[Fis] Anticipatory Systems--second thoughts
Pedro C. Marijuan
pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
Sat Oct 27 22:16:17 CEST 2018
Dear All,
Thanks to Loet, Mark, Francesco, and Stan for the new elements of
discussion. At stake is whether we can interconnect the
cellular/biological and the social/humanistic via traditional systemic
generalizations (semiosis included) or there might be a more appropriate
"informational" path. Given that we have started the debate by the
communication aspect ("stories"/narratives), it seems that the former
option, the traditional one, has more traction. Necessarily? First, let
me discuss the topic of "codes". Apart form the genetic one, bacteria
have almost none other (except protein degradation). But we the
eukaryotes are full of codes: histone code, splicing codes, epigenetic
codes, tubulin code, cytoskeleton codes, sugar codes, compartment codes,
etc. etc. Actually Marcello Barbieri has postulated a new field within
biosemiosis, "code biology". To sum up my own interpretation, the
development of new complex functions has implied a multitude of new
"hard" codes inscribed in DNA/RNA and protein sequences and, even more
importantly, "soft" codes via signaling combinatorics, genuine molecular
"narratives" shared among cell-cycle trajectories. Only then our
"cellular complexity" has been made possible.
The second leg of the argument concerns what Spinoza called the
Principle of Conatus (effort, striving): "the endeavor to persist and
flourish in one's own being". Very recent works of Damasio and Pinker
this year coincide in their expostulation of this Conatus Principle as
rooted in our biological stuff, in our evolutionarily grounded tricks to
stave off the effects of entropy. Damasio goes to connect our
infrastructure of emotions, feelings, etc. with the Cellular Imperative,
via the successive evolutionary stages of increasing organismic
complexity. Then, when symbolic language emerges in our species, an
explosion of social complexity occurs relatively fast. Like in the
eukaryotic biology of codes above. And the communication via "packages"
or stories that encapsulate the relevant behavioral happenstances in the
social milieu, in order to learn how to advance the own life course,
become the vertebral column of the new human "informational" order.
By the way, the "dialogic" term was taken from R. Sennet (Together,
2012), he was meaning what happens when a common ground is not found in
the dialog. It can be complemented with "monologic" and "multilogic"
--easy to see what they mean!
Best wishes
--Pedro
El 24/10/2018 a las 13:21, loet at leydesdorff.net escribió:
> 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
> <mailto: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 <mailto: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 list
>>> Fis at listas.unizar.es <mailto:Fis at listas.unizar.es>
>>> http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
>>
>>
>> --
>> -------------------------------------------------
>> Pedro C. Marijuán
>> Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
>>
>> pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es <mailto:pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es>
>> http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
>> -------------------------------------------------
>
>
> --
> -------------------------------------------------
> Pedro C. Marijuán
> Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
>
> pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es <mailto:pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es>
> http://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 <mailto:johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com>
> Blog: http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com
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>
>
> --
> Loet Leydesdorff
> Professor Emeritus, University of Amsterdam
> Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR)
> loet at leydesdorff.net <mailto:loet at leydesdorff.net>;
> http://www.leydesdorff.net/
--
-------------------------------------------------
Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
-------------------------------------------------
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