[Fis] 0% of most important Informatics

[Jason Hu]

Dear Paul, very good point! Let me remind all friends on this list, that
"scientists" may be classified into three types: Ontology-centered (arguing
about WHAT exists); Epistemology-centered (figuring out HOW do we know what
we think we know); and Methodology-centered (searching for HOW do I/we deal
with THIS hands-on). For me, I have nothing to do with ontology, therefore
I don't engage in debates of opinions about what is what. It is very easy
to commit the academic original sin of IARYAW (pronounced as "ee-ah-you,"
means "I-AM-RIGHT-YOU-ARE-WRONG") in that territory.

I'm 40% epistemology-centered and 60% methodology-centered. That is why I
ask you, the FIS experts, about what are the most important 20% of what you
know about Informatics.  If a graduate student learning Physics needs to
learn 1000 pages of Physics, then a high-school student needs to learn 200
pages to be aware of the basics. That's what I mean 20%. This effort is not
for researchers. It is for the whole young generation at large - what these
youngsters need is a primer so that they are not informatics-illiterate.

After all, consciousness or intelligence is all about making decisions,
which involves predictions about the consequences of one's
actions/non-actions. This is done through something we call "cognitive
system," i.e. our brain plus all our neurons busily working together. Human
language, formed by concepts or words, are all product/emergence of this
cognitive system (first individually, then collectively), including words
such as matter, energe, information. I agree that "information" involves
living systems' functions - attempting to measurement, drawing
distinctions, perceiving differences, etc., all the way to inventing math
tools, doing statistics, discovering something named "entropy," and alas,
"information"! Here comes an Internet group, who are doctors of "Foundation
of Information System" (Sorry, I don't know your original naming of
FIS...)

So to rephrase my question in much simpler way - what would you teach your
kids about what you consider yourself an expert about?  If you can distill
20% of what you have been talking/writing/debating and make it useful to
your kids, that's what I hope to get from you.

All the best - Jason


On Fri, Jun 27, 2025 at 8:50 AM Paul Suni <paul.p.suni at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Krassimir Markov,
>
> You stated that “...information cannot exist outside of matter and energy,
> while the opposite is not true - matter and energy do not depend on
> information…”  With all due respect, you commit a category mistake typical
> of serious scientists. While there is a scientific consensus that
> information is always accompanied by matter and energy, it is also true
> that matter and energy must always exist in some form, thereby carrying
> information. Formlessness is informative only outside of serious science,
> as a religious concept among spiritual practitioners. I challenge you to
> design a scientific experiment, where matter and energy demonstrably occur
> without form, information. Yours is a good example of the fallacy of the
> conflation of the epistemic and ontic domains of reality - an apparently
> universal mental condition infecting academics.
>
> Cheers,
> Paul
>
>
> On Jun 27, 2025, at 12:51 AM, Krassimir Markov <itheaiss at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> information cannot exist outside of matter and energy, while the opposite
> is not true - matter and energy do not depend on information.
>
>
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