[Fis] An Unbeatable Tradition? Ten Principles

[Pedro C. Marijuán]

Dear All,

Thanks a lot for the learned exchanges. Herewith I am responding to some 
few previous ones.

First, to Howard, who takes the information metaphor inside the 
subatomic world and, seemingly, "reifies" it. As a style resource it may 
be fine, but in scientific discourse it does not fit well. As an 
opposite case, the "founded fathers" of molecular biology (physicists 
many of them--Crick, Gamow, Delbruck...) enshrined the 
info/communicating metaphor for all the new phenomena discovered: codes, 
transcription, translation, signals, messengers... No one put any 
question, maybe because it was making a robust inner sense. Deepening 
into that is what we try here.

Stuart has to be thanked for his detailed responses. He has both 
expanded (& synthesized) the topics of his recent publications. 
Nevertheless, my own emphasis is that this kind of ideas are very 
suitable to argument on them, but even more to build upon them, and to 
try to advance in new directions. As a reminder I am going to rebuild 
some my own "ten principles of information science" which I posted years 
ago. I was also discussing the idea of "principles" in science (in a 
paper that appeared in Chinese, with Bilin and Wukun). Principles become 
amazing thought economizers, convergence makers, trail openers... don't' 
we need them herein?? There are wonderful citations from Whitehead about 
that (and of course, from Ortega y Gasset, my favorite).  Anyhow, here 
there are those selected ten:

1. Information is /distinction on //the adjacent /(the DOTA hypothesis, 
as John Holgate dubbed it).

2. Information processes consist in organized action upon distinctions 
collected onto space-time patterns, sequences, structures, messages, or 
flows.

3. Information flows become essential organizers of life's 
self-production processes – anticipating, shaping, and mixing up with 
the accompanying energy flows. /The life cycle main outcome./

4. Proto-phenomena of meaning, knowledge, and cognition (& intelligence) 
emerge via the signaling system and the genetic system of the living 
cell—fully developed later on in multicellulars via the 
action/perception cycle of central nervous systems.

5. Information/communication exchanges among adaptive life-cycles 
underlie the complexity of biological organization at all scales.

6. It is symbolic language what conveys the essential communication 
exchanges of human individuals—and constitutes the core of their "social 
nature."

7. Human information can be transformed into efficient knowledge by 
following the "knowledge instinct", further disciplined and delimited by 
applying rigorous methodologies.

8. Human cognitive limitations are partially overcome via specialized 
disciplines, to be caught in "knowledge ecologies", where knowledge 
circulates and recombines socially in a continuous actualization that 
involves "creative destruction" of theories, practices, and disciplines.

9. Narratives become encapsulated information forms of “natural 
intelligence”, tailored to capture our collective attention and memory, 
and essential for the cohesion of social, political, and economic 
structures.

10. Information science proposes a new, radical vision on how 
information and knowledge surround individual lives, with profound 
consequences for scientific-philosophical practice and for social 
governance.


And concerning Plamen (with Marcus, both may be partially responded with 
some of the above points), I would argue that in the convergence / 
divergence play we all make with the lens of the thematic focus, he has 
taken the latter. It would quite useful for a next planned discussion 
session, chaired by Arran Gare, on general problems of science and 
science education (approx.). About Free Will and Consciousness, I would 
say they appear gradually along the evolutionary complexification of 
nervous systems. I remember Gerald Edelman saying that in invertebrates 
at the level of lobsters there already appears a proto-consciousness 
(maybe to tease his hedonistic lobster-eater colleagues?), not to speak 
in Octopus (already cited in this list, and a great mention in Steele et 
al. paper sent by Plamen--by the way, have a glance on "geometric 
constraints on human brain evolution", Nature 15 June, 2023, p.566--on 
resonant activity modes just derived from brain's geometry). Finally I 
quite concur with Marcus... "So I am unsure what to do with Aristotle’s 
four causes in current exchanges."

Best --Pedro

El 24/01/2024 a las 13:10, Stuart Kauffman escribió:
> Hi Marcus and All. Marcus thank you. Consider: Deduction, Induction, 
> and Abduction - John Stuart Mill and human rationality. Great!!
>
> Now consider this: If I am using an engine block as a paper weight, I 
> cannot deduce that I can also use the engine block’s sharp rigid 
> corners to crack open coconuts. More generally we cannot deduce the 
> different uses of any single thing alone or surely with indefinitely 
> many other things.
>
> So I am being  a good scientist, even a Bayesian.  I have now used 
> 1,429 engine blocks as paper weights and used a Bayesian approach to 
> improve the engine blocks to be better paper weights. I have even used 
> AI to construct a Markov Blanket! …Cool. /My mind evolved to predict 
> the world for survival purposes. Thank whatever gods. / I have make an 
> induction with a universal quantifier: “All Engine blocks within some 
> constraints can be used as paper weights!” Then, given this /covering 
> law/, I find an engine block and deduce: Because all engine blocks 
> given these constraints can be used as paper weights, and this engine 
> block fits the constraints, therefore I can use this engine block as a 
> paper weight.  All true. Thank Darwin and some neurobiologists, 
> philosophers, and cognitive theorists that my mind evolved to predict, 
> Bayesian and all!
>
> But with all that, I have /no “logical or algorithmic” way whatsoever/ 
> to get to, “Hot damn! I can use this engine block and its rigid 
> corners to crack open coconuts.! “  Uhoh, evolving life is about open 
> thermodynamic systems that reproduce so must eat, thus must find, 
> stumble upon, grok, intuit ever - novel affordances. Were we only 
> Bayesians we would be dead.  Evolution is not limited to Bayesian. The 
> evolving biosphere invents novel morphologies all the time.Evolution 
> invents novel behaviors all the time.
>
> This is also correct for us humans with MIND. We invent all the time. 
> Mind is not limited to algorithmic. General AI seems ruled out. The 
> evolving biosphere is a propagating non deducible/construction,/ not a 
> computation. Why do we continue to think that everything that becomes 
> complex is some computation, even one that must be run to see what it 
> produces? No.
>
> Andrea and I argue that we are trapped in our categories, hence in 
> most of our deductive mathematics. There is no logical procedure to 
> discover, stumble upon, find out the invention. Einstein did not 
> deduce SR or GR.
>
> The evolving world is not trapped in its algorithms. Andrea and I 
> published, The World Is Not a Theorem”.
>
> Wittgenstein realized all this nearly a century ago  From Russell 
> Whitehead and his Tractatus to his Investigations and non reducible 
> language games.
>
> Marcus, I do think we may find statistical laws of the process. For 
> example, I sent all of us the Stu Andre recent paper, “Is the 
> emergence of life….” In that we mention the TAP process. That simple 
> mathematical recurrence relation predicts the power law descent 
> distribution of 3,000,000 patents. So TAP is capturing something about 
> human non-deductive invention. These is a statistics of ‘jury 
> rigging”, somehow related to constraints and what they next enable. 
>  What is next enabled is the unprestatable non - deducible Adjacent 
> Possible. Here we do not know the sample space so have no /probability 
> /measure. We cannot even define /random. /Yet TAP seems to work for 
> descent distributions. /ODD, how can both of these claims be true, if 
> they are?/
>
> Best,
>
> Stu
>
>> On Jan 24, 2024, at 2:29 AM, Marcus Abundis <55mrcs at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Pedro and Stuart,
>>
>> Thank you for the usefully provocative posts.
>>
>> Pedro's 22 Jan post points to THE central matter in a Third 
>> Transition and Phase Transitions, no?
>> < Not aspiring to any universality about the conceptions of this 
>> independent informational exploration of life--at least shouldn't it 
>> be attempted?? . . . So, an unexpected[?!] convergence might be found 
>> finally >
>> — If I understand Pedro correctly: creation of new adjacent 
>> possibilities surely follows `some type of logic'! Why is THAT not 
>> discussed here? But I am also unsure why this should be `unexpected’ 
>> (Pedro?). Still, is it really NOT POSSIBLE to formally deduce `base 
>> elements of creativity'? Does one simply claim it is a `mystery’ (a 
>> failure of scientific imagination), to throw our hands up and walk away?
>> — I am unsure if this is what Stuart (and others?) suggest. If, as 
>> Stuart says, it is `not deductive reasoning’, it surely is not 
>> inductive reasoning (nor analogic reasoning). So EXACTLY what type of 
>> reasoning is needed?!Intuitively I think `abductive reasoning’, but 
>> then that does not seem to fully `fill the bill’. Alternatively, 
>> perhaps a blended vista is needed. Further to Pedro’s note about 
>> Plamen, Joe, and Eric, I too have offered my own Theory of Meaning 
>> view on the matter, much earlier.
>>
>> ERIC < . . . at a given point in time we have real possibilities and 
>> we have pseudo possibilities . . . I did develop a theory of changing 
>> sets to make possible the formalization of changing possibilities. >
>> — I am unsure how one effectively differs between real and pseudo 
>> possibilities, as mostly everything is possible until `the hand is 
>> dealt’ (a wave function collapse?).Still, a theory of changing sets 
>> sounds interesting (link?:< my theory of information and ability of 
>> agents>)
>> Also, < in writing by the time you get to the end of the sentence you 
>> already have a better understanding of what you are thinking. >
>> — In writing it down again, this time on a computer . . . you should 
>> have EVEN BETTER clarity of your intent and language, no? This would 
>> be useful. Still, my own QM view is skeptical, I am uninterested in 
>> things prior to a wave function collapse as all is too much like `noise’.
>>
>> JOE < information is characterized by its quality as well as by 
>> scalar quantities. I have not seen any algorithmic theory that 
>> captures quality, but would of course be glad to know of one. >
>> — How does Signal Entropy’s variable X^n logarithmic base NOT present 
>> a scalar (simple-to-complex) role?
>>
>> STUART — when someone mentions Aristotle’s four causes I am too often 
>> left with more questions than answers. Foremost, it requires a Prime 
>> Mover — which we are to call `What?’ exactly, thermodynamics?! Also I 
>> do not see how it gets us to simple-to-complex material reality, it 
>> does not even rise to the level of dialectic logic born of 
>> Pre-Socratic views. Lastly, it seems awfully anthropocentric, given 
>> what we know of cause-and-effect in this modern era. So I am unsure 
>> what to do with Aristotle’s four causes in current exchanges.
>>
>> Marcus
>



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