[Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 116, Issue 8 Emotions are not binary

Fri Nov 22 14:06:42 CET 2024

Quantum 2024 11 22

Dear Thomas,

Thank you for bringing up the subject of "quantum" as an idea and
procedure. Please allow me to comment from the viewpoint of a psychologist
(biologist) on the concept. First, let me show limits of practicability of
the idea. Then, we return to Wittgenstein and establish how the meaning of
a word is arrived at and how the logical truth is understood to mean the
congruence of a mental pattern (devised by us) with a numeric pattern (as
the gauge on which to measure whether we had reasoned correctly). The
constructive part of this essay proposes using numeric patterns as
blueprints of mental patterns, even if we may as of today not have produced
that mental pattern which fits smugly with a practical numeric pattern.

*1. Inapplicability of the concept quantum for solving my problem*

The problem FIS deals with centers around the concept "information". In
terms of background, some of the Learned Friends have been raised in the
context of biology while other Learned Friends had a stem education. If I
understand you right, quantum is an invention by the stem people, and you
propose to use the concept to come nearer to a satisfying general picture
of how Nature manages relationships among parts of wholes.

The idea that biologists should familiarize themselves with and use the
concept of quanta so that both sides of the old trivial-quadrivial conflict
possess a common intellectual unit, this suggestion is comparable to the
idea that biologists suggest to stem people to use the concept of the
mirror relation of lust and hangover because that perspective is really
useful in understanding the behavior of animals.

This is not to say that quantum as a concept would be wrong or false. It is
simply not applicable in biology. Not because of its peculiarities but
because of the generality of its generation.

Let me state the problem as biologists see it: we see that an animal lives.
We have no stem words to describe what we mean by the word "lives". So, we
have a state of the world that a picture that exists in my head can't be
described by me, because the mechanics of life have not yet been explicated
to me, so I can't build sentences to communicate about a clear and explicit
content of my head.

Both the pictures of the living animal, and of the lexicon are in my head.
I have an inner conflict, because one part of my head has no words to
describe what a different part of my head perceives. (It was hypothesized
that natives were helpless vis a vis the conquistadores, because in the
lexicon of the natives such a structure that swims on water and of which
people emerge, was not existing, so thinking broke down, confronted by
something that was impossible to exist.)

Quantum is understood to be a property of the things that are outside of my
head. Now we come to the conflict. Experience shows that it is in the best
case a symptomatic improvement if a person who is laboring with inner
conflicts, is offered a reinforcement that deals with the outside world.

It doesn't help me at all, with my problem of not finding the correct words
to describe biology, if more and more detailed yellow stickers are picked
onto diverse parts of the whole, of which the interaction of the parts I
have a problem with. In the elephant example, it is of no use to amass
measurements of trunk, feet, belly and ears, if I fail to build a general
picture of how these parts fit together.

This is the reason why this person is very reticent to embrace the idea of
quantum. From the outside, it is not clear whether quantum is today's stone
of wisdom, Phlogiston, ether, Wotan's odem or highly refined snake oil. The
concept of quantum asserts to depict relations among objects that are
outside of my head.

What I need is an explanation that relates to the inability of one part of
my head to describe intelligently that what a different part of my head
sees clearly. I have no problem with how things interact outside. I have a
problem with understanding myself, how come that I find no words for
something that I see to exist. I will overcome the limitations of my
vocabulary, not that of my faculties of observation. If I don’t understand
the general principle of the contraption, getting into more details is
usually only of limited value. We need to investigate how words are checked
for meaning something in a grammatically true fashion.

*2. How we check that our words refer to that concept which we intend to
refer to*

Wittgenstein would have been an adept of Shannon and his hardcore
followers, had he lived after Shannon. The idea of information processing
being *au fond* an identification of an element of *N* is included in
Wittgenstein’s reasoning about the correct grammar of using well-defined
words in a sentence that is interpersonally understandable.

Wittgenstein’s steps of reasoning go:

Word → remove connotations → arrive at denotation → establish relations of
denotation of word to other denotations of words → check if relations among
words agree to relations among other words that are definitely true (in
practice, use numbers as sources of correct relations) → if the relations
among the words are in agreement with the relations that are known to be
true, the sentence is grammatically correct.

If we simplify our concepts into bundles/clusters of numeric relations (1)
and compare this pattern of relations to patterns of relations we find or
create by counting, then in case the comparison yields positive, the mental
concept is reasonable. (If it calculates, it may be something useful. If
the numbers do not add up, forget it, that won’t work in no case anyway.)
(1) My transaction today at the supermarket paying for groceries by card is
a bundle/cluster of numeric relations. This is one word of the sentence
describing me, the supermarket, the groceries and the bank. The words of
the sentence fit together, obeying a numeric pattern: the sentence is
grammatically correct. Every word of this sentence answers to the
requirements for that word and means exactly that what it is expected to
mean. (In this sense, the sentence contains no information, as nothing is
otherwise than expected.)

*3. Proposal: Turn the procedure on its head*

We check whether our ideas have merit by confronting them with the truths
the natural numbers contain in themselves. The natural numbers are the
roots and the stem of the system of true relations. From the simple come
the composite who begot the differences who begot the similarities and the
probabilities and the combinations and the certitude. Of that apple, which
later fell down, to Newton’s great delight, of certitude we homo sapiens
have created logic and numbers and relations.

Why don’t we just dig out the tree of relations, turn it over and give it a
good shakeup? The canopy of the tree of natural numbers is a habitat for
many numeric patterns. If we need a common, very versatile and small
building block, why not take such that grow in that tree, with which we
anyway compare all that we produce for checking whether it is grammatically
correct?

Wittgensteins direction: create coherent ideas. Check if the rules of the
coherence agree to rules of coherence which we know to be true.

Update 21st century: use the set of relation we know to be true and subject
them to axiomatic ongoing changes. In this way, anything that can happen in
an ordered world will appear in the produced patterns.

(If I produce ideas, I can check whether the structure of my ideas agrees
to structures that can be found among the structures that I have learnt to
be true. Now we change direction, take the rule book and mix all the rules.
We are interested in the resulting convolutum of rules. Which rules are
sticky with which other rules?)

*4. Are these quantum amounts?*

Doing an exercise *en vogue* in FIS, ordering any 12 books from
author-title into title-author and retour, one wonders what words are in
use for the different kinds of impacts, voids, speeds and holes and one
missing and one double of the romantic relations (called aforetimes
“cycles”) among books that share that they are *in transit together in one
closed sequence.*

One level further up, cycles running parallel have inevitably some
predictable patterns of coincidences. That such-and-such are regularly
together although they belong to different cycles is an *offset bondage*
that is not covered by the definition of simple romantic relations. That
the coincidence takes place is a predictor for many different, seemingly
temporally, materially and spatially distant occurrences. The knowledge
about *αβ ↔ γδ* taking place is equivalent with the expectations of how
many cycles are running, how many places are empty and what size the bump
each cycle carries on average. These are sets of *expectations *against
which the *observations *deviate, yielding the extent of *information. *

*To summarize:*

One way is to think something up and look whether the numbers confirm it.
The way proposed here, which technology of our age now permits, is to
filter out the most obvious numeric patterns the system produces if we make
it undergo perpetual changes. The bet is that the numeric patterns we
harvest will need only to find each a good name for, because the idea as
such is by definition sound.

Am Di., 19. Nov. 2024 um 17:18 Uhr schrieb Prof. Dr. Thomas Görnitz <
goernitz at em.uni-frankfurt.de>:

> Dear Everyone,
> as Eric wrote:
> “Emotions are involved in the construction of what is perceived and
> thought to be possible.”
>
>  From my point of view, this shows how important the “physics of
> possibilities”, namely quantum theory, is for an understanding of
> mental processes in general.
>
> The quantization of a bit means that all intermediate stages are
> possible between the two possible measurement results “yes” and “no” (
> two-dimensional Hilbert space).
>
> The abundance of possibilities that arise is the precise essence of
> the coupling of psyche and body in the case of emotions.
> (Possible literature on this, unfortunately so far only in German:
> Thomas Görnitz, Brigitte Görnitz (2016) Von der Quantenphysik zum
> Bewusstsein/Kosmos, Geist und Materie, Heidelberg, Springer,
>
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.springer.com/de/book/9783662490815__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!XUku6GUw-2Jt5xqaYi_xpi9JIZIwOqI_n703EIPUtlG0h_CjOKVUDj1dZFzqp3h9yTbhTo-oNjOy1L6K-fMDm4rjc-jzeA$
> Thomas Görnitz: Quantentheorie verstehen/Grundlegende Vorstellungen
> und Begriffe, (2. Ed. 2024) Hanser, München,
>
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.hanser-fachbuch.de/fachbuch/artikel/9783446480261__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!XUku6GUw-2Jt5xqaYi_xpi9JIZIwOqI_n703EIPUtlG0h_CjOKVUDj1dZFzqp3h9yTbhTo-oNjOy1L6K-fMDm4p-y_CLog$
> )
>
> In contrast to the AI that currently exists, the self-stabilizing
> information processing in all living organisms is not electronic, but
> chemical. “Chemical” primarily means “purely quantum physical”.
>
> The chemical basis means that the processing of any property that can
> be interpreted by a living organism as meaningful information is
> always associated with a change in its material structure: every
> thought changes the brain.
>
> Best wishes
> Thomas
>
>
> Quoting Eric Werner <eric.werner at oarf.org>:
>
> > Dear Kate,
> >
> > A bit late, but some brief reactions.
> >
> > Most emotions don't seem to be binary. They drive us and influence
> > our perception, thought, intentions and execution of our strategies.
> > They even cover what we think is our capacity to act in world.
> > Emotions are much more than run or attack.  There are so many subtle
> > mixtures of love and hate, of liking and not liking, of trepidation
> > and courage.
> >
> > Emotions are involved in the construction of what is perceived and
> > thought to be possible.
> >
> > -Eric
> >
> > On 11/7/24 11:02 PM, Katherine Peil wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi Peter,
> >>
> >> I’ve only been able to pop in occasionally, but I find your
> >> thoughts on feedback to be highly relevant to many of the big open
> >> questions. Not only “information” but agency, cognition, creativity
> >> and the structure of “identity” itself (something that our best
> >> hard science theory does not address.)
> >>
> >>
> >> At the beginning of the year, I led a discussion herein where I
> >> suggested that the /emotional system/ was central to our
> >> “self-regulatory” hardware (genetic, epigenetic and immune
> >> regulation). In this view, binary feelings (pleasurable or painful,
> >> eustress or distress) serve as cybernetic feedback signals –
> >> informative software -  that originate in the non-equilibrium
> >> dynamics of complex adaptive systems (those that must constantly
> >> exchange energy and resources with their local environment in order
> >> to exist). I cited a four step cybernetic control loop instantiated
> >> by a coupling between bottom up positive (amplifying) feedback and
> >> top-down negative (homeostatic) feedback that works like this: 1)
> >> An ongoing /comparison/ is made between internal and external
> >> environments; 2) A /signal/ is sent when self-relevant mismatches
> >> occur; which 3) triggers a coupled /self-correcting response/,
> >> which is then 4) /fed back/ as a memory into the next cycle
> >> “comparison”. (AI uses a similar arrangement for deep neural
> >> learning networks, by comparing two probability distributions that
> >> compare internal requirements and external circumstances, modelling
> >> mismatches as free energy – “surprises” to the system - wherein
> >> learning occurs the via the goal of reducing free energy.)
> >>
> >> But as living systems, we have direct experience of a binary
> >> feedback signal as emotional sensory qualia – self-regulatory
> >> surprises that come in feel-good or feel-bad categories and are
> >> coupled to approach or avoidant self-correcting behavioral
> >> responses. I call these binary qualia the /fundamental semantic
> >> information bit, /for their binary categories drive each step in
> >> the loop and set the stage for all Pavlovian learning.
> >>
> >> This loop, and its subjective binary hedonic driver, is central to
> >> the operational, organizational and informational closure of
> >> complex self-organizing and autopoietic systems, and it is central
> >> to the ongoing construction of the enactive “mind”. It enables an
> >> identity structure that behaves as a dance of both parts and
> >> wholes, an autonomous yet collective agent, both determined yet
> >> with minor participation, in ways that mediate both being and
> >> becoming. And so much more…
> >>
> >> Sorry for the quick core dump, but I thought I’d pop in to applaud
> >> Peter’s inquiry and say hi to you all!
> >>
> >> Katherine Kauffman
> >>
> >> (Kung Fu Kate)
> >>
> >> *From: *Fis <fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es> on behalf of
> >> fis-request at listas.unizar.es <fis-request at listas.unizar.es>
> >> *Date: *Wednesday, November 6, 2024 at 7:40 PM
> >> *To: *fis at listas.unizar.es <fis at listas.unizar.es>
> >> *Subject: *Fis Digest, Vol 116, Issue 8
> >>
> >> Send Fis mailing list submissions to
> >> fis at listas.unizar.es
> >>
> >> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> >>
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> >> Today's Topics:
> >>
> >>    1. Re: Fwd: Re: New Discussion Session--Complexity & feedback
> >>       (Peter Erdi)
> >>
> >>
> >> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >>
> >> Message: 1
> >> Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2024 02:39:45 +0000
> >> From: Peter Erdi <Peter.Erdi at kzoo.edu>
> >> To: Pedro C. Mariju?n <pedroc.marijuan at gmail.com>,
> >> "fis at listas.unizar.es" <fis at listas.unizar.es>
> >> Subject: Re: [Fis] Fwd: Re: New Discussion Session--Complexity &
> >>         feedback
> >> Message-ID:
> >> <
> BY5PR12MB39852EDD96A4B026324DCA5EF35C2 at BY5PR12MB3985.namprd12.prod.outlook.com
> >
> >>
> >> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
> >>
> >> Thank you, Pedro, for your thoughtful post. I hope some people will
> >> react, and we will kick the ball towards some goal.  Alternatively,
> >> the discussion might evolve by random mutations.
> >>
> >> By the way, Gordana and Sheri: more thoughts about the relationship
> >> between cybernetics and complex systems theory with evolution?
> >>
> >> Peter
> >> ________________________________
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Fis mailing list
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> > --
> > /Dr. Eric Werner, FLS
> > Oxford Advanced Research Foundation
> >
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://oarf.org__;!!D9dNQwwGXtA!R-Gi37vuYLoUksqZFW0zHvoDcMrSEa9O7hXZuPDmD02RM8Q1aJhZ0z9PSXhDtRXoYNBYNRsPyBzQpvb5NZrIzJ0$
>
> > /
>
>
>
> Prof. Dr. Thomas Görnitz
> Fellow of the INTERNATIONAL ACADEMY OF INFORMATION STUDIES
>
> Privat (für Postsendungen):
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>
> Fachbereich Physik
> J. W. Goethe-Universität Frankfurt/Main
>
>
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