[Fis] Ecology of the social mind
Eric Werner
eric.werner at oarf.org
Fri Feb 16 16:16:02 CET 2024
Ecology of the social mind
Dear All,
Last night I had a vivid dream;
I am flying high above looking down at a man riding his bike through a
vast expanse of shallow water interspersed by small islets of bushes. It
was some place in Asia.
He rides quickly through shallow water. The water is clear with a
sandy bottom with a sea plants scattered here and there.
He is a fisherman who is collecting the fish he has caught at different
places or nests where he has placed his hooks on twine.
At one of these nests of fish I stood in the water and looked at the
fish he has caught. The fish are less than a foot long, colored green,
red and yellow. Three fish swimming slowly in circles. They are fat,
slow and easy to catch. I grab the caught fish and cut off its large
head. Then I catch a second fish and cut off its head. Thinking I am
helping the fisherman.
When the fisherman arrives he is upset saying that he will be ill
because have killed more fish than one should.
On waking it came to me that the fisherman's belief was obviously false.
There is no connection between killing an extra fish and his well being.
It seems irrational.
While it seemed irrational, it is ecologically sound.
The belief limits his catch and insures the survival of the fish as a
whole.
Thus we have a locally irrational belief that is globally rational even
if untrue. The belief's truth is irrelevant to its functional efficacy.
The ecology of the whole determines the beliefs function not its local
rationality or truth.
Science and logic may be locally rational but globally destructive of
the human natural ecology of the global system.
Local logic - global illogic and irrationality.
I recall when teaching philosophy in Africa and later interacting with
the Aborigines in Australia their reasoning was clearly different than
the European model, yet it worked in their environment. As the months
passed I thought I understood the people, their way of being and
thinking. Then some thing happened or was said that made me realize I
did not understand them after all.
As we think of reason, logic; information and meaning perhaps the
distinction between local rationality and global ecological rationality
may be fruitful.
At least that's what the dream told me. Shall we listen?
-Eric
--
/Dr. Eric Werner
Oxford Advanced Research Foundation
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/
On 2/15/24 8:57 PM, Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic wrote:
>
> Dear colleagues,
>
> In our recent discussions, one could observe a movement towards
> increasingly detailed levels of analysis.
>
> We've moved from discussions on
>
> * "*Paradigm shifts*" initiated by Yixin/Eric and Stu, to
> * *(Beyond) "Formal Systems" *by Carlos*,* and further to
> * *"Concepts"*as the foundation of "Formal Systems" (Eric) and today
> * *'Intuitive criterion' *for concept selection as introduced by
> Mariusz in his examination of 'Erroneous Concepts'.
>
> This seems to be the level one can hardly go beyond.
>
> In this context, it may be instructive to consider the work of the
> logician Jaakko Hintikka, who has commented on the role of intuitions
> within philosophical discourse. It goes back to Gödel and our feeling
> for what we believe we know
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://medium.com/@preston.b.evans/the-emperors-new-intuition-d054992c25df__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!R9CMT1gJvyHXSCbeXUcpvBKqxIzCxjcvPEmubWOpEvy3iGwlTJBuc6LxYbEW3fR9-DeAH1LHI_VtfJv3c9innpJMJlvkeA$>
> - a kind of circular motion that leads us back to the beginning.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Gordana
>
> *From: *Fis <fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es> on behalf of Mariusz
> Stanowski <stanowskimariusz at wp.pl>
> *Date: *Thursday, 15 February 2024 at 18:09
> *To: *"fis at listas.unizar.es" <fis at listas.unizar.es>
> *Subject: *Re: [Fis] "express matter and energy in terms of
> information"--Digital Cheese
>
> I agree that digitization would be difficult or impossible here. But
> if future scanners could copy quantum states, like quantum computers
> then we could get a duplicate of the cheese without the digitization
> (encoding) process. That is when we would be dealing with Aristotelian
> information - an immanent feature of matter (form of energy).
>
> I attached a pdf of the mentioned article: "Erroneous concepts of
> prominent scientists: C.F. Weizsäcker, J. A. Wheeler, S. Wolfram, S.
> Lloyd, J. Schmidhuber, and M. Vopson, resulting from misunderstanding
> of information and complexity"
>
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://drive.google.com/file/d/1grCvR5R-JJfv9v1ecpBHRalhS0aX94_4/view?usp=drive_link__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!WDxYhfDr44gGY2xVD4LJyj6K0G50DWQ9-fn8CK1YAowBVgAw51zmWfyKgGWoSsLRw2FM2-HyeX--pUfuUexjXYQ$
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://drive.google.com/file/d/1grCvR5R-JJfv9v1ecpBHRalhS0aX94_4/view?usp=drive_link__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!QY-yWw45S08p-qz1wVhylKrDKn713onnyUOvqB2H9OhcTsvyA-Oecnma-zHUeMsW--sS_pnoF8uOjxNszd-kzxFLzF8i$>
>
> Best regards
> Mariusz
>
> W dniu 15.02.2024 o 13:24, Pedro C. Marijuán pisze:
>
> Dear Mariusz & FIS Colleagues,
>
> Thanks for your reply. Please, send me your paper, it looks quite
> interesting.
>
> I was thinking on a digital variation of the info cheese. It
> reminds what Stuart posted weeks ago about digitalizing the info
> of a painting.
>
> Let us imagine a (future) powerful sort of
> scanner-mass-spectrogram, so that it could digitalize the position
> of all molecules (momenta needed too?) in a portion of the cheese.
>
> We would get a hipermatrix of say 50,000 different molecules
> (assuming most microrganisms are dead and somehow
> dissolved/incorporated), most of them situated in billions or
> trillions of different positions.
>
> Could the hypermassive data be sent to a molecular 3-D printer and
> rematerialize the cheese? Therefore, would we have completely
> digitalized the cheese, putting it "in terms of information"?
>
> I don't think so, for "interpretive" reasons not difficult to
> follow. Partially they would apply to Stuart's painting case too
> (although color codes are more tricky to discuss than the codes
> needed for heterogeneous molecular populations).
>
> And just to close, formal systems share the enormous advantage of
> computer's Moore Law, but cannot capture the "jury rigging" of
> life --or in my own parlance, the information games that life
> cycles orchestrate regarding their collectively-unending
> adaptation processes.
>
> Best--Pedro
>
> El 14/02/2024 a las 10:51, Mariusz Stanowski escribió:
>
> Dear Pedro,
>
> I find your elaboration of Krassimir's question very aptly
> pointing out the difficulty of getting to the essence of
> things and understanding the objects themselves in an
> increasingly complex world of human concepts/information. The
> more of this information we have to deal with, the more and
> more difficult it is for us to distinguish between the more
> and the less relevant, being further and further
> meta-reflections of that object. It is also increasingly
> difficult to find common features for all this information,
> that is, information that succinctly define the object.
> Therefore, I believe that if we want to understand something
> we should focus on the fundamental information, i.e. the set
> of the smallest number of concepts sufficient to
> distinguish/define the object.
> This is the principle I tried to follow in the just published
> article that defines information and complexity at the
> fundamental level.
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01655515231203644*core-collateral-purchase-access__;Iw!!D9dNQwwGXtA!WDxYhfDr44gGY2xVD4LJyj6K0G50DWQ9-fn8CK1YAowBVgAw51zmWfyKgGWoSsLRw2FM2-HyeX--pUfu5HqqEjU$
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01655515231203644*core-collateral-purchase-access__;Iw!!D9dNQwwGXtA!T32AiE6UmQl-7n70JaaD2Z8MkqW19WQsVpbwk065JHpDk-lBrAiFGUO1bbWk5PVAYYGnnhnXoVC70zzLMwlGJJWPuR6f$>
> Information is understood here either as an Aristotelian form
> or form of energy (it is worth noting that information is a
> generalization of the concept of form-shape to all other
> characteristics of objects), or technically (Shannon) as an
> element of a collection. Complexity, on the other hand, is
> here the equivalent of information compression (in the
> broadest sense).
> The article was intentionally written in a somewhat
> provocative form to draw attention to the misconceptions
> arising from a lack of understanding of these key concepts,
> even among well-known authorities. An example of this is
> Shannon's universal attribution of natural/physical properties
> to information on the basis of similarity to thermodynamics
> where we deal only with collections of gas particles, while
> other physical objects/processes are not collections but
> complex structures and systems.
> I can send PDF of the paper if you are interested.
>
> Best regards
> Mariusz
>
> W dniu 13.02.2024 o 18:52, Pedro C. Marijuán pisze:
>
> Dear All,
>
> This was great from Krassimir:
>
> "Please give at least one example, for instance, to
> express the cheese in terms of information."
>
> I was reminded of a famous essay I read in the 80s (or
> 90s) about "what's in a cent?" (or maybe a "penny"?). It
> was a one or two pages essay on the enormous web of
> occurrences related to a "simple" object such as a penny.
> I could not locate it any more --does anyone know about it?
>
> Well, the cheese. The sheer diversity of cheeses. The
> different flavor, fragance, taste, texture, appearance...
> as estimated by our senses, are some of these related to
> "terms of information"?
>
> And let's go to the milk fermentation by yeasts, bacteria,
> fungi... See
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-science-behind-your-cheese-180981199/__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!WDxYhfDr44gGY2xVD4LJyj6K0G50DWQ9-fn8CK1YAowBVgAw51zmWfyKgGWoSsLRw2FM2-HyeX--pUfu6NfiulE$
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-science-behind-your-cheese-180981199/__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!RZmBAGuqcc3WPSJ1gwPwe6Rfxa-lmx4SL77c4fRq2SuTNCAAIa_SmSVmJ8ohHfdmp1ED3LhKSC41zIBn9OYQjiPEOgPs$>
>
> What are the molecular transporters, enzymes, signaling
> systems involved? What are the main "molecular
> recognition" events? Again: are some of these related to
> "terms of information"?
>
> And what about the lives of those involved in the "making
> of"? And of the patient "donor" animals? And the
> engineering and the whole organization of the production
> process?
>
> And let's go to the marketing, web sales, use of
> influencers, social networks, etc. And fundamentally, when
> we go to a market all the other stories will disappear and
> will get subsumed into a "price" that signals the value of
> the product--into a collective information processing that
> recalibrates itself at high speed. That famous Adam Smith
> "invisible hand".
>
> Therefore, the initial question taken literally becomes
> rather absurd, fundamentalist--it is the same as if we ask
> for the "physics" of the cheese or for its "chemistry".
> But curiously, in this case the information-related
> aspects get an upper hand. The fact is that socially we
> have to handle a big, very big system of the sciences, and
> we are forced to combine, recombine their specialized
> disciplinary views etc. etc. It is in this bigger
> multidisciplinary context where the "physicalist"
> dominance in intelligence & information studies was
> discussed by Yixin-Zhong a few months ago... quite opportune.
>
> Best--Pedro
>
> El 12/02/2024 a las 22:38, Krassimir Markov escribió:
>
> Dear Carlos,
>
> You wrote "... express matter and energy in terms of
> information".
>
> Simple question:
>
> How can it be done?
>
> Please give at least one example, for instance, to
> express the cheese in terms of information.
>
> With respect,
>
> Krassimir
>
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--
/Dr. Eric Werner
Oxford Advanced Research Foundation
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