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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Dear Arturo and FISers,<br>
<br>
The last paragraphs of your chess game, pretty exciting, remind me
strongly on the role that I have been attributing to cellular
signaling systems, and the radical difference they have with
metabolic cellular networks, although finally both are
interrelated into the advancement of a life cycle at the cellular
scale. As I have often commented, it is like reading the newspaper
versus eating a sandwich, or better reading the menu carte versus
devouring it.<br>
<br>
Going back to nervous systems, the approach presented reminds me,
more and more, the work of Kenneth Paul Collins in late 1980s and
early 90s. His work was condensed in : <i>"On the Automation of
Knowledge Within Central Nervous Systems."</i> Unpublished
Manuscript, presented as a poster at the AAAS Meeting in 1991,
Boston. (Sorry Malcolm for giving the "reference" so late). I
talked with him there, and was impressed by his work and kept in
touch with him for several years. With his permission, I
translated it into Spanish, changing some not well-solved aspects
and adding a few more stuff: <i>"El Cerebro Dual: Un
Acercamiento Interdisciplinar a la Naturaleza del Conocimiento
Humano y Biológico" </i>Authors: KP Collins and PC Marijuan,
published by <i>Editorial Hacer, Barcelona (1997)</i>. "The
central principle of Duality Theory [am quoting from Kenneth, p.3]
is that the neural arrays of the vertebrate Central Nervous System
are physically organized so that their functioning will blindly
minimize the sum of the topologically-distributed ratios of
excitation to inhibition that occur within them." <br>
<br>
Many more interesting quotations could be cited. But his
manuscript of more than 100 dense pages did not attract any
attention except a very few parties (essentially, me). He went
down and down and my final indirect news were from some discussion
lists where he was trolling in a sick way. At that time, I had
received some alarming news from himself about his own
deteriorating mental health... (late 90s/early 2000s). <br>
<br>
Anyhow, in 1997 I published <i>"The Topological Inventions of
Life: From the Specialization of Multicellular Colonies to the
Functioning of the Vertebrate Brain."</i> World Futures, 1997.
50. 617-631., where I was summarizing the basic tenets of his
theory, and I have kept mentioning him in some of my publications.
The point is that his work anticipated basic ideas nowadays
developed by Arturo and James, Friston, Sengupta, etc. about CNS
overall optimization principles, entropy/information, symmetries
& antisymmetries, dynamic connectome, learning & trophic
mechanisms, behavioral propensities, etc. He was particularly
great connecting the abstract processing of neural information
with human behavior, learning biases, emotional reactions ("the
prejudice towards the familiar", violence, depression). With
today's' new knowledge, some gaps in those views may be filled in,
and viceversa, we could work and throw a new light upon his great
behavioral insights. That's my personal opinion, of course, that
was not very well received when I tried to talk about with
relevant neuroscientists.<br>
<br>
Well, it was a good occasion to tell this story in the list, that
has always troubled me, and that now finally has found avantgarde
germane developments. <br>
<br>
Best wishes--Pedro <br>
<br>
<i> </i><br>
<br>
El 12/12/2016 a las 16:44, <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:tozziarturo@libero.it">tozziarturo@libero.it</a> escribió:<br>
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<br>
Coming back to our chessboard, this
means that information can be studied in terms of systems’
symmetries and changes
in dimensions, rather than in terms of entropies and energetic
gradient descents.
An object (on an event) embedded in an environment encompasses
a certain amount of information, but such information increases
when you add a further
dimension to the environment (NOTE: non necessarily a spatial
dimension, but also other possible ones, such as an increase of
complexity). Indeed, a
dimension more gives you a coordinate more, and therefore more
information. To make the usual example, the 2D shadow of a
cat encompasses less information than a 3D cat. Some authors
start from a very low number of dimensions (e.g., the
holographic Universe of t’Hooft and Susskind),
others from an high number (claims dating back to Spinoza and
Kant and going through our Universe made of eleven-dimensional
Kaluza-Klein manifolds and subsequent decrease of dimensions,
until our 3D plus time perceivable environment). It does not
matter: when projecting among
levels, information is always a function of the number of
dimensions. <br>
In such a framework, the role of energy is different from the
role of information: the energy is something "injected" from the
external "environment" into the system, in order to produce the
change of coordinates into the system; on the other side, the
changes of information can be detected into the system, and
depend on the energy just indirectly (second-hand). In other
words: <br>
a) the system's change of dimensions dictates the change in
information, while<br>
b) the changes in energy dictate the projective mechanisms that
allow the changes in system's dimensions. <br>
It is a subtle, but foremost difference, that can be highlighted
just taking into account a very general topological framework.
This is one of the examples of the importance of the
topological meta-language in the study of science foundations.
<br>
<br>
Arturo Tozzi<br>
<br>
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<p><br>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
-------------------------------------------------
Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta 0
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:pcmarijuan.iacs@aragon.es">pcmarijuan.iacs@aragon.es</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/">http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/</a>
------------------------------------------------- </pre>
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