[Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 113, Issue 17. From Mark

[Pedro C. Marijuán]

/(clean posting: delete all the accumulated stuff below your message, 
otherwise it won't pass--P.)/



-------- Mensaje reenviado --------
Asunto: 	Re: [Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 113, Issue 17
Fecha: 	Mon, 8 Jul 2024 16:31:25 +0100
De: 	Mark Johnson <johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com>
Para: 	Louis Kauffman <loukau at gmail.com>, fis <fis at listas.unizar.es>



Dear Lou, all,

Apologies for taking ages to reply – I’ve had a busy couple of weeks 
travelling.


I wonder if I might address your question about measurement and the 
representation of wholes by using the wonderful cartoon that you sent me 
a few months ago (attached)


In a way, there is some similarity to the “blind men and the elephant”, 
but in that story we observers of the situation see there is an 
“elephant” and laugh at the story of the restricted perception of the 
blind men. With your cartoon, we observers are as much in the dark as 
the two people arguing.

The two people:

a.Are perturbed by what they see;

b.Make a distinction;

c.Utter a word which has meaning to them;

d.Disagree with each other.

I think it is the dynamics between a, b, c and d which is the whole.  
More abstractly, there is:

a.Noise or disturbance;

b.A selection;

c.An utterance of a word relating to that selection whose meaning is 
contextualised within a shared culture

d.An appreciation that there is a difference between their selection and 
the other person’s, and that this awareness may even reinforce the 
selection and the utterance.

It's similar, it seems to me, in your knot paper the abstract 
representation of the knot is the result of distinction-making, and the 
associated formal representation. And there might be argument (among 
mathematicians) as to the particular formalisation. This means that the 
formal representation on its own is not a representation of the whole. 
Seen in isolation from the original knot, it loses the dynamics between 
a, b, c and d. The formalism is a reduction which attenuates - rather 
like a measurement. Is it drained of meaning? I think it might be more 
accurate to say that it is divorced from the dynamics which connect 
"disturbance" with "distinction", "utterance" and shared expectation.


But I think we can have “reduction” which doesn’t attenuate – a 
"non-reductive reduction" as Alex was puzzled by. This isn’t a new idea 
– David Bohm particularly talked a lot about “holomovements” and so on. 
I'm thinking particularly about Peter Rowlands’s physics as a compelling 
example - and indeed, your own work on time, commutators and imaginary 
numbers, from which you arrive at quaternions and Clifford algebra. If 
you go backwards from Clifford algebra back to commutators, distinctions 
and imaginary numbers have you performed a reduction?


When I first encountered Peter’s “Rewrite system” I was confused that 
each group of terms expressing the quaternion variables do not use i, j, 
and k. He does explain it in his “Foundations of Physical Law) that he 
just uses i and j:

“It may be significant that the rules A → B and B → AB seem to be 
suggesting the structure of 3-dimensional (quaternion) algebra:

i → j

j → ij (“ = k”)

and that a string like BABABBABABBABBABABBAB appears to be creating a 
fractal-like structure in 3-dimensional space, but situated in the AB or 
ij plane, as in holography. The logarithmic spiral then becomes a way of 
expressing 3-dimensionality in the plane with the increasing length of 
the intervals substituting for penetration into the third dimension”.


It was obvious when he explained it – but this is precisely the kind of 
non-reductive reductionism that I am concerned with. I think we agree 
that non-commutativity is the key to make it work. Non-commutativity 
creates a spiral leading to ever-deeper recursions, which obviates the 
need for more than three dimensions. (Do we need n-dimensional Hilbert 
spaces?? – Peter blames Eddington for that)

(1, –1)

(1, –1) × (1, i)

(1, –1) × (1, i) × (1, j)

(1, –1) × (1, i) × (1, j) × (1, i)

(1, –1) × (1, i) × (1, j) × (1, i) × (1, j)

(1, –1) × (1, i) × (1, j) × (1, i) × (1, j) × (1, i) ...


The perception of wholes entails apprehension of this spiral. Your 
cartoon exemplifies this: the perturbation is a kind of “noise” – a 
scalar; the distinction is a vector; the utterance is a chosen in the 
context of language and culture – it is reliant on redundancy which is a 
higher order than a vector (a bivector probably); and the mutual 
understanding is a higher order still.


So to come to music, the “swing” is in the spiral. There is 
dimensionality in making any sound – it involves noise, notes (signals), 
redundancy (repetition/pattern) and expectation. And most importantly, 
once we start “swinging”, we have to find a way to stop: music has to 
reach a point where the next thing that happens is silence.


With regard to AI, I am no zealot. But it raises fascinating questions – 
I really recommend playing with Google’s Teachable Machine 
(https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!Vg7EFbHyX9FBFZHVTsQ-am5ttmeLnVaJKsCT-Bnivhyp_YlK8-Pj58Hs-C98va7wdrIVkio3iFF6JANfJKPw-kyJ0P-v$  
<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com/__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!UsPK2SRbiXBsfUCVImOrMm7fPKKNuBbKeVeR7v6-AmTt7BCvZVrKGYKDIRzLOAqwbokC90rmAhTGK6Hkf8MZ_pw$>) 
– it’s good to experiment with this stuff.  But there are structural 
similarities to how it performs its selections to what I’ve described 
above. It is noisy (and this is significant in driving its development 
further); it selects signals as predictions of the likely categories of 
data it hasn’t seen before; it both requires redundancy for training, 
and exhibits redundancy in the structuring of its output; and it must 
meet our expectations otherwise we would not see any good or use in it. 
Is it a practical non-reductive reduction? That’s the question. If it is 
then we have a very important new kind of scientific instrument on our 
hands which, like all previous scientific instruments, helps us perceive 
deeper order in nature.


Measurement, I think, is how we encode our perception of that deeper 
order. While the encoding of measurement drains the meaning from any 
specific perception, it creates a new meaning through the shared 
understanding. Isn't it another level in the spiral? So we move from 
perception to measurement with each having commensurable dynamics. 
Musical notation provides another example of this: written notes are not 
music, but they are part of a complex set of inter-relationships which 
connect noise with signal, pattern and mutual expectation.


Best wishes,


Mark


On Sun, 23 Jun 2024 at 16:23, Louis Kauffman <loukau at gmail.com 
<mailto:loukau at gmail.com>> wrote:

    Dear Mark,
    I am writing privately since I have to rights on fis until tomorrow.
    When we use the word measurement in the usual scientific context, we
    mean making a record that can be viewed without disturbance by anyone.
    Thus the measurement is drained of all meaning that might be
    supplied by a given observer.
    It takes a very concentrated effort to produce measurements of this
    kind and they are the subject of engineering practice.
    Think of vinyl records. The track is an accurate transform of the
    sound. The track is in itself meaningless. The track can be
    transformed back into sound and
    observed/ heard by a sensitive human at which point the meaning can
    arise in the interaction of the human with the sound.
    Best,
    Lou





>     >Isn't meaning "part" of any measurement? How could it not be? But perhaps
>     >the difficulty lies in what one might mean by "part"... Reductionism - as
>     >in the attenuation of "dimensions" of experience - lies in wait for any
>     >trivial identification of a "part". But there is a kind of "reduction"
>     >which does not attenuate... Holograms are reductions, for example.

    -- 


Dr. Mark William Johnson
Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health
University of Manchester

Department of Science Education
University of Copenhagen

Department of Eye and Vision Science (honorary)
University of Liverpool
Phone: 07786 064505
Email: johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com <mailto:johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com>
Blog: https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!Vg7EFbHyX9FBFZHVTsQ-am5ttmeLnVaJKsCT-Bnivhyp_YlK8-Pj58Hs-C98va7wdrIVkio3iFF6JANfJKPw-krB0FJf$  
<https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!UsPK2SRbiXBsfUCVImOrMm7fPKKNuBbKeVeR7v6-AmTt7BCvZVrKGYKDIRzLOAqwbokC90rmAhTGK6HkIVeDeaY$>


-- 
Este correo electrónico ha sido analizado en busca de virus por el software antivirus de Avast.
https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.avast.com__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!Vg7EFbHyX9FBFZHVTsQ-am5ttmeLnVaJKsCT-Bnivhyp_YlK8-Pj58Hs-C98va7wdrIVkio3iFF6JANfJKPw-sVOKVf4$ 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listas.unizar.es/pipermail/fis/attachments/20240708/e26aad94/attachment-0001.html>