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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#44546A'>Dear Stan, <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#44546A'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#44546A'>I sometimes become confused by your word usage.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#44546A'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:9.5pt'>S: Well, I have generalized the Shannon concept of information carrying capacity under 'variety'... {variety {information carrying capacity}}. This allows the concept to operate quite generally in evolutionary and ecological discourses. <span style='color:#44546A'><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#44546A'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#44546A'>I can easily follow that Shannon-type information (uncertainty) can be considered as variety. “Information” and “variance” are very close concepts, but variance measurement assumes normality of the distribution.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#44546A'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#44546A'>It seems to me that the carrying capacity of a communication channel is determined by the maximum information content H(max) = log(N), whereas the information content H = - Sigma p(i) log p(i). (The difference is also the redundancy.)<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#44546A'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:9.5pt'>Information, then, if you like, is what is left after a reduction in variety, or after some system choice. <span style='color:#44546A'><o:p></o:p></span></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#44546A'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#44546A'>This is no longer Shannon’s, but Bateson’s definition, isn’t it? One could also say that this is the “meaningful information” selected as a signal from the noise (Shannon-type information that is not yet meaningful).<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#44546A'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:9.5pt'>Consider dance: we have all the possible conformations of the human body, out of which a few are selected to provide information about the meaning of a dance.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#44546A'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#44546A'>The example is perhaps confusing. Is the system of reference the dance or us giving meaning to the dance? It seems to me that the concept of “meaning” merits a discussion of its own. Some (Bateson-type) information is more meaningful than other; Shannon-type information is defined as meaningless.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#44546A'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#44546A'>Best,<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#44546A'>Loet<o:p></o:p></span></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:9.5pt'>STAN</span><o:p></o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:9.5pt'>STAN</span><o:p></o:p></p></div></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><o:p> </o:p></p><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'>On Fri, Sep 11, 2015 at 8:22 AM, Pedro C. Marijuan <<a href="mailto:pcmarijuan.iacs@aragon.es" target="_blank">pcmarijuan.iacs@aragon.es</a>> wrote:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'>Dear Steven and FIS colleagues,<br><br>Many thanks for this opening text. What you are proposing about a pretty<br>structured discussion looks a good idea, although it will have to<br>confront the usually anarchic discussion style of FIS list! Two aspects<br>of your initial text have caught my attention (apart from those videos<br>you recommend that I will watch along the weekend).<br><br>First about the concerns of a generation earlier (Shannon, Turing...)<br>situating information in the intersection between physical science and<br>engineering. The towering influence of this line of thought, both with<br>positive and negative overtones, cannot be overestimated. Most attempts<br>to enlarge informational thought and to extend it to life, economies,<br>societies, etc. continue to be but a reformulation of the former ideas<br>with little added value. See one of the last creatures: "Why Information<br>Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies" (2015), by Cesar<br>Hidalgo (prof. at MIT).<br><br>In my opinion, the extension of those classic ideas to life are very<br>fertile from the technological point of view, from the "theory of<br>molecular machines" for DNA-RNA-protein matching to genomic-proteomic<br>and other omics' "big data". But all that technobrilliance does not<br>open per se new avenues in order to produce innovative thought about the<br>information stuff of human societies. Alternatively we may think that<br>the accelerated digitalization of our world and the cyborg-symbiosis of<br>human information and computer information do not demand much brain<br>teasing, as it is a matter that social evolution is superseding by itself.<br><br>The point I have ocasionally raised in this list is whether all the new<br>molecular knowledge about life might teach us about a fundamental<br>difference in the "way of being in the world" between life and inert<br>matter (& mechanism & computation)---or not. In the recent compilation<br>by Plamen and colleagues from the former INBIOSA initiative, I have<br>argued about that fundamental difference in the intertwining of<br>communication/self-production, how signaling is strictly caught in the<br>advancement of a life cycle (see paper "How the living is in the<br>world"). Life is based on an inusitate informational formula unknown in<br>inert matter. And the very organization of life provides an original<br>starting point to think anew about information --of course, not the only<br>one.<br><br>So, to conclude this "tangent", I find quite exciting the discussion we<br>are starting now, say from the classical info positions onwards, in<br>particularly to be compared in some future with another session (in<br>preparation) with similar ambition but starting from say the<br>phenomenology of the living. Struggling for a<br>convergence/complementarity of outcomes would be a cavalier effort.<br><br>All the best--Pedro<br><br><br><br>Steven Ericsson-Zenith wrote:<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'>...The subject is one that has concerned me ever since I completed my PhD in 1992. I came away from defending my thesis, essentially on large scale parallel computation, with the strong intuition that I had disclosed much more concerning the little that we know, than I had offered either a theoretical or engineering solution. <br>For the curious, a digital copy of this thesis can be found among the reports of CRI, MINES ParisTech, formerly ENSMP, <a href="http://www.cri.ensmp.fr/classement/doc/A-232.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.cri.ensmp.fr/classement/doc/A-232.pdf</a>, it is also available as a paper copy on Amazon.<br><br>Like many that have been involved in microprocessor and instruction set/language design, using mathematical methods, we share the physical concerns of a generation earlier, people like John Von Neumann, Alan Turing, and Claude Shannon. In other words, a close intersection between physical science and machine engineering.<br><br>...I will then discuss some historical issues in particular referencing Benjamin Peirce, Albert Einstein and Alan Turing. And finally discuss the contemporary issues, as I see them, in biophysics, biology, and associated disciplines, reaching into human and other social constructions, perhaps touching on cosmology and the extended role of information theory in mathematical physics...<br><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>Fis mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Fis@listas.unizar.es" target="_blank">Fis@listas.unizar.es</a><br><a href="http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis" target="_blank">http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis</a><br> <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><br><br>-- <br>-------------------------------------------------<br>Pedro C. Marijuán<br>Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group<br>Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud<br>Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)<br>Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X<br>50009 Zaragoza, Spain<br>Tfno. <a href="tel:%2B34%20976%2071%203526" target="_blank">+34 976 71 3526</a> (& 6818)<br><a href="mailto:pcmarijuan.iacs@aragon.es" target="_blank">pcmarijuan.iacs@aragon.es</a><br><a href="http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/" target="_blank">http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/</a><br>-------------------------------------------------<br><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>Fis mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Fis@listas.unizar.es" target="_blank">Fis@listas.unizar.es</a><br><a href="http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis" target="_blank">http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis</a><o:p></o:p></p></div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><o:p> </o:p></p></div></div></body></html>