[Fis] Anticipatory Systems--second thoughts

Thu Oct 25 05:04:27 CEST 2018

Dear Loet,

I think the conclusion that we learn top-down is important. This is
increasingly apparent with our conscious experience of learning in the
light of communications technology.

On biology, cellular communication looks very much like a social system, I
would suggest. I wonder if we need to see DNA differently (Terry Deacon
said at the biosemiotics conference this year, "how does a molecule become
about another molecule?" - great question!) DNA may be an epiphenomenon of
the cellular communication process - at some level, what Schrödinger called
an "aperiodic crystal" may also be a kind of hypothesis as cells organise
themselves. If this is the case, then the coherence between biological
communication and social systems may provide a new insight into dialogical
processes (and learning)

Having said this, there must be some organising principle that produces
coherence and creates biological and social regularities. My guess is, as
you suggest, that it has something to do with interactions of redundancies
at multiple levels of description... but I suspect the biology has
flexibility in an analogous way to social phenomena: is human consciousness
so exceptional, or is "consciousness" from cells upwards?

In such a simple thing as studying a musical instrument, "practice makes
perfect", is only one set of levels of redundancy generation. If it was
only this level of redundancy, we'd all be virtuosi! Something else must be
going on...

Best wishes,

Mark

On Wed, 24 Oct 2018, 21:22 loet at leydesdorff.net, <leydesdorff at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Dear Mark and colleagues,
>
> It seems to me that in this case, one can learn top-down. We begin to
> understand how communications is coordinated by codes in the communication
> which are not observable, since operating virtually. The codes have the
> status of hypotheses. Their interaction can generate redundancy among the
> perspectives which is measurable in potentially negative bits of
> information. Redundancy adds options which were not available yet. This
> operation is against the entropy law, and thus there is a link with
> anticipation: x(t) = f (x(t+1)). In Dubois's terminology: hyperincursion:
> the system operates in terms of expectations of future states. Only the
> social system can do so because the codes of communication can interact as
> selection envrionments for one another. It seems to me that biology does
> not have more than a single code (DNA), and biological systems are
> incursive: the mind has to couple on a body -- in other words, it is always
> instantiated. The rule of law for example can be instantiated in local
> courts, but it does not have to be instantiated at specific places. There
> is a degree of freedom about where to be instantiated.
>
> In evolutionary terminology: the observables are phenotypical; but we have
> to specify the genotypes. The codes are genotypical, but not given (unlike
> in biological evoltuion). In cultural evoltuion, the codes are
> co-constructed with the observable variation as selection mechanisms.
> Coordination is a form of selection. For example, as a system growth (that
> is, becomes populated), it may increasingly pollute its environment and
> thus create a selective freedback.
>
> Hopefully, we can make next steps. But for me this is the second
> communication on the list this week.
>
> Best,
> Loet
>
> On Wed, Oct 24, 2018 at 6:44 AM Mark Johnson <johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> 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
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Fis mailing listFis at listas.unizar.eshttp://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> -------------------------------------------------
>>> 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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>> http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
>>
>
>
> --
> Loet Leydesdorff
> Professor Emeritus, University of Amsterdam
> Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR)
> loet at leydesdorff.net;  http://www.leydesdorff.net/
>
>
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