[Fis] New Perspectives. Reply to Bruno's. Inverse Phenomenology

Tue Jun 18 10:06:16 CEST 2019

Dear Bruno and All,

As a way of positioning Bruno’s theory, I suggest that it is a kind of
inverse phenomenology. In standard phenomenology, one starts with phenomena
and places them in a framework of interpretation. In his Digital Mechanism,
Bruno starts with a mathematical framework, (to which he ascribes
ontological properties), and comes out with the phenomena, or some of them.

If there is – also – some dynamic, material principle underlying what we
perceive and what we are, Digital Mechanism should also generate it. If it
does not, then DM may not be wrong, but it is incomplete, and a careful
reading of Bruno would appear (sic) to permit this.

We all look for theories, at some time in our lives or another, that will
‘carry us’ from one side of existence to the other. Bruno – your best
statements come at the send of your note. 

“I hesitate to make my point, because it is of no use in any direct
applications. It concerns more the afterlife than life per se.” I then would
be very glad if, as a candidate for the ‘other part of the story’, you would
look at my logical phenomenology. Logic in Reality addresses life per se,
and I claim it is of substantial use in direct applications, last but not
least informational processes. You say further: “nature confirms all this
(which again is not an argument for saying it has to be true, of course) and
can be helpful to get rid of the reductionist 19th century conception of
numbers and machines”. It thus would be ridiculous to say that nature is
limited by the one function you attribute to her here. As long as you are
not saying that man _is_, or is only, a machine, there is room for
discussion.

Best,

Joseph

  _____  

From: Fis [mailto:fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Bruno Marchal
Sent: lundi, 17 juin 2019 13:12
To: fis
Subject: Re: [Fis] New Perspectives. Reply to Bruno's Reply to Stan

Dear Gordana,

I will try to answer your questions. It is not easy, because this belongs to
a very hot subject, and what I say is based on counter-intuitive, and not
very well known, results in mathematical logic, which is not very well
taught, if taught at all.

Note also that I am using the Digital Mechanist hypothesis as a working
hypothesis. I never claim that it is true, and my work has only shown that
it is testable, but eventually I can conclude that the experimental
evidences favours this hypothesis.

On 14 Jun 2019, at 06:45, Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic
<gordana.dodig-crnkovic at mdh.se> wrote:

I have a few questions to your answers and would be happy if you can help me
to understand.

Here they come, following formulations from your mail.

“This seems to assume some primary natural reality, isn’t it?”

Q: What is meant by “primary natural reality”? 

1. If it refers to the EXISTENCE OF THE EXTERNAL/INTERNAL NATURAL WORLD, I
think this is the most reasonable hypothesis to start with:

The world/nature EXISTS. It is the fundamental assumption of all sciences
which are our best present knowledge about the world.

Otherwise, if the world does not EXIST, we can conclude any discussion about
it.

So, this might already be in conflict with the Digital Mechanist hypothesis
(simply called Mechanism hereafter). I will come to that hypothesis later.
What I will say is derived in that theory.

We do agree that the physical-world/nature EXISTS. But with Mechanism, this
is no more something that we have to assume, its existence has to become a
theorem in the Mechanist theory. The physical reality does not disappear,
but its existence becomes phenomenological, and physics get reduced to
arithmetic, a bit like today most scientists would agree that chemistry is
in principle reducible to quantum physics, if we abstract from the level of
organisation. 

By Mechanism (Digital Mechanism) I mean the assumption that there is a level
of description of my brain, or body, possibly including a finite part of the
environment, such that a digital emulation of my body made at that
description level would not change my first person conscious experience. 

Mechanism is the belief that no organ in my body can’t be replaced by an
artificial prosthesis, and in particular, that we would survive, in the
clinical usual sense, with an artificial brain. Now, the level can be as
much low as we want, like copying the brain at the level of the quantum
field description, using the standard model of the particles, and using as
many decimals as needed as long as it is a finite number.

Mechanism implies that physics has to be recovered from a statistics on
(pure) partially computable number relations, and this will lead to the fact
that neither matter nor consciousness are Turing emulable, contrary to a
widespread confusion. Somehow, if “I” am a machine, everything else cannot
be a machine.

Eventually, mechanism makes very elementary arithmetic into the theory of
everything, but any Turing-complete (rich enough to define the notion of
computation) theory can be used. Indeed, physics becomes independent of the
ontological theory: they all lead to the same physics.

So, to answer your question: YES, the physical reality exists. But NO, it is
not primary, which means that we don’t have to assume a natural world, we
have to explain its appearance from a theory of consciousness or from some
“theology”, in the pre-christian sense of the word. Today’s theology is
still in the hands of institutions which practice the argument of authority,
which is invalid with the scientific method.

What many people ignore is that the discovery of computation and
computability has been done by mathematician, and those notion have been
shown to be even *arithmetical*. A computer is an implementation in the
physical reality of a universal machine, which is an object already
implemented in all universal environment just through natural number
relations. 

A universal machine cannot distinguish a physical computations from an
arithmetical one, by introspection, and that enforce us to explain why the
physical laws must be reduced to a statistics on "number's dreams” in
arithmetic. This leads quickly to some “many-world” interpretation of
elementary arithmetic, and it is testable by comparing the mathematics of
that many-worlds, or better “many-histories” interpretation of arithmetic
(or Turing equivalent) with the observations.

2. The other question is HOW that EXISTENCE of the world outside/inside
cognitive agents presents itself or unfolds in an agent in the interaction
with the world.

That is the question of UMWELT, and the construction of knowledge through
information processing. (Natural information processing = natural
computation.)

As a consequence of above, the natural computation emerges from the
arithmetical computations. (I assume Mechanism all along).

The “primary natural reality” reflects itself in a myriad of local
“realities” in cognizing agents. As we know from empirical observations,
even though existence of the world induces various information processes in
various agents, communities of agents are typically sharing common
“languages” about that “primary natural reality”.

Yes. If Mechanism would lead to solipsism, that would be enough for me to
abandon it. Fortunately, the universal machine discourse explains already
why some dreams get very long and sharable among population of universal
machine/numbers.

That is true for bacterial as well as for human communities. 

Note that I discovered computer science in molecular biology books. I would
have become a biologist if I did not discover that the conceptual
explanation of reproduction (which fascinated me in biology) was already
implemented in the arithmetical reality. 

After Gödel, we know that this is not a reductionist view, as such a reality
is beyond all possible effective theories. Here, sometimes people confuse
the arithmetical reality and the theories we built to put some light on that
reality. 

Languages reflect our ability to collectively navigate “primary natural
reality” and share common references. So much so that we are able to
commonly build a new semantic layer, that is human culture, upon that
“primary natural reality”.

Why primary? I am OK with what you say here, except that what you call
“primary natural reality” is no more primary. It is already a sort of
unavoidable social cultural building by the universal numbers in arithmetic.

The logical dependency is like this:

NUMBERS => CONSCIOUSNESS => PHYSICAL-REALITY => HUMAN-CONSCIOUSNESS

The arithmetical structure, which follows from the definition of addition
and multiplication, determine a consciousness flux which differentiate
itself in arithmetic, and the natural world appearance emerges from the
first person (singular and plural) view of the universal numbers.

Consciousness can be quasi-axiomatically defined by

True,

Indubitable,

Immediate,

Non provable,

Non definable

+ (with Mechanism) invariant for some digital functional substitution made
at some description level.

“As I have shown, this requires a non computationalist theory of mind, which
seems to me to be highly speculative.”

Q: Why would that follow from the EXISTENCE of the world? What kind of
phenomenon is that “computation” which minds perform? Is it the Turing model
of discrete sequential symbol manipulation – calculation of mathematical
function? 

Yes. I sum up often Mechanism by “Yes Doctor + Church’s thesis”. The notion
of computations is the one discovered by many people like Emil Post, Alan
Turing, Alonzo Church. Gödel discovered it implicitly, and already show it
to be an arithmetical notion. He missed the Church-Turing thesis though, and
the consequence of mechanism.

Computations exists like prime number exists. The physical reality is
secondary, and physics is in principle reduced to very elementary
arithmetic. 

It may at best describe linguistic part of the mind.

This is described in the mind of the universal machine/number.
Interestingly, they can only describe a part of this. Many arithmetical
truth concerning those machine are extra-linguistic, and does not admit any
third person description. They are not definable.

The universal numbers/machine can be shown to have a soul (in Plato’s sense,
not Aristotle’s sense), and the universal numbers, in particular also those
implemented in the physical reality, already knows that they have a soul,
and that their soul are NOT a machine, nor anything describable in third
person term. It is more like the meaning, and like the syntax.

In fact, a universal machine can refute all complete effective theories that
we may use to study them. The universal machine is born universal dissident.
They break down all reductionist conception of themselves.

After Gödel and Tarski, we know that most of the arithmetical reality will
be unprovable by any machine, but a part of that non provable reality is
still experienceable and knowable by other (tag provability) diverse means. 

But mind as a natural process is both data-based (even continuous data) 

OK. Mechanism proves the necessary existence of at least one continuous
observable, even of a non computable one.

and symbol based. Not Turing computable in it entirety, 

OK. Mechanism makes both consciousness and matter NON computable. That is
why your approach is interesting in practice, probably even necessary. With
Mechanism, only the assumption of primaries  would be wrong. In arithmetic,
The machines are confronted all the time to a non entirely computable
reality. The machines are themselves only partial computable, and most of
the arithmetical reality is highly not computable, and plays a role in the
development of mind.

but “naturally computable” i.e. the result of natural information processing
performed by living embodied minds.

I use computable in the mathematical sense of Church and Turing. I would use
here “naturally experienceable”, or “naturally manageable” or something. I
am aware of many attempt to define different sort of computations, but they
have no corresponding “Church’s thesis”, and usually, they are Turing
emulable, or they use non computable elements that it is simpler to recover
from the first person indeterminacy imposed by incompleteness to all
machines. If not, it looks like assuming something just to add
complications, when the complications is already there.

“I am not sure we can avoid the mind-body problem in a philosophy of
information context.”

Q: Why? Natural information processes in living organisms seem to me as the
best way to bridge the mind-body chasm. Mind is a result of a complex
network of networks of information processes going on in a cognizing agent.
That process is implemented in their bodies as a material substrate that is
self-organized structure growth from that “primary natural reality”. There
is no contradiction between the morphology (shape, structure, material) of
an organism and its functions (processes performed by that morphology. At
least those organisms who have nervous systems capable of representing their
bodies and their relationships to their environments can be seen as
possessing intrinsic “self-models” or simply having “self” or “mind”. That
“mind” is the result of the relationships of its subsystems that constitute
that “self”, that process which for an organism makes a distinction between
the “self” vs. the world and the relationships between the two.

Mind is a process, matter is its substrate on which the process is going on.
Those are inseparable in a living organism. In-formation has it roots in the
concept of formation (of a material substrate). Matter and form are two
aspects of the same reality. It is not a problem, it is a way how we
conceptualize the world, in order to manage its complexity.

With mechanism, mind is a process. OK. But there is no substrate. That is a
necessary collective hallucination coming from the differentiation of
consciousness in arithmetic. 

This is admittedly counter-intuitive/ There is no ontological/primary space,
nor time, nor particles, nor energy, nor waves, etc. But the conscious
appearance of this can be explained, in a precise way enough to be tested
(and thanks to quantum mechanics, which I predicted before realising that
the physicists were already there, we get confirmations of this).

With Mechanism we are back at Pythagorus. There is only numbers and the only
laws are addition and multiplication. With this we can define computations,
and the appearance of ontological/primary space, time, particles, energy,
waves, 
 is explained by the theory of machine’s consciousness.

“There are no evidences for physicalism or for a physical primary reality,
nor are there evidences for a non computationalist theory of mind.”

Q: What is meant with “physicalism” here?

Wikipedia offers two different definitions,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism according to which

Physicalism is the  <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical>
metaphysical thesis assuming that

a) "everything is physical", that there is "nothing over and above" the
physical, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism#cite_note-1> [1] or 

b) that everything  <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervenience> supervenes
on the physical.[2]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism#cite_note-DStoljar-2>  

Those are two very different proposals. The first one is obviously false, as
it negates all the emergent levels of organization of the world above
physics.

I agree.

With mechanism, the physical level is itself an emergent level of
organisation above arithmetic. Nature is no more primary in the sense that
we can explain it without an ontological commitment in some physical
universe. 

It is not exactly like a dream, but like infinitely many dreams
statistically interfering.

The second one depends on what is meant by “supervenience”. If it means that
higher levels of organization of matter-energy emerge from the lower ones
bringing completely new properties, it is in perfect agreement with what
sciences today say about the world and how they model the world.*

Molecules are made of atoms but bring completely new possibilities of
structures, processes and interactions. Biology is more than chemistry for
the same reason. 

Yes, but with mechanism, physicalism is false in the sense that the physical
reality is due to a psychological phenomenon. A very precise one, which
should give the laws of physics, so we can test empirically Mechanism, and
the test made until today confirms mechanism. That does not prove it to be
true, of course.

Q: What would be “a physical primary reality”?

Am I wrong if I imagine that I cannot go out of this room through its walls?
Does not that mean that there is “a physical primary reality” that stops me
from doing so, no matter how much I wish and try?

Not really. In most of my dreams, I cannot go through wall too. It just
means that there is wall, and that we cannot go through. It does not mean
that a wall really exist, just that some dreams are lawful, and this is what
mechanism show to exist statistically.

Note that with both Digital Mechanism, and quantum physics, we can go
through wall (!), but the probability of that event is shown, in quantum
physics, to be very rare for massive object, and yet common for very small
object. That is used in the miniaturisation of the transistor, which makes
up the physical computer around us.

“Of course some people confuse the evidences for physical laws with
evidences that such laws are primary, but that is just because they
“believe” in some natural world to begin with.”

Q: What is primary? Indeed, physical laws are not primary, in the sense of
eternal and unchangeable, as they evolve with the universe*. 

I am not sure if many physicist would agree with this. I don’t know a
physical laws which would have evolved, except in speculative theory used to
explain the big-bang. With mechanism, the laws of physics becomes eternal
and unchangeable laws derivable from their theology/psychology/biology,
which are themselves eternal and unchangeable, given that they belong to
arithmetic/computer science. The only things which change are the indexical
notion, like here and now, or me and you, which are related to interval view
of arithmetic from arithmetic. 

Physicalism is mainly the idea that there is an ontological physical
universe, and that the fundamental laws on which everything supervene are
the physical law. With Mechanism this can be shown leading to contradiction,
en eventually we need to derive the physical laws from number
psychology/theology. Then incompleteness provides the tools for doing this,
and to make the testing. Mechanism makes metaphysics into a science, even an
experimental science.

Primary is the EXISTENCE of the world that we all share and experience.

That remains correct if by world you mean the (standard) arithmetical
reality. The physical world is an emergent organisation coming from the (non
trivial and irreducible) arithmetic, taken in its after-Gödel understanding.

Many people agree that Gödel’s theorem kills the reductionist conception of
man and mathematics, but it kills already the reductionist conception on
natural numbers and machines.

Mechanism leads to a sort of fictionalism for analysis, set theory and
physics. A physical universe becomes a convenient fiction invented by the
numbers to figure out what they are, somehow. 

It presents itself in both fluid, intrinsic ways (subjective feelings and
emotions) and crisp, well defined inter-subjective forms (as in sciences,
logics, mathematics).

OK. But with mechanism, the physical somehow arise from the natural or
canonical inter-subjective agreement between all universal machines/number.

To help a bit, I always fix one universal system in my head, say the
programming language LISP. Then we can enumerate all machines (Lisp
program), by length order, and by alphabetical order for those having the
same length. This permits the enumeration of all partial computable
functions (which include the total one, defined on all numbers). I identify
a machine with its number in that enumeration (like we can identify a
vectors with its coordinate once we have chosen a basis in linear algebra).

“We can’t have both Mechanism in cognitive science, and materialism, or just
physicalism, in the “natural science”. That has been shown logically
inconsistent.”

It depends on the choice of “mechanism”, “cognitive science”
(classical-computationalist disembodied or contemporary EEEE models of
cognition), along with the kind of “physicalism” assumed, and even the
choice of “natural sciences” to support your thesis. In the paper below (*)
I argue, for a given choice of all those terms and with heavy reliance on
the contemporary scientific knowledge, that computational mind is not only
(naturally) compatible but essentially dependent on its physical substrate
on succession of levels of organization. 

That is true for the human mind. And it is important for the human
application. But with mechanism, eventually, we get very close to de
Chardin, when he says that we are not humans having spiritual existence, but
we are spiritual beings having a human existence. We are not human thinking
about numbers, but we are numbers thinking about humans.

Q: If we have such model in which “mechanisms” of information processing
(natural computation in the framework of computing nature) from the lowest
levels of exchanges between elementary particles to the highest levels of
exchanges among people of symbolic structures and artifacts, wouldn’t that
constitute a counter-example to the claim that mind and body have nothing to
do with each other ? (**)

With Mechanism, we have the curious, non Aristotelian, consequences that
bodies are constructs of the mind, but also a result of the fact that we
don’t know which computations, among an infinities in arithmetic, supports
us. 

A material reality, with some primitive substrate, is unable to select a
computation from the infinitely many computations going through our state in
arithmetic. That would require an added non computational ability to the
brain or to the particles, or whatever we assume to be physically primary.

But the overall picture is the same, except that the physical supervene of
the number theology which supervene on elementary arithmetic.

It is not necessarily a pleasant theory, as we can no more die in this
theory, consciousness becomes a sort of inescapable prison, and arithmetic,
if it contains some paradise, contains also some hell, etc. What is nice, is
that it is a vaccine against reductionism of both man and machine.

I hope this helps. I refer to my papers for the proof of the assertions, and
the description of why we can say that most of current physics favours
mechanism on naturalism. With the important understanding that this does not
mean that nature does not exist or is not important. It is only not
primarily real.

Like I say above, we get:

NUMBERS => CONSCIOUSNESS => PHYSICAL-REALITY => HUMAN-CONSCIOUSNESS

Many posts in this list plays on the 

PHYSICAL-REALITY => HUMAN-CONSCIOUSNESS,

part, where I have no critics. But sometimes some people seems to conclude
that digital machine, à-la Church and Turing cannot be subject of private
conscious experience, which is a string assumption, and indeed it is needed
to have a primary reality. I prefer to remain open to Mechanism, and which
case, that part going from the physical reality to the human consciousness
is itself a consequence of us being universal number, borrowing the
consciousness common to all universal machine, which is also the
consciousness we should come back in some state of sleep, and plausibly
after the death of the biological body.

I hoping this is not too much shocking. Please ask any question if something
is not clear. I do agree with many important points made in this list by
diverse people, but sometimes, some comments are presented like if it was in
contradiction with Digital Mechanism, when in fact they are confirming long
term prediction I derived  from it. I hesitate to make my point, because it
is of no use in any direct applications. It concerns more the afterlife than
life per se. But as it predicts the very weird quantum computing notion,I
tend to think that nature confirms all this (which again is not an argument
for saying it has to be true, of course) and can be helpful to get rid of
the reductionist 19th century conception of numbers and machines. 

Kind Regards,

Bruno

Gordana

*
<http://www.gordana.se/work/PUBLICATIONS-files/2019-Laws%20of%20Science%20as
%20Laws%20of%20Nature.pdf>
http://www.gordana.se/work/PUBLICATIONS-files/2019-Laws%20of%20Science%20as%
20Laws%20of%20Nature.pdf 

** No model or framework can explain everything about the world (including
humans) at the same time, but info-computational approach can be used to
model some interesting aspects of the mind emergent from, in interaction
with its matter/energy substrate.

From: Fis <fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es> on behalf of Bruno Marchal
<marchal at ulb.ac.be>
Date: Thursday, 13 June 2019 at 15:11
To: fis <fis at listas.unizar.es>
Subject: Re: [Fis] New Perspectives. Reply to Stan

Joseph, 

On 12 Jun 2019, at 16:40, Joseph Brenner <joe.brenner at bluewin.ch> wrote:

Stan,

Thank you for your question. I reply with a modified excerpt from an article
in Philosophies. The full article is Open Access. I am indebted to Rafael
Capurro for part of this formulation. Comments welcome.

Best wishes,

Joseph

Natural Philosophy: Excerpt from Brenner, J. 2018. The Naturalization of
Natural Philosophy. Philosophies 2018 3, 41.

Natural Philosophy deals with the question of nature as a whole stated by
beings (ourselves) that find themselves in nature without having the
possibility of a holistic view, being ourselves in nature and not beyond it.
The fact that we are able to ask this question means that we have some kind
of pre-knowledge about nature as a whole while at the same time this
pre-knowledge is problematic, otherwise we would not ask the question and
would not be able to become natural philosophers.

The question then changes to the difference between nature and reality as a
whole, including fictions, non-verifiable beliefs and intangible objects of
thought. Since the idea that classical Natural Philosophy evolved into
science  seems  correct,  we  are  left,  for  the  domain  of  Natural
Philosophy, with only a speculative interpretation of nature viewed in its
entirety. This interpretation is, ipso facto, at a lower ontological level
than the science which has largely replaced it. Much of the 20th Century
linguistic turn, expressed in both analytical and phenomenological and
residual transcendental traditions, is well visible in contemporary
philosophy.

The reaction to this unsatisfactory state of affairs has been the
reinstatement of realisms and materialisms of various kinds, associated
today with the names of Derrida, Badiou, Zizek, and others. The ‘ontological
turn’ in philosophy is a term of art that designates dissatisfaction with
descriptions of reality based on analytical, semantic criteria of truth.
Starting with Heidegger’s critique of hermeneutics and the basing of
philosophy on human life, the ontological turn is a challenge to neo-Kantian
epistemologies, and looks to what the structure of the world might be like
to enable scientific, that is, non-absolute knowledge. Unfortunately,
ontological theories have been hobbled by the retention of static terms
whose characteristics are determined by bivalent logic. In 2002, Priest
suggested that such an ontological turn in philosophy was taking place, away
from language in the direction of an contradictorial view of reality. Priest
proposed paraconsistent logic as appropriate to this turn, but his system
suffers from the epistemological limitations of paraconsistency. Lupasco, on
the other hand, anticipated the ontological turn by some 60 years. (In the
complete article, I show that his logical system can be used to
differentiate between Natural Philosophy and Philosophy tout court.)

The most important point for me is that Natural Philosophy tells us
something real about the world that is consistent with our best science,
physical, biological and cognitive. Speculative philosophy can always
re-illuminate ‘eternal’ questions such as what it means to be a thinking
being in a non-thinking environment. This non-Natural Philosophy, to repeat,
exists for ‘natural’ reasons: it is a natural necessity for human beings to
create it, by a natural process, but it is not part of nature qua content. 

This seems to assume some primary natural reality, isn’t it?

As I have shown, this requires a non computationalist theory of mind, which
seems to me to be highly speculative.

I am not sure we can avoid the mind-body problem in a philosophy of
information context. 

There are no evidences for physicalism or for a physical primary reality,
nor are there evidences for a non computationalist theory of mind. Of course
some people confuse the evidences for physical laws with evidences that such
laws are primary, but that is just because they “believes” in some natural
world to begin with. I think it is better to be agnostic and see where the
facts (experimental) and working theories lead us.

We can’t have both Mechanism in cognitive science, and materialism, or just
physicalism, in the “natural science”. That has been shown logically
inconsistent (ask for reference if interested).

Bruno

  _____  

From: Fis [mailto:fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Stanley N
Salthe
Sent: mardi, 11 juin 2019 21:09
To: fis
Subject: Re: [Fis] New Perspectives

Joseph -- Would you like to write how you define Natural Philosophy?

STAN

On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 12:03 PM Joseph Brenner <joe.brenner at bluewin.ch>
wrote:

Dear Pedro and All,

Many thanks are due to you, Pedro, for this new and valuable formulation of
the – daunting - task at hand. The task is logical and philosophical, as
well as scientific. Philosophy here, exemplified by the Philosophy of
Information, does not mean standard discussions of ‘where did we come from’
and ‘does a transcendent deity exist’, which are as sterile in their way as
the excesses of the IT and AI ideologists. Natural Philosophy can be a
‘vehicle’ for interaction between people of good will, the collaboration
that you point to that may help to advance IS4SI. Some of you who may not
have been at the Conference in San Francisco (Berkeley) may wish to look at
abstracts of papers from the Philosophy of Information sub-conferences at
the 2015, 2017 and 2019 Summit conferences on Information.

To revitalize the list is indeed a key first step. But it starts, in my
opinion, with some self-examination, examination of whether one’s own
theories are just ‘pet’ theories. Applying this criterion to my own Logic in
Reality, about which I have written on several occasions, I claim that it is
not just a pet theory. It is a new perspective on how information, logic and
thought operate as real processes, following laws within the laws of
physics, without loss of a human, ethical dimension. However, LIR makes many
demands on one. It requires an understanding and acceptance of what is /not/
Natural Philosophy, which may include some of the ideas that have appeared
in this list.   

Again, accepting my own criterion of interactive non-separability, I do not
call for any exclusions or limitations on the list. I only wish that
everyone makes the necessary effort to position his or her own views in
relation to the overriding need for furthering the Common Good. The sum of
all such honest self-referential (or second-order recursive) opinions of
people about their own work would itself be a useful creative effort, I
think.

Thank you and best wishes,

Joseph 

-----Original Message-----
From: Fis [mailto:fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Pedro C.
Marijuan
Sent: mardi, 11 juin 2019 13:05
To: 'fis'
Subject: [Fis] New Perspectives

Dear FIS Colleagues,

A few days ago took place the IS4SI Meeting, in SFco, with one of the 

parallel sessions devoted to FIS and other sessions also with presence 

of veteran parties of this list. Relevant speakers in the plenary 

sessions covered the main topic of the conference, expressed as: Where 

is the I in Artificial Intelligence and the Meaning in Information? From 

Tristan Harris to Melanie Mitchell, to Paul Verschure, etc.

In my view the perspectives in these IT fields are changing 

significantly. The tremendous hype in AI, Deep Learning, IOT, etc. keeps 

unabated, but critical voices are being heard, not just from a few 

Academia corners as usual, but now by leading technologists and 

researchers of big companies in these very fields. "Dissent" on the 

contents, methodologies, and consequences of social applications is growing.

The industrial development of this IT sector --notwithstanding the 

inflated proclamations and all the hype of the gurus-- does not mean the 

arrival of some great singularity, or the symbiosis with machines, or 

widespread menace of robots & cyborgs... these are slogans coming from 

the industrialists to maintain social/ideological preeminence for their 

whole sector. Rather I think they are starting to feel the consequences 

of their social overstretching in different ways.

The fundamental point, in my opinion, is that our solitary, isolated 

efforts from a few Academia places (Sciences & Humanities) in the quest 

for new perspectives in Information Science, and not just AI 

development, should not isolated any more. We can now establish an 

interesting dialog and partnership with those new "dissenters" of the 

technology in its concepts, methods, and social applications. It is upon 

us to improve the discussion procedures, the collaborations, the 

organization, etc. so that this opportunity might materialize 

progressively. Do not ask me how... In any case I pointed out three 

future directions for IS4SI advancement: community building, attracting 

scientific/technological avantgarde, and organizational improvement.

Revitalizing this discussion list--shouldn't it be one of the first steps?

Best greetings to all,

--Pedro

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

Pedro C. Marijuán

Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group

pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es

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