<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><html lang="de" xml:lang="en" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /><title></title><style type="text/css">html,body{background-color:#fff;color:#333;line-height:1.4;font-family:sans-serif,Arial,Verdana,Trebuchet MS;}</style></head><body><p> </p>
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<p>Jerry LR Chandler wrote on 04.11.2019 03:00 (GMT +01:00):</p>
<blockquote cite="mid:62B6B7C6-82C9-4215-8C07-D59D7F922F35@me.com"><span style="font-size: 15px;">List, </span>
<div ><span style="font-size: 15px;">Hi Annette, </span><br style="font-size: 18px;">
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<div >On Nov 3, 2019, at 4:42 PM, <a href="mailto:annette.grathoff@is4si.org" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">annette.grathoff@is4si.org</a> wrote:</div>
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<div ><span style="caret-color: #333333; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif, Arial, Verdana, 'Trebuchet MS'; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none; float: none; display: inline !important;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> ...</span>where a centralized nervous system and brain analyses signals incoming from many different cells and sub-cellular systems and integrates them into a global feeling which aids as evaluation capacity in decision making. Descartes had to deliberately exclude this topic from the sciences for reasons quite understandable at his times, but today?</span><br style="caret-color: #333333; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif, Arial, Verdana, 'Trebuchet MS'; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; text-decoration: none;"><span style="caret-color: #333333; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif, Arial, Verdana, 'Trebuchet MS'; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none; float: none; display: inline !important;">Is the evaluation capacity and evaluation depth of machines in any way comparable to the one of biological systems or is it a complete new path in the history of prioritizing?</span></div>
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<div style="font-size: 18px;">Thank you for focusing a deeper perspective on the well-worn metaphors about mathematical machines. </div>
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<p>Hi Jerry,</p>
<p>Thank you for your challenging questions! I will do my best to answer them. I hope you allow me to write the answers in a forum-talk-style, because otherwise it would take too much time for conducting a thorough research for references to send you answers in due time, and after all, we are discussing ideas here, too! </p>
<p>What do you think is the role of information-bearing symbols in the possible forms of machines?</p>
<p>--> Symbols directly lead to concepts, where sets of (possible) observations are subsumed. The process of subsumption or more generally conceptualization however is a difficult one to explain classically. Machines have to either do it mechanically (internalized into their structure by a purposeful constructor) or they do it with sensor capacity (again internalized into their spectrum of action by a constructor, thus reflecting his purpose). In the latter case they generate a signal as their own symbol from a threshold process. In machines looking at the Phase-Locked-Loop (PLL) principle gave me some insights how internalized signal generation works. I think considering that there exist so many different processes of selection and subsumption in nature, it is the most complex step in information processing. If your question was instead directed at information-carrying symbols which have machine-like function, like bistable biochemical molecules which can fit a receptor and act as signal in one state and not fit the receptor and be ignored in another state, please restate the question. </p>
<p>Is there a truth function that connects abstract machines to the logic of reality?</p>
<p>--> The only “truth function” of machines and apparatuses I am familiar with is the one in the mind of their constructors which gives them their purpose of acting. Interestingly there have been some cases of apparent “malfunctions” which have surprisingly been appreciated subsequently by human intentional selectors of functionality although not being intended from the construction. In the two cases I know of spontaneously, the “happy malfunction” happened because of “misscaling” in instructions given to the machine (the discovery of terry cloth by misscaled loop size and the discovery of conching in chocolate manufacture by miscalling the duration for pressing cocoa beans). I think that many inventions might go back to the recognition of value in initially disdained degrees of freedom in giving instructions to machines. But generally malfunctions are not seen as functional in machines and are corrected due to “purposeful” real function as expected by their constructors. Coming to more complex machines (especially those with CPUs) however there seems to be a kind of “truth function”-analogue internalized in the machine giving it an internal mechanism + standard to correct errors by comparing results of processes with the internal standard; but it cannot develop inside, the machine doesn´t sense its state, it registers the order represented by the signal.</p>
<p>(Is this [the truth function, I assume] the constraint that you believe Descartes declined to address?) The bipolarity of Quantum theory (QED) seems to address your issues from a sub-atomic perspective. Or have I misinterpreted your intended meaning?</p>
<p>--> A little misinterpretation might come to it, since I had in mind more the political reasons for his grave decision than the idealistic and epistemic reasons. If there hadn´t been a clear cut between “responsibilities” of science to care for materialist descriptions of the world and the church to care for mind-related, i.e. metaphysical descriptions of the world, maybe science would not have been allowed to come as far as it did.</p>
<p>Numerous scientific symbol systems are used routinely in the everyday pragmatism of doing science of reality. Why? Why so many different symbol systems? Are numerous symbol systems actually necessary for human communication of information?</p>
<p>--> I don´t know. My guess would be that this keeps happening because of the difficult nature of subsumption and conceptualization processes (as basis for selectivity)? Maybe because such processes never can happen completely objectively, since the context in which a subsumption process is taking place and is leading to an end acts on the signal/symbol with which this end is represented? As an individual one can adapt ones conceptualization to the symbols already available in the community, but if somebody has worked outside the community set of symbols for too long (or didn´t learn to use it, e.g. autodidacts coming from different fields originally), it is a longsome process to learn all the conventions. I think in some cases the process was seen as too cumbersome for several reasons, so redundancies were kept. Sometimes it makes sense to have everyday concepts alongside more precise concepts and their respective symbols for different applications (think of the Kelvin scale and the Celsius scale; and then there are other scales kept for historical reasons like the Fahrenheit scale…). Additionally there is a possibility that “translating” concepts of one school into common concepts of the community or even concepts of another school is assumed to be not possible at all. The question of how much redundancy in symbols is helpful or detrimental is often discussed in the literature. I haven´t found a general answer so far.</p>
<p>Can you imagine one “machine language” that could serve to communicate information, irrespective of the particular scientific symbols used by humans?</p>
<p>--> Hardly. I think even if relations between numbers and mathematical/ topological objects could explain our world, it would be impossible to translate computational results back into a symbolic language understandable by humans which could be less complex than the world we are experiencing. The computation is not the main problem the problem I see as critical is the reading out of the gained information. In the movie Matrix there is a scene where the operator says that he can “see” the world which people in their form as matrix components experience by looking at the code from an outside perspective only. I always doubted that this is possible…but on the other side my imagination is limited here. My math professor claimed he could see the geometry/dynamics by just looking at the algebra equations! Maybe some people have this kind of imagination-abstraction capacity.</p>
<p>The writings of C S Peirce (breath and comprehension as properties of information) and of J S Mills (homeopathic and heteropathic representational structures of emergence) seem to lurking in the philosophic ether that motivates these distinctions.</p>
<p>W.R.T </p>
<p><span style="font-size: 16px;">Is the evaluation capacity and evaluation depth of machines in any way comparable to the one of biological systems or is it a complete new path in the history of prioritizing?</span></p>
<p>It is possible to give a logically rigorous path that connects heteropathic scientific antecedents to emergent heteropathic consequences by numerical paths. Such a path embraces the notion of mappings between scientific notations and correspondence between the logical terms of scientific notations. I published a short paper on this in a conference proceedings a couple of years ago; the thread of logic is by extension of scale and by abductive scopes of meanings of propositional terms.</p>
<p>--> Sounds interesting! Can you please link to the proceedings article or send it to me?</p>
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<p>Cheers</p>
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<p>Jerry</p>
<p>-->Thank you and best wishes to you and to the whole list of FIS members,</p>
<p>Annette</p>
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