[Fis] Anticipatory Systems

[Joseph Brenner]

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

 

The calls of Karl and Mark for a new narrative relative to the Foundations
of Information Science are auspicious and appropriate. Just a couple of
comments: we obviously need to avoid the target of a single new narrative,
thereby faithfully reproducing the problem we are trying to solve. In the
new logic that I have proposed, I have tried to be very careful to indicate
the domains to which it does not apply. 

 

For me, this means not seeking coherence as an end in itself, but the proper
relation between coherence and incoherence. The new book by the French
philosopher and sinologist François Jullien – dé-coïncidence (decoincidence)
talks directly to this relation.

 

I also would like to suggest a careful reading of Donne’s negative statement
that “all is just Relation” in the ‘new philosophy’. Does this mean that
looking at the world in terms of relations is somehow incorrect? What does
this imply for Chew’s bootstrap theory, relational quantum mechanics and the
idea of some, including Ladyman and Lupasco that “everything is relations”?

 

In Mark’s list of components of the new narrative, I see several whose
foundations may lack the necessary principles to change to a new narrative
and/or include some that may be incompatible with one. This should come out
in the discussion. As an example of a principle upon which we might see if
there is a consensus, however, I suggest the cosmology of Carlo Rovelli
which eliminates background spacetime. This is at the same time (!) a good
example of the principle of the dualism between reality and appearance, time
being a particularly powerful illusion.

 

Best wishes,

 

Joseph

 

  _____  

From: Fis [mailto:fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Mark Johnson
Sent: lundi, 29 octobre 2018 16:48
To: Karl Javorszky
Cc: fis
Subject: Re: [Fis] Anticipatory Systems

 

Wonderful, Karl - thank you!

 

I think one of the most important stories that we have to look at is the
story about how we have come to think about science. More pertinently, there
is a question about whether we need a new story – and whether a story with
“information” (or perhaps "redundancy") at its heart is that new story.
>From digital ontology, quantum mechanics, biosemiotics, cybernetics, black
hole cosmology and the theology of people like Arthur Peacock and John
Haught, it seems that this indeed is the beginning of a new story for the
world. We  need it, don’t we?!

 

I’m reading David Wootton’s “The Invention of Science” at the moment. It’s a
wonderful scholarly account of the construction of scientific narrative in
the 17th century. Highlighting the invention of concepts like “discovery”,
“fact”, “evidence”, “laws” and “experiment”, Wootton points out that poets
knew what was happening decades before the likes of Bacon put it in more
prosaic terms. This is John Donne, who Wotton quotes in the first chapter:

A new philosophy cals all in doubt,

The element of fire is quite put out;

The sunne is lost, and th’earth, and no mans wit

Can well direct him, where to looke for it.

And freely men confesse, that this world’s spent,

When in the Planets, and the firmament

They seeke so many new; they see that this

Is crumbled out againe to his Atomis. 

‘Tis all in pieces, all cohaerence gone; 

All just supply, and all Relation;

Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne are things forgot,

And every man alone thinks he hath got

To be a phoenix, and that then can bee

None of that kind, of which he is, but hee.

 

Extraordinary, isn’t it? We have everything from atoms to the individualism
of capitalism. But Donne gets what was missing: it was coherence. We’ve
tried to put the pieces back together again. But it doesn’t work. We need
something else.  To emphasise my earlier point, there is a choice as to how
we look at narrative: if we look through the lens of the scientific
revolution, we see the world broken down into constructions and stories
where “every man thinks he hath got to be a phoenix” (or indeed, has no
choice but to be one). I’d prefer to look through Donne’s lens, and see the
coherence we have lost. 

 

Best wishes,

 

Mark

 

On Mon, 29 Oct 2018 at 15:33, Karl Javorszky <karl.javorszky at gmail.com>
wrote:

Anticipation

 

Learned Friends,

 

We deal with the observation, that biologic organisms anticipate what will
happen next. Some concentrate on the narrative of the anticipation, some on
the phenomena that are anticipated. As a human faculty, anticipation can
range from intuition, guess, instinct, to prediction and certitude. Science
has more or less dealt with certitude (b follows from a) and has understood
prediction (if a then p(b) ~ x). Now we work our way towards understanding
instinctive prediction.

The utility and efficacy of the narrative version of anticipation varies
also greatly: we have the wish formulae, where faith and belief causes
anticipating an effect (if I say “please” they will give that to me),
magical incantations with powerful words, inputting arguments of an
algorithm in the hope of receiving a result, and the classical case of the
words of the narrative being one and inseparable from the facts that are the
case (the DNA is a narrative of what will happen, and its predictions are in
the closest possible way related to the facts of the matter the narrative
talks about). (Interactive online reporting, where the narration is a part
of the process.)

We do have some difficulties with a running narration, because such a thing
as telling the future has no place in classical, Wittgenstein logic and the
corresponding narrative about the proceedings. That, what will come into
existence is presently not the case. Whichever way we turn it, we are not
supposed to talk about things that are not the case. 

 

Foretelling the future (anticipating correctly) is a task that humans can
despair of. This problem being with us since the beginning of time, it has
been addressed by many generations using diverse lexica. Bruno’s suggestion
that we have no shy using words and concepts of theology is a wise one: Our
forefathers expressed themselves in allegories involving divine figures.
This has given me courage to present to you an Allegory on the Seduction of
Arithmetica by Amor, with a bow to Martianus Capella. May your serene
judgement of this non-polished draft be softened by magnanimous mercy
extended against a beginner.

 

-----------------------

Seduction of Arithmetica by Amor (20181028)

 

Amor: (enters scene of idyllic Elysian character) Oh All you Gods! Your help
is needed now that I have lost my way in my quest for my beloved
second-sister Arithmetica, and now I am in unknown terrain, where no human
intelligence had shed any light so far. Where are you, oh Arithmetica?!

Arithmetica: (enters from behind a tree) Here I am my Amor, never far from
you. You have a desire to talk to me

Amor: Please help. I have a problem I cannot solve on my own. You know, Zeus
has gone more mercantilist, in the wealth-generating mood, and he tasks each
of us to prepare reports the end of every quarter. How many arrows fired,
how many hits, and among these how many with operational achievement. Now
what is a success I know: if I hit with my arrow the heart of one
individual. What they want to know is, however, how many couples I generate
and how fruitful the resulting fornications will turn out to become. They
are in population management up there and are obviously scheming to make me
less industrious or less precise, but first they want the numbers. How can
you tell me, my dear second-sister, how many healthy offspring are generated
per arrow shot of mine?

Arithmetica: You, my dear second-brother, like so many others, want to know
whether we can foretell the future by our dexterous fingers, using
distinguishable objects which we count. The answer is: theoretically no,
practically yes. You may at first not understand this reply. To help to open
up your mind, let me tell you in all confidence a sordid part of my life.

Amor: Ah, my dearest Arithmetica? How come you have suffered indignities?
Surely by the acts of the mortals?

Arithmetica: Yes, the bipeds have kidnapped me from the Gardens of Olymp and
pressed me into their service. This would have not been necessary, first of
all, but for the cruel circumstances of that rendition into the realm of the
humans, the shame of it has kept my forced adoption for a long time in the
dark. Everybody knows that my 6 sisters and I are of a cooperative, willing,
pleasing character, because we find pleasure in what we do. No one needs to
force Music to be the essence of Music, there is no need to coerce Geometry
into doing geometry! We are the far relatives of the Muses, in the
technical, applicational fields. We like what we do, otherwise we could not
embody the spirit of that what we are. But what happened to me was of an
otherworldly brutality. All the bipeds agree in praising our diligence and
competence, in my case my speciality, exactitude. There is no need to
subject a person of our divine breed to such indignities.

Amor: What, oh Arithmetica, what did they did to you?

Arithmetica: That subgroup of the bipeds which calls itself the Quadrivials
have captured me and keep me locked up in a place with rectangular axes on
which identically spaced units are measuring distances. You cannot imagine a
less creative surroundings for a young girl. It is pure sensory deprivation,
the intellectual equivalent of a solitary confinement. I have no permission
to have anything in hand that is not of a uniform make, as such
indistinguishable from any other unit element. They just eliminated all
diversity from their castle. These are very strict people.

Amor: what a sad story! You with all your talents and you love of glitzy
things to be left on your own among grey uniform units that have no
relations among each other! You always loved arranging and re-arranging your
manifold glitzy things according to their inner connections among each
other. You always knew that there is a system of a-priori relations among
the things: this is what their differing ways of being glitzy expresses.

Arithmetica: You, my beloved, understand my pain. It is all right if those
of strong faith require that one serves them according to their beliefs and
rituals, but it is not right, if these well-educated rulers discourage any
parallel way of looking at things, which in my case means counting them. 

Amor: As far as I know you, my dear Arithmetica, you will never give up.
Every day, the efforts of deciphering the original creativity of Zeus and
his ancestors will bring up new details about the world, where your unerring
faculties are needed. The bipeds rejoice in thy works and bring you many
spectacles and offerings, I understand?

Arithmetica: Indeed, I am not without resources. Evading the intrusive
surveillance of my quadrivial masters, this maiden has imagined up her
beloved glitzy things, which she so much enjoyed arranging about during
chaste childhood, playing with the frolicking centaurs, naiads and nymphs.
To evade any malign attention, I have replaced the actual form of the
glitziness with a number, and only worked on the first few natural numbers.

Amor: Indeed, I have been hearing you muttering to yourself: 

Position ( (a,b), d, (b,a) ) = b * (b+1)/2 + a,

Position ( (a,b), d, (a,b) ) = d * (d+1)/2 – (d-a+1) * (d-a+2)/2 + (b-a+1)

the other day.

Arithmetica: That was the x,y coordinates on a plane of pairs (a,b) which
can have any of d degrees of glitziness. These coordinates can be grouped
into what is called cycles by lines that connect elements that change places
with each other in a sequence of push-aways. The concurrent running of
several cycles creates rhythms. This is pure arithmetic, no one can deny
that. Still, the Lords distrust the idea of order, as long as it comes from
ordering by one’s own free will. They learned well, how Poseidon orders
water, how Helios throws his bolts, but they would never think of sequencing
just for the sake of it, to see how far they get until they overdo it. They
do not believe that if you generate all of the possible alternatives, the
reasonable ones will turn up among these and will be recognised. The
a-priori relations that exist in the world, do have something to do with
order, or am I mistaken on this point? What mortal people don’t notice is
that you can stick axes into each other in a rectangular fashion and
completely valid Descartes spaces emerge, just on the glitzy properties of
the first 16 numbers. They haver a deep revulsion against considering
objects that are different to each other.

Amor: So, you can build rectangular spaces just from natural numbers? Just
by re-ordering them? You can demonstrate what is called gravitation by the
bipeds to be an implication of linear order (of the Peano axioms)?

Arithmetica: Now we come to the answer to the question you have started out
with. Can we foretell Future? Only the Gods can do that in a full sense, but
we are catching up. The problem is that my overlords, the Quadrivials, do
not like conflicts and unpredictable outcomes. As if an unpredictable
outcome would be on average any better or worse than a predictable one. It
is the subjective tension they do not like, and this is why they discourage
a relaxed, rational view of predictability.

Amor: Well, I was always an admirer of your countless fingers, tentacles and
other appendices that you can bend to a high number of distinct degrees
each, but do your arithmetic calculations allow me to foretell the number of
living births per woman between 15 and 45 years of age?

Arithmetica: That detail can be solved, once the Lords of Quadriviality
encourage the industrious bipeds to base their calculations on recurrences
and their predictability. The problem is, they officially have no concept
for a future: everything in classical logic happens in the moment; classical
logic is as such: timeless. They have to laboriously calculate around the
concept of cycles, because to use cycles as the basis of all calculations
would admit to the existence of alternatives. If alternatives a priori
exist, the whole edifice of classical logic turns out to be a special case,
riding the wave, surfing along a moment of truth, being in the air while
running in jumps.

Amor: This might be the curse by the descendants of Cheiron the wise
centaur. Being as well a horse and as well a man teaches one some insight
into biology and its relation to rational thinking. The Quadrivials have
decided that theirs is the rational way to determine the greenness of grass
and could not suffer Cheiron’s frequent intermissions: is maybe the grass
indeed greener the other side of the road? Before getting too much disturbed
in their picture of the world, they have eliminated Cheiron and all of his
folk. They could not stomach the common-sense approach a half-horse brings
to counting. He could argue his case as eloquently as he wanted. He was all
for predictability and a natural web of relationships among the parts of the
world. He could have argued to electrically powered Wittgenstein machines
for all the understanding and sympathy he got. They do not wish to be
engaged in ambiguities. That, what can be resolved by finding the one,
correct solution, that is quadrivial. That, what can be discussed, put in
different lights, can have several solutions, none of which is completely
right: this delineates a subject the quadrivials make a wide berth around.
Conflicts are trivial. Centaurs are creating conflicts, they are as such, in
themselves a conflict, so they get radically removed from the quadrivial
world. How will they now try to understand what makes centaurs function, let
alone reason? They were not able to understand that axiomatics begins with
axiom 1: there must be recurrent feeding. Till today, they burn holy weeds
in their offices if the word “recurrent” is uttered. These people are beyond
the point of no return. The divine retribution for the extermination of the
centaurs is presently taking place. Our ruling elite is unable to think it
terms of recurrent states of a set, because they have deep feelings of guilt
and emptiness for having expelled the animal spirits from their
reasoning-thinking part of the brain.

Arithmetica: Is it so, that fertility rates are sinking in those parts of
the world, where you induce pairing, depressive as you sound, Amor? Do not
paint my overlords in such a harsh light, my friend. Rigid they may appear,
but some of them are flexible and clever. Let me continue whispering in as
many ears as stand open, in the low voice of reason, that working on uniform
things during the day does not prohibit one from working with glitzy things,
in off time. Perhaps, some of the quadrivials do like engineering, puzzles
and the building of kaleidoscopes.  Do not give up hope yet, my beloved
Amor. So, we shall part for a time now, but we shall meet again. Your arrow
has touched me in my inner being, and our chaste meeting of minds has
resulted in the creation of a new baby girl, of which you are the father, my
beloved Amor.

(Enter young child, growing on stage into young woman)

Amor: Sacre bleu! A nice conversation about predictions turns out to be a
love affair, with consequences, and here she is, the consequence: one
maiden, quite becoming, who seems to be fully enjoying all feelings of
vibes. She is the fruit of our love? What a divine end to this story!

Arithmetica: Yes, your longings have awakened in my heart the desire to be a
well behaving daughter of Philosophia and, like my respected Mother, from
time to time to give birth to a baby Science. Please meet your sweet
daughter Rhythmonomia, who will help you and all bipeds to give different
names to different rhythms and make a great work of it, deriving much
pleasure from finding the correct answers to some of their questions. My
Quadrivial Lords will surely forgive me for getting impregnated by an idea,
once they see how pleasingly helpful Rhythmonomia will be in their everyday
household tasks or in their great campaigns to achieve intellectual
brilliancy.

(Exeunt)

 

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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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