[Fis] Anticipatory Systems--second thoughts

Wed Oct 24 06:44:18 CEST 2018

Dear Pedro and list,

I wonder if narrative is the right category to concentrate on. Clearly
stories are important, but it does lead to the conclusion that
"everything's a story" (or worse, MERELY a story), and that leads nowhere,
in my opinion. Good stories are interesting because they have coherence (if
they don't, are they stories at all?). I wonder if it's "coherence" which
is at the root of the issue. The deeper question is whether the coherence
lies in words of the story independently from the coherence of a
conversation about it - Pedro's emphasis on dialogue is important. My guess
is coherence arises from a totality which is essentially dialogical, as
Pedro notes. But we need to get closer to "coherence", not narrative.

When talking about dialogue, I'm puzzled by the emphasis on "two people":
the "Dia" in dialogue means "through", so it's THROUGH "logos" (words,
wisdom, etc): that can be many people, many brains. That's more than simply
talking to one another. It's the full gamut of intersubjective engagement.
Ultimately, that enlists an total ontology - biology, physics,
consciousness, ontogeny, phylogeny, education, etc. (and yes, all of those
things are indeed stories!)

As Loet has noted, coherence is a problem, particularly in cybernetics. It
cannot be accounted for in a bottom-up process; there has to be top-down
coordination. It is the latter which gives coherence to everything: the
great mystery of nature is, as John Torday remarked a while ago, that
everything seems to fit together.

My guess is that the coherence of stories, art, dialogue, etc is connected
to the coherence of consciousness, which is probably connected to the
coherence of biological processes, and why not physical processes too?
After all, mathematics, (another product of consciousness, like a story)
reveals fundamental patterns through fractals, and even our machine
learning algorithms seem to obey some kind of fundamental self-symmetry in
their operation, which whilst we are exploiting them, we understand very
little about (this is fascinating:
https://medium.com/intuitionmachine/the-holographic-principle-and-deep-learning-52c2d6da8d9
)

So my question is, why narrative? Coherence is the thing!

Best wishes,

Mark

On Tue, 23 Oct 2018 at 19:38, Pedro C. Marijuan <pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es>
wrote:

> Stan, List,
>
> I was thinking that those questions (below) or what, why, how, etc. are
> not very useful either in order to ascertain "causality" around
> communication phenomena. First, a communication is not "monologic" as the
> Aristotelian scheme presupposes (at least implicitly) but "dialogic" as it
> is a dialog between two parties who have different experiences,
> backgrounds, preferences, valence, "logics", etc.  Thus the pieces of
> communication between two or more parties cannot be explained
> monologically, but establishing something else: a story, a narrative where
> the relevant antecedent facts, the life stories of the protagonists, the
> current or previous background, the exchanges themselves, etc. are
> expressed with economy or "optimality" depending on the explanatory
> purposes...  So very different narratives may be needed (including the
> elaboration of "data") even about a single communication or interactive
> exchange. In any event, the common factor is happenstances around life
> cycles or life courses. Narratives are but complex pieces of information
> --causative or descriptive-- that we naturally elaborate and interpret
> around the social life around. And this may dovetail with the views of
> Akerlof & Shiller on narratives in "phishing for phools" economics...
> Does this make "informational" sense?
> Best--Pedro
>
> El 21/10/2018 a las 20:58, Pedro C. Marijuan escribió:
>
>
> To Stan: Thanks for incorporating the four Aristotelian causes below. But
> do you think they are useful or well suited for communicational phenomena?
> Rather they respond better to the single agent or designer arranging a
> piece of the inanimate world to his/her plans. See the traditional metaphor
> of the sculptor carving out the statue. But communication and narratives
> could be different.  Seemingly they respond better to questions such as:
> What? (Content) To whom? (interlocutor) Why? (reasons or purpose) How?
> (style, moods, manners) How long? (duration of the engagement,
> transitions). I think that when cells indulge in their molecular narratives
> or when we do communicate with our stories the causal analysis becomes
> different from the Aistotelian frame. It could be a good point to search
> out.
>
> Best wishes to all
> --Pedro
>
>  El 19/10/2018 a las 15:49, Stanley N Salthe escribió:
>
> On the topic of information as narration:
>
> Information as Narrative (would involve serial ‘statements’)
>
> Formal cause (of narrative) ...  the presence of available channels (in
> nature and/or culture) for informative energy flows
>
> Material cause ...  available energy gradients for required actions
> generating the narrative
>
> Efficient cause(s) ...  serial actions having sequential cumulative
> effects on the result of information flow in such a channel
>
> Final cause ...  anticipated subsequents as effects of the narrative
>
>      (Anticipation requires system survival over a period of time, during
> which impingements were survived, sometimes by way of internal modification
> -- Rosen, 1985, Anticipatory Systems)
>
> STAN
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
> --
> -------------------------------------------------
> Pedro C. Marijuán
> Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
> pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.eshttp://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
> -------------------------------------------------
>
>
> --
> -------------------------------------------------
> Pedro C. Marijuán
> Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
> pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.eshttp://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
> -------------------------------------------------
>
>
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-- 
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
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