[Fis] FIS discussions. Other Info Conundrums

[Pedro C. Marijuan]

Dear Ramon and colleagues (Karl, Jerry, Annette...)

Thanks for the excellent comment on entropy. It clarifies basic aspects 
of the abuse on the Second Law and entropy, particularly by 
nonphysicists. There is sort of a meta-knowledge, widely shared in this 
list, that the reliability of informational approaches has to be 
grounded on physics. If we look for informational properties of 
fermions, hadrons, electrons, atoms, periodic table, waves, etc. the 
inquiry is quite OK, for these are places where important info 
developments are occurring (e.g., from chemoinformation to quantum 
information science and to the new info interpretations of quantum 
mechanics). But, let me colorfully say, that if we visit other 
neighboring planets, that very physics has not generated much diversity 
around. Terrestrial life itself is what has created an amazing panorama 
of uncanny complexity around information. From cells to nervous systems 
to hyperconnected societies. I will mention just three major 
conundrums--with the spirit of enlarging the current discussion.

1. The informational view of the cell (unfortunately we are still not 
too far from Crick's Central Dogma).
2. The informational coupling between organisms and their environments 
via the electro-molecular processing of nervous systems ("meaning" 
culminating in consciousness.
3. The hypercommunication paradox (how mobiles and artificial social 
networks are creating dis-functionalities and havoc in contemporary 
societies--rather than the utopian "happiness"  promised).

It is unfortunate that we, scholars devoted to "information study", are 
not interested collectively in one of the biggest historical 
transformations--perhaps the biggest one-- taking place just in front of 
our eyes. As I often mention, we also need focused discussions --chaired 
ones-- in order to contemplate these alternative conundrums and not to 
automatically fall under the spell of "conundrum 0" of what is 
(physical) information. So, given that we have recently incorporated new 
organization into the list via IS4SI, let me reiterate the need of 
suggestions with potential themes/chairs for future focused discussions. 
Please send them publicly in the list or privately to me offline. Those 
new in the list may have a glance to the historical record of fis 
chaired discussions at: https://fis.sciforum.net/fis-discussion-sessions/
*And  very best greetings to Michel and the emerging FRENCH CHAPTER!! It 
is great that we count with further nucleus of organization. *I see just 
now their promising message...

Best regards to all,
--Pedro

PS. just in retrospect, I would ad the fourth informational conundrum on 
the"ecology of knowledge" (how disciplinary and individual limitations 
might be partially transcended via the never-ending combinatorics of 
knowledge).

El 23/10/2019 a las 14:58, GUEVARA ERRA RAMON MARIANO escribió:
> Dear all,
>
> I want to add a small comment about the units of entropy [this is 
> related to : "One aspect of Shannon information is that it requires 
> that the transmissible form of information be represented in terms of 
> bits and bytes.  Indeed, bits and bytes are the only permissible forms 
> of representation of Shannon information.  The units of Shannon 
> information are numeric of indefinite magnitude, are they not? As 
> numeric units, Shannon units are unbounded in scale and are unlimited 
> in scope.  This fact that Shannon information can represent unbounded 
> scales (magnitudes) is one key element of the wildly successful theory." ]
> I found that comment very interesting and I thought about the relation 
> with thermodynamics.
> Indeed, Gibbs (or Boltzmann ) entropy is related to Shannon entropy, 
> as it was shown by Landauer and others. They are actually 
> proportional. If this is the case, we can think of entropy as having 
> units as in S = k log N, the famous Boltzmann formula. The units are 
> J/K. It means that changes in information (actually erasing 
> information) leads to generation of heat. It is also interesting that 
> information depends on the scale used to calculate it. For example, we 
> can calculate the entropy in a DNA molecule in terms of its nucleotids 
> the same as we can calculate the entropy of an English text. But we 
> can also calculate the entropy at a smaller spatial scale, and they 
> are not the same. Actually entropy is ill defined even in statistical 
> mechanics, where we need to know the size of the cells in phase space. 
> If I remember well this gives an infinite amount of entropy for an 
> ideal gas. But then we consider cells given by the quantum mechanical 
> uncertainty in phase space (dp dx proportional to Planck constant h 
> for one dimension) and entropy becomes finite.
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 4:19 PM Karl Javorszky 
> <karl.javorszky at gmail.com <mailto:karl.javorszky at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     This is Part Two of the Letter to Jerry ("Shannon and the Tautomat")
>
>     /Does the same hypothesis, the same critical concept, apply to the
>     neighboring concept of real scientific information, that is, the
>     natural forms of scientific information as used by working
>     scientists (physicists, engineers, chemists, biologists,
>     physicians, ecologists, and other specialists)? Is this a
>     conundrum? Or, it merely a matter of "getting the physics right”?/
>
>     In the last few generations I had the enjoyment to watch, there
>     was a movement to the
>
>     subjectification of reality. There is less talk nowadays about the
>     Principle to which one has to subject himself. If the Great Idea,
>     which is independent of today’s small despairs and hopes, goes
>     through dead bodies to show us its supreme merits, it is received
>     with more suspicion than in my parents’ and grandparents’ times.
>     Similarly, it used to be that Physics rules supreme. After the
>     discoveries of the last centuries, it was natural that the
>     measuring scientists believed they had figured out the answers. in
>     actual fact, it seems, Physics is subject to Mathematics is
>     subject to Logic is subject to Philosophy is subject to Physiology
>     is subject to Regulation Theory (formerly known as Theology). No,
>     unfortunately, it is now the theory of Physics that has to
>     re-adjust to the facts coming from life sciences, just like these
>     had to give up long-held dogmata after being repeatedly shown
>     facts of evidence. The table has turned now. The fact is that you
>     cannot procreate unless some circumstances are ideal. The
>     requirements of maintaining an ideal surrounding leads to
>     requirements relating to ordered changes in the environment (that
>     the changes that come – e.g. by tide and daylight rhythms – will
>     happen in an ordered way, where all the rules that come from /a=a
>     /are observed) and that the elements are complying with the
>     changes in the surrounding environment. Therefore the surrounding
>     environment has to be made up such that it obeys laws that govern
>     well ordered assemblies that undergo changes. Sorting pictures the
>     ranking of elements of a set according to a property (e.g. being
>     well prepared for cold/drought/predators, etc.)
>
>     Sorting things around and reordering them again, and watching the
>     patterns they make as they follow the rules of combinatorics, one
>     discovers that whatever small thing it is that consists of two
>     parts, in an idealised assembly, under external influences the
>     elements will group up, spontaneously, because it is in their
>     nature to react so. Please watch the exciting life of elements of
>     a set while being reordered. One can educate himself massively on
>     the subject of ‘order’ by playing with his tautomat. Like playing
>     with a general version of the Rubik cube.
>
>     Had our culture allowed concepts of individuality of elements as
>     the basis of Logic and therefore of Arithmetic and all her
>     descendants, we would live in a different society. It could not
>     have happened before our times anyway, because one needs computers
>     to delineate and concretise the concepts that we discuss. We have
>     now the technical means to sing about the heroics of the little
>     individual Dinge an sich; what we need now is the inner permission
>     to be curious. Some songs will sound familiar to professionals:
>     there are charms, up and down jumpers, spinners, bosoms, muons and
>     some more. The individual Dinge are quite flexible: in dependence
>     of external influences, they will match up with distinctly
>     separate gangs of other individual Dinge, therefore taking part in
>     several great adventures. The problem is that you do not need to
>     excavate a huge circular tunnel with the circumference of a great
>     number of kilometres, so a small city’s worth of well-paid
>     professionals will not earn their bread, once people say, well one
>     can figure that out much cheaper! Bring me /n/ urns and /n/ balls,
>     /d /colors, some robots and a few scribes and you will see what
>     particles build up a unit (the term /particle /in itself is an
>     authoritarian one, imposing identity on the object named by
>     suggesting it is a part, a small one, of a greater Ding. It is
>     otherwise: the greater is built up of the parts, not the smaller
>     gets created by misadventures of the Whole. Let us stay with Kant,
>     it is the Ding an sich, but now, ready for a spin out in the
>     world, painted in two colors. These coloured things team up for
>     some moments for some tasks, and some of them stay together for
>     very long, but the world is not a collection of fragments of a
>     broken Ultimate Whole.)
>
>     /By the way, I would argue that the clarity of the status of
>     matter, i.e., the chemical table of elements and their
>     compositions, augmented by a huge range of physical measurements
>     that span variables from all physical units of measure, is vastly
>     clearer than any theory of physics./
>
>     /Does not the theory of wave mechanics emanate from the physics of
>     atoms and composites? Or, shall we simply agree that the
>     relationships from between physical theories form a “which came
>     first, the chicken or the egg?”;//“The union of units unite the
>     unity."///
>
>     The chemical elements are logical archetypes. That they exist and
>     that they have such characteristics, which allow them to be
>     grouped in several ways into types, is beyond any question. They
>     are part of the setup.
>
>     Let us discuss a large warehouse with many items that are subject
>     to seasonal fluctuations of demand. The inner logistics of the
>     warehouse has to keep up with optimising the retrieval costs by
>     re-arranging the contents such that the most often sold product
>     shall be the closest to the packaging area. Now we state two
>     hypothesises: 1) if the warehouse is not optimised, pileups,
>     traffic jams, are to be expected among delivery boys fetching the
>     merchandise, 2) the actions of optimising the warehouse contribute
>     to the inner traffic of the warehouse, and by that means cause
>     pileups, traffic jams, are to be expected among delivery boys
>     fetching the merchandise. The quantity and the quality (type,
>     constituents) of the pileups will differ, but pileups will come
>     into existence. Some points in space are more sought after than
>     other points (entrance and exit of the warehouse). The pileups are
>     distinguishable. These are what is called chemical elements. We
>     are playing presently with interference patterns coming from the
>     two differing sub-segments of the common space, but arranging
>     playing-card type pictures of triangles intersecting each other is
>     a very time-consuming hobby. Anyone interested in naturally
>     generated hiccups and pileups in theoretical space?
>
>     Now the time has come to go beyond answering your questions and
>     offering a concept which can clarify the relation between the
>     special case (Shannon) and the general system. This relates to the
>     sadly neglected topic of the cuts.
>
>     As we have learnt that 5 is 1+1+1+1+1, we have seen this
>     demonstrated on the number line, with cuts creating the unit
>     distances. Then we have learnt that 2+3=5. We have seen two and
>     then three units placed alongside each other and we have counted
>     that these are indeed five. What we neglected to ask, is the
>     following: what happened to that noble and valiant Cut of the
>     Second Class that formerly separated the Two from the Three? Had
>     it been demoted to a simple, unimportant, common Cut First Class?
>     Does this little inexactitude not come back and hunt us as a
>     mysterious vanity of Nature?
>
>     Shannon keeps the deep silence of one who has ridden roughshod
>     across the Society of Cuts. Not so us.
>
>     We account for the cuts very exactly, because it is them who
>     determine the structure of the set. If you have a Cut of Class
>     {(2,(7,4,3),/insert funny notation here/, etc. } (that is a cut
>     that separates two from among seven of which 4 are in 1 more group
>     and 3 in 2 more groups) being different from a Cut of Class
>     {8,(11,7,0,5)}, then you can keep count of the cuts and keeping
>     count of the states of the set is more or less superfluous. If you
>     have a usual distribution of the types of cuts, then the actual
>     measurement (experience) can be compared to that, on the level of
>     the messages about cuts, which more or less exactly describes the
>     state of the set. The additional advantage of bookkeeping the cuts
>     is that they translate into First Class cuts, if the need arises
>     to become linearised. If we play with 136 puppets (as is the most
>     reasonable way to do), Shannon has 136 cuts that are all alike.
>     The tautomat generates a varied diversity of cuts that are a
>     description of the set’s state. If we match each state of the
>     tautomat to one of the states of Shannon, we see that in the
>     intervals 1-32 and 97-135ff Shannon has more alternatives to carry
>     messages expressed by the state of the set that numbers /n/
>     elements. Within the range of 33-96 however, with a peak at 67, up
>     to 3.4 times more alternatives are there for the state to have
>     states in its form (reading) as a complete assembly than as a
>     sequenced collection of elements.
>
>     Information is a description of the remaining alternatives. The
>     remaining alternatives do not exist in this moment /they remain/.
>     This is the reason the birth of the concept is so much of endless
>     pain and futile efforts. In logic it is strictly forbidden to talk
>     about things that do not exist. Maybe one can help with the idea
>     that we talk about the cuts, because the cuts do exist. Their
>     biodiversity has not been addressed yet. The cuts appear to be the
>     origami mechanism that unfolds from a linear order into an
>     elaborate composition.
>
>     The last point is a reassuring thought: we already do have a very
>     detailed table of all possible collections of cuts – of group
>     boundaries – which come from the elements’ belonging-to to cycles.
>     It looks promising to investigate, how the collection of cuts does
>     not change if the set is linearised. It appears that the cuts are
>     the actual carriers of information, as they detail, which
>     alternatives remain, and this independently of linear or spatial
>     neighbourhood.
>
>     Thank you for addressing by your questions some interesting topics.
>
>     Karl
>

-- 
-------------------------------------------------
Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group

pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
-------------------------------------------------



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