[Fis] Fwd: Re: Acknowledgments--ends and beginnings. The Informationalist Perspective

Tue Jan 16 11:04:43 CET 2024

Dear Pedro, Dear Friends and Colleagues
The importance of information from one standpoint is as an example of a complex phenomenon that does not follow standard logic or
even the non-standard logic of processes that I have proposed. Both cover some aspects of information, but Pedro has intuited combinatorics
as offering an additional explanatory dimension.
In his 2002 book, Ontology, on which I
commented in 2008, Dale Jacquette
attempts to derive the “entire universe” from combinatorics, but one in which
objects and their properties are given by pure, classical binary logic. I
suggest that combinatorics as a strategy can and should be considered, but additional
“software” is required. Llull’s work is perhaps better read as religion rather
than science.
I argue that it is neither necessary nor desirable to
be eliminativist with regard to science to establish a set of principles
consistent with an informational perspective. The generation and processing of information
is a complex process following a logic that is a logic of physical change
and not a truth-functional logic of propositions.
In other words, the question of physical change, in
the interpretation I have given it, is central to, is a principle for, an
informational perspective. In one sentence, my “theory” is no more esoteric than
a recognition that real complex processes evolve in a sinusoidal movement from primarily
actual to primarily potential and vice versa, with going to the limits
of 0 and 1.
Biological organization, in fact any organization that
can and does change, follows this pattern, not completely or forever, but
partially and temporarily. It would be idiotic to exclude, from this picture,
the existence of discontinuities, and it is not necessary to do so. At the
unique, higher human cognitive level that permits one or several additional cycles
of recursive processing, aspects of our relation to the existence of the physical
world in fact to existence tout court cannot be avoided.
For me the most important word in Pedro’s note
is “co-creation”. This is a term explicitly used by the 20th Century
Japanese philosopher Yamauchi Tokuryu whose work has just become available in
French in the translation and interpretation by Augustin Berque and Romaric
Jannel. It co-creation or co-instantiation refer to the ontology of emergence
and the “play” of properties of natural phenomena, natural properties of
phenomena such as presence and absence, consistency and inconsistency,
knowledge and ignorance.  
The implications of the opening of the discussion that
Pedro has urged are far-reaching. The test of their reasonableness is no
greater (or less) than  parsimony and anchoring in the
reality of potentiality/actuality in its different physical forms – gravitational, magnetic,
chemical and social.
 You have not gone astray, Pedro, but you have opened
the discussion in a way which may require commitment to inclusion of new forms of
knowledge but only those that remain scientifically rigorous, excluding things reducible to “wishful thinking”.  

Best,
Joseph----Message d'origine----
De : pedroc.marijuan at gmail.com
Date : 15/01/2024 - 21:19 (E)
À : fis at listas.unizar.es
Objet : Re: [Fis] Acknowledgments--ends and beginnings
 Hi Stu--and colleagues, 

 Coincidentally with your message I was reading  McLuhan's "Man and Media" (1979): 

 "I am suggesting that the Club of Rome is really talking to the old nineteenth-century situation of quantity and hardware and ignoring completely the effect of software information on the human psyche. The rip-off of human psychic resources by new media may far exceed the dangers involved in energy shortages from hardware." 

 Literally, it is not a bad suggestion regarding the irrationality of some present ideological policies (I have a dramatic video showing the destruction of a beautiful Spanish landscape by hundreds of windmills). And taking the citation symbolically, it might be arguing for a liberation of the informational discourse out from the physicalist stance. So, the "end" you have achieved with Andrea Roli about the non-deducibility of the evolving biosphere may represent another argument for a genuine liberation from the "science of the hardware". 

 The scientific discourse, as regularly practiced, is supported by a limited number of concepts-arguments that are cohered into a "point of view", caught into a shared "perspective" (in the sense of philosopher Ortega y Gasset). Thus, devoting most of our argumentative resources to arriving at the "end", when we have already confirmed that end from different points of view, seems to demand an alternative--a "beginning" strategy starting to build out from there. We may leave aside the burden of physicalist questions and conundrums --still deep unsolved ones-- and try to advance the "informational point of view" or the "informational perspective"--out from new "principles" (beginnings). My own bet is from reflection about the basic biological organization towards the many other realms based on information-communicating agents, of course including the careful scrutiny of our societies' psychic resources as McLuhan points. 

 A new point of view, informational, where many disciplines would converge in co-creating it, could parallel and complement the monopolistic historic influence of the "hardware" science... And in order to clarify misunderstandings about implementing a new reductionism, the whole knowledge edifice appears as an enormous social combinatorics enterprise, where an unending mixing occurs,  and where the frequent overstretching of successful theories becomes an intellectual toxic. To socially better playing this combinatorics of perspectives, getting free of the mentioned monopolistic influence would be quite convenient. Curiously we count with a historical Saint Patron-- Ramon Llull (or Raimundo Lulio, or Raimundus Lullus) who developed in 13th Century his wonderful Ars Combinatory, or Ars Magna. He even devised a mechanical contraption of rotating boards to help exploring the combinatoric universe of faith, philosophy, logic...

 Hope not having gone too astray.
 Best--Pedro

  El 15/01/2024 a las 16:25, Stuart Kauffman escribió:

  Thanks Krassimir. Yes Thinking Life. I will soon complete an article with Andrea Roli: Is the Emergence of Life an Expected Phase Transition in the Evolving Universe?” and will share it with the group. In it, quite to my surprise, I think we demonstrate that John von Neumann’s famous self reproducing machine is badly mistaken about how living cells reproduce. It is all very odd. If we are correct, the software hardware distinction does not apply to living cells. But the software hardware distinction surely applies to Universal Turning Machines. How can both be true?  

  It seems a deep new puzzle. It may be related to Aristotle’s Four Causes and how they can be true, but not, I suspect, for reproducing cells. Very odd. 

  Best to all,.

  Stu

     On Jan 15, 2024, at 3:18 AM, Krassimir Markov 
     <itheaiss at gmail.com> wrote:

      Dear Stu,

 Thanks for the reply.

 I was able to find your lecture and interview on the web and got my questions answered. I have no more questions for you.

 I completely agree with you that "Life is a mystery", but I am convinced that it will be revealed by another, greater mystery - The Thinking Life!

 Therefore, let us follow the wisdom of the Bulgarians, who say:

 "The vineyard wants a hoe, it won't a prayer!"

 Keep working!

 Dear Lou,

 Thank you very much for the interesting presentation. Category theory is yet to become more relevant, especially in the modeling of intellectual processes and activities.

 I have some doubts about using the metaphor of quantum physics to model them.  

       Especially considering the drive to break away from the physical paradigm. 

       It's really strange, on the one hand we don't want physics, and on the other hand we are firmly attached to the idea of the quantum brain.

 Dear Gordana,

 Thanks for the very timely idea to discuss some computing issues. 

       It would be especially interesting to me if there were time and opportunities to discuss the current state of cognitive computing.

 With respect,

 Krassimir

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