialObservations Have Shaped Civilization (New York: Springer, 2011), p. 134.

[v] PeterJames, Nick Thorpe, Ancient Inventions(New York: Ballantine, 1994), p.485.  Evan Hadingham, Early Man and the Cosmos (New York:Walker, 1985), pp. 85-88.

[vi]Alexander Marshack, The roots ofcivilization: the cognitive beginnings of man's first art, symbol and notation(Kingston, RI: Moyer Bell, 1991).  DavidH. Kelley, Eugene F. Milone, Anthony F. Aven, Exploring Ancient Skies: A Survey of Ancient and Cultural Astronomy(New York: Springer, 2004), pp.157-158. Paul G. Bahn, ed, An EnquiringMind: Studies in Honor of Alexander Marshack (Oxford: Oxbow, 2009).

[vii]A. Thom, “Megalithic astronomy: Indications in standing stones, Vistas in Astronomy, Volume 7, 1966, pp.1-56.  Clive Ruggles, “The stonealignments of Argyll and Mull: a perspective on the statistical approach inarchaeoastronomy,” in  Clive Ruggles,ed., Records in Stone: Papers in Memoryof Alexander Thom (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 233.

[viii]Penprase, The Power of Stars, pp. 11,68, 71, 74-6, 91-92, 123-124.

[ix]Kenneth R. Lang, The Sun FromSpace (Berlin: Springer, 2009), p. 385.

[x] J.Edward Wright, The early history ofheaven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.31.

[xi] LornaOakes, Mesopotamia (New York: Rosen, 2009), p. 54.

[xii] Dr.Tonia Sharlach, “Taxes in Ancient Mesopotamia,” The University of Pennsylvania Almanac, April 2, 2002 
http://www.upenn.edu/almanac/v48/n28/AncientTaxes.html#meso  (accessed June 28, 2011). Louise Roug,"Cuneiform bits become history bytes," Los Angeles Times, May 27, 2003, http://articles.latimes.com/2003/may/27/entertainment/et-roug27(accessed October 12, 2011).

[xiii]Robert W. Smith, The Expanding Universe:Astronomy's 'Great Debate', 1900-1931 (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
 
 





Howard Bloom
Howardbloom.net
Author of: The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History ("mesmerizing"-The Washington Post), 
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century ("reassuring and sobering"-The New Yorker), 
The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism ("A tremendously enjoyable book." James Fallows, National Correspondent, The Atlantic),  
The God Problem: How A Godless Cosmos Creates("Bloom's argument will rock your world." Barbara Ehrenreich), 
How I Accidentally Started the Sixties (“Wow! Whew! Wild! Wonderful!” Timothy Leary), and 
The Mohammed Code (“A terrifying book…the best book I’ve read on Islam.” David Swindle, PJ Media).
Former Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute; Former Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University
Founder: International Paleopsychology Project. Founder, Space Development Steering Committee. Board Member and Member Of Board Of Governors, National Space Society. Founding Board Member: Epic of Evolution Society. Founding Board Member, The Darwin Project.




-----Original Message-----
From: Xueshan Yan <yxs at pku.edu.cn>
To: FIS Group <fis at listas.unizar.es>
Cc: 'Jose Javier Blanco Rivero' <javierweiss at gmail.com>
Sent: Mon, Feb 12, 2018 6:33 am
Subject: Re: [Fis] The unification of the theories of information based on the cateogry theory



Dear Javier and Dear Stan,
 
Javier:
1. I very much agree with you as follows:
“I think that only signals can be transmitted, not information. Information can only be gained by an observer (a self-referential system) that draws a distinction.”
A Chinese scholar Dongsheng Miao’s argument is: There is no information can exists without carrier, i.e. No naked can exists.
I think both of you two are expressing a principle of information science.
 
2. According to Linguistics, the relationship between language and communication is:
Language is a tool of communication about information.
Of course, this is only limited to the human atmosphere. So I think that all (Human) Semiotics ((Human) Linguistics), (Human) Communication Study should be the subdisciplines of Human Informatics.
 
==========================================================
Dear Xueshan,
Thanks for sharing your interesting remarks and references. I think no one really wants to deny the crucial role the language metaphor has played in the thinking of communication and information models. But I believe the crucial point is to distinguish between language and communication. Language is for us humans the main communication medium, though not the only one. We tend to describe other communication media in society and nature by mapping the language-like characteristics they have. This has been useful and sucessful so far. But pushing the language metaphor too far is showing its analytical limits. I think we need to think of a transdisciplinary theory of communication media. On the other hand, I agree with you that we need to check the uses of the concepts of signal and information. I think that only signals can be transmitted, not information. Information can only be gained by an observer (a self-referential system) that draws a distinction.  
Best,
Javier
==============================================
Stan:
According to Peirce, language is only one of the systematic signs. Here we consider sign, signal, symbol as the same thing. So, more precisely in my opinion:
{signal {information}},   or   {substrate {signal {information}}}
But not
{language {signal {information}}}
If you remember, in our previous discussions, I much appreciate the 
The hierarchy idea is very important to our study which is initially introduced by Pedro, Nikhil and you.
===============================================================
Xueshan -- I think one can condense some of your insights hierarchically, as:
In a system having language, information seemingly may be obtained in other ways as well. It would be a conceptually broader category. Thus (using the compositional hierarchy):
        [information [language [signal]]]
Meaning that, when a system has language, all information will be understood or construed by way of linguistic constructs. 
(Here I am using ‘signal’ as being more specific than Peirce’s ‘sign’, where:
        [sign [information [...]]] ) 
Then, more dynamically (using the subsumptive hierarchy):
        {language {signal {information}}}
Information in a languaged system is derived by way linguistic formations, so that, even though it is an extremely broad category, information (informing) only emerges by way of linguistically informed transformations.
STAN
 
Best wishes to all,
Xueshan
===============================================================

El feb 10, 2018 5:23 AM, "Xueshan Yan" <yxs at pku.edu.cn> escribió:


Dear Colleagues,
I have read the article "The languages of bacteria" which Gordana recommended, and has gained a lot of inspiration from it. In combination with Sung's comparative linguistics exploration on cell language and human language, I have the following learning feelings to share with everyone:
In this article, the author recognized that bacteria have evolved multiple languages for communicating within and between species. Intra- and interspecies cell-cell communication allows bacteria to coordinate various biological activities in order to behave like multicellular organisms. Such as AI-2, it is a general language that bacteria use for intergenera signaling.
I found an interesting phenomenon in this paper: the author use the concept information 3 times but the concept signal (signal or signaling) 55 times, so we have to review the history and application of “information” and “signal” in biology and biochemistry, it is helpful for us to understand the relationship between language, signal, and information.
The origin of the concept of signal (main the signal transduction) can be traced back to the end of the 1970s. But until 1980, biochemist and endocrinologist Martin Rodbell published an article titled: “The Role of Hormone Receptors and GTP-Regulatory Proteins in Membrane Transduction" in Nature, in this paper he used the "signal transduction" first time. Since then, the research on signal transduction is popular in biology and biochemistry.
As for any information transmission system, if we pay more attention to its transmission carrier instead of its transmission content, we are used to employing "signal transmission" instead of "signal transduction". From the tradition of the early use of information concept, the signal transduction study of cells is only equivalent to the level of telecommunications before 1948. Outwardly, before the advent of Shannon's information theory, the central issue of telecommunications is "signal" rather than "information". After that, the central issue of telecommunications is "information" rather than "signal".
According to the application history of information concept, nearly all the essential problems behind the concepts of communication, messenger, signal and so on may be information problems. Just as the language problem what we are discussing here, our ultimate goal is to analyze the information.
 
For the same reason, I recommend another two papers:
1. Do Plants Think?  (June 5, 2012, Scientific American)
(http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-plants-think-daniel-chamovitz/#rd?sukey=fc78a68049a14bb24ce82efd8ef931e64057ce6142b1f2f7b919612d2b3f42c07f559f5be33be0881613ccfbf5b43c4b）
2. Plants Can Think, Feel and Learn  (December 3, 2014, New Scientist)
(http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429980-400-root-intelligence-plants-can-think-feel-and-learn)
>From which we can judge whether or not a plants informatics can exists.
 
Best wishes,
Xueshan
 

From: fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es [mailto:fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Sungchul Ji
Sent: Thursday, February 8, 2018 9:10 PM
To: Francesco Rizzo <13francesco.rizzo at gmail.com>; Terrence W. DEACON <deacon at berkeley.edu>
Cc: Fis, <fis at listas.unizar.es>
Subject: Re: [Fis] The unification of the theories of information based on the cateogry theory

 

Hi Terry,  and FISers,
 
Can it be that "language metaphor" is akin to a (theoretical) knife that, in the hands of a surgeon, can save lives but, in a wrong hand, can kill?
 
All the best.
 
Sung



From: Francesco Rizzo <13francesco.rizzo at gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 8, 2018 2:56:11 AM
To: Terrence W. DEACON
Cc: Fis,; Sungchul Ji
Subject: Re: [Fis] The unification of the theories of information based on the cateogry theory 

 


Caro Terry estensibile a tutti, 

è sempre un piacere leggerTi e capirTi. La  general theory of information è preceduta da un sistema (o semiotica) di significazione e seguita da un sistema (o semiotica ) di comunicazione. Tranne che quando si ha un processo comunicativo come il passaggio di un Segnale (che non significa necessariamente 'un segno') da una Fonte, attraverso un  Trasmettitore, lungo un Canale, a un Destinatario. In un processo tra macchina e macchina il segnale non ha alcun potere 'significante'. In tal caso non si ha significazione anche se si può dire che si ha passaggio di informazione. Quando il destinatario è un essere umano (e non è necessario che la fonte sia anch'essa un essere umano) si è in presenza di un processo di significazione. Un sistema di significazione è una costruzione semiotica autonoma, indipendente da ogni possibile atto di comunicazione che l'attualizzi. Invece ogni processo di comunicazione tra esseri umani -- o tra ogni tipo di apparato o struttura 'intelligente, sia meccanico che biologico, -- presuppone un sistema di significazione come propria o specifica condizione. In conclusione, è possibile avere una semiotica della significazione indipendente da una semiotica della comunicazione; ma è impossibile stabilire una semiotica della comunicazione indipendente da una semiotica della significazione.

Ho appreso molto da Umberto Eco a cui ho dedicato il capitolo 10. Umberto Eco e il processo di re-interpretazione e re-incantamento della scienza economica (pp. 175-217) di "Valore e valutazioni. La scienza dell'economia o l'economia della scienza" (FrancoAngeli, Milano, 1997). Nello mio stesso libro si trovano:

- il capitolo 15. Semiotica economico-estimativa (pp. 327-361) che si colloca nel quadro di una teoria globale di tutti i sistemi di significazione e i processi di comunicazione;

- il sottoparagrafo 5.3.3 La psicologia genetica di Jean Piaget e la neurobiologia di Humberto Maturana e Francesco Varela. una nuova epistemologia sperimentale della qualità e dell'unicità (pp. 120-130).

Chiedo scusa a Tutti se Vi ho stancati o se ancora una volta il mio scrivere in lingua italiana Vi crea qualche problema. Penso che il dono che mi fate è, a proposito della QUALITA' e dell'UNICITA',  molto più grande del (per)dono che Vi chiedo. Grazie.

Un saluto affettuoso.

Francecso

 


 

2018-02-07 23:02 GMT+01:00 Terrence W. DEACON <deacon at berkeley.edu>:


Dear FISers,

 

In previous posts I have disparaged using language as the base model for building a general theory of information. 

Though I realize that this may seem almost heretical, it is not a claim that all those who use linguistic analogies are wrong, only that it can be causally misleading.

I came to this view decades back in my research into the neurology and evolution of the human language capacity.

And it became an orgnizing theme in my 1997 book The Symbolic Species.

Early in the book I describe what I (and now other evolutionary biologists) have come to refer to as a "porcupine fallacy" in evolutionary thinking.

Though I use it to critique a misleading evolutionary taxonomizing tendency, I think it also applies to biosemiotic and information theoretic thinking as well.

So to exemplify my reasoning (with apologies for quoting myself) I append the following excerpt from the book.

 

"But there is a serious problem with using language as the model for analyzing other 
species’ communication in hindsight. It leads us to treat every other form of communication as
exceptions to a rule based on the one most exceptional and divergent case. No analytic method
could be more perverse. Social communication has been around for as long as animals have
interacted and reproduced sexually. Vocal communication has been around at least as long as frogs
have croaked out their mating calls in the night air. Linguistic communication was an afterthought,
so to speak, a very recent and very idiosyncratic deviation from an ancient and well-established
mode of communicating. It cannot possibly provide an appropriate model against which to assess
other forms of communication. It is the rare exception, not the rule, and a quite anomalous
exception at that. It is a bit like categorizing birds’ wings with respect to the extent they possess or
lack the characteristics of penguins’ wings, or like analyzing the types of hair on different mammals
with respect to their degree of resemblance to porcupine quills. It is an understandable
anthropocentric bias—perhaps if we were penguins or porcupines we might see more typical wings
and hair as primitive stages compared to our own more advanced adaptations—but it does more to
obfuscate than clarify. Language is a derived characteristic and so should be analyzed as an
exception to a more general rule, not vice versa."
 
Of course there will be analogies to linguistic forms.
This is inevitable, since language emerged from and is supported by a vast nonlinguistic semiotic infrastructure.
So of course it will inherit much from less elaborated more fundamental precursors. 
And our familiarity with language will naturally lead us to draw insight from this more familiar realm.
I just worry that it provides an elaborate procrustean model that assumes what it endeavors to explain.
 
Regards to all, Terry

 

 



 

On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 11:04 AM, Jose Javier Blanco Rivero <javierweiss at gmail.com> wrote:

In principle I agree with Terry. I have been thinking of this, though I am still not able to make a sound formulation of the idea. Still I am afraid that if I miss the chance to make at least a brief formulation of it I will lose the opportunity to make a brainstorming with you. So, here it comes:
I have been thinking that a proper way to distinguish the contexts in which the concept of information acquires a fixed meaning or the many contexts on which information can be somehow observed, is to make use of the distinction between medium and form as developed by N. Luhmann, D. Baecker and E. Esposito. I have already expressed my opinion in this group that what information is depends on the system we are talking about. But  the concept of medium is more especific since a complex system ussualy has many sources and types of information. 
So the authors just mentioned, a medium can be broadly defined as a set of loosely coupled elements. No matter what they are. While a Form is a temporary fixed coupling of a limited configuration of those elements. Accordingly, we can be talking about DNA sequences which are selected by RNA to form proteins or to codify a especific instruction to a determinate cell. We can think of atoms forming a specific kind of matter and a specific kind of molecular structure. We can also think of a vocabulary or a set of linguistic conventions making possible a meaningful utterance or discourse. 
The idea is that the medium conditions what can be treated as information. Or even better, each type of medium produces information of its own kind. 
According to this point of view, information cannot be transmitted. It can only be produced and "interpreted" out of the specific difference that a medium begets between itself and the forms that take shape from it. A medium can only be a source of noise to other mediums. Still, media can couple among them. This means that media can selforganize in a synergetic manner, where they depend on each others outputs or complexity reductions. And this also mean that they do this by translating noise into information. For instance, language is coupled to writing, and language and writing to print. Still oral communication is noisy to written communication. Let us say that the gestures, emotions, entonations, that we make when talking cannot be copied as such into writing. In a similar way, all the social practices and habits made by handwriting were distorted by the introduction of print. From a technical point of view you can codify the same message orally, by writing and by print. Still information and meaning are not the same. You can tell your girlfriend you love her. That interaction face to face where the lovers look into each others eye, where they can see if the other is nervous, is trembling or whatever. Meaning (declaring love and what that implies: marriage, children, and so on) and information (he is being sincere, she can see it in his eye; he brought her to a special place, so he planned it, and so on) take a very singular and untranslatable configuration. If you write a letter you just can say "I love you". You shall write a poem or a love letter. Your beloved would read it alone in her room and she would have to imagine everything you say. And  imagination makes information and meaning to articulate quite differently as in oral communication. It is not the same if you buy a love card in the kiosk and send it to her. Maybe you compensate the simplicity of your message by adding some chocolates and flowers. Again, information (jumm, lets see what he bought her) and meaning are not the same. I use examples of social sciences because that is my research field, although I have the intuition that it could also work for natural sciences. 
Best,
JJ

El feb 7, 2018 10:47 AM, "Sungchul Ji" <sji at pharmacy.rutgers.edu> escribió:


Hi  FISers,
 
On 10/8/2017, Terry wrote:
 
" So basically, I am advocating an effort to broaden our discussions and recognize that the term information applies in diverse ways to many different contexts. And because of this it is important to indicate the framing, whether physical, formal, biological, phenomenological, linguistic, etc.

. . . . . . The classic syntax-semantics-pragmatics distinction introduced by Charles Morris has often been cited in this respect, though it too is in my opinion too limited to the linguistic paradigm, and may be misleading when applied more broadly. I have suggested a parallel, less linguistic (and nested in Stan's subsumption sense) way of making the division: i.e. into intrinsic, referential, and normative analyses/properties of information."

 

I agree with Terry's concern about the often overused linguistic metaphor in defining "information".  Although the linguistic metaphor has its limitations (as all metaphors do), it nevertheless offers a unique advantage as well, for example, its well-established categories of functions (see the last column in Table 1.) 

 

The main purpose of this post is to suggest that all the varied theories of information discussed on this list may be viewed as belonging to the same category of ITR (Irreducible Triadic Relation) diagrammatically represented as the 3-node closed network in the first column of Table 1.


 



Table 1.  The postulated universality of ITR (Irreducible Triadic Relation) as manifested in information theory, semiotics, cell language theory, and linguistics.


Category Theory

   f            g
   A -----> B ------> C
    |                           ^
    |                            |
    |______________|
   h
 
ITR (Irreducible Triadic Relation)

Deacon’s theory of information

Shannon’s
Theory of
information

Peirce’s theory of signs

Cell language theory

Human language
(Function)


A

Intrinsic information

Source

Object

Nucleotides*/
Amion acids

Letters
(Building blocks)


B

Referential information

Message

Sign

Proteins

Words
(Denotation)


C

Normative information

Receiver

Interpretant

Metabolomes
(Totality of cell metabolism)

Systems of words
(Decision making & Reasoning)


f

?

Encoding

Sign production

Physical laws

Second articulation


g

?

Decoding

Sign interpretation

Evoutionary selection

First and Third articulation


h

?

Information flow

Information flow

Inheritance

Grounding/
Habit


Scale

Micro-Macro?

Macro

Macro

Micro

Macro


 


*There may be more than one genetic alphabet of 4 nucleotides.  According to the "multiple genetic alphabet hypothesis', there are n genetic alphabets, each consisting of 4^n letters, each of which in turn consisting of n nucleotides.  In this view, the classical genetic alphabet is just one example of the n alphabets, i.e., the one with n = 1.  When n = 3, for example, we have the so-called 3rd-order genetic alphabet with 4^3 = 64 letters each consisting of 3 nucleotides, resulting in the familiar codon table.  Thus, the 64 genetic codons are not words as widely thought (including myself until recently) but letters!  It then follows that proteins are words and  metabolic pathways are sentences.  Finally, the transient network of metbolic pathways (referred to as "hyperstructures" by V. Norris in 1999 and as "hypermetabolic pathways" by me more recently) correspond to texts essential to represent arguement/reasoning/computing.  What is most exciting is the recent discovery in my lab at Rutgers that the so-called "Planck-Shannon plots" of mRNA levels in living cells can identify function-dependent "hypermetabolic pathways" underlying breast cancer before and after drug treatment (manuscript under review). 

 

Any comments, questions, or suggestions would be welcome.

 

Sung


 



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-- 

Professor Terrence W. Deacon
University of California, Berkeley


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