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It seems to me that information is a much bigger area than that
limited definition:
(John K. wrote:)
1. Information is the property of scientists (and the like). Nature runs
automatically and all of its effective processes can be described as conforming
to absolute information, i.e., immutable laws that apply everywhere.
Not all aspects of nature "run automatically". Only the aspects
that are simple, interacting with other simple aspects. As soon as complexity is
involved, I think automatic activity is joined by other behaviors that cannot be
seen as "automatic". Complex systems seem to convert natural phenomena into
"information".
A gazelle that sees a certain kind of motion in the brush, on an
African plain, is going to react to that "information". There is no way to
predict whether that particular gazelle will interpret the information as a
lioness closing in or as something else. It depends on the visual accuity of the
gazelle, the past experience of the gazelle, how well integrated it's brain
and its body are, whether the gazelle is healthy or injured, and so on, ad
infinitum. Information would be a word to describe the change
undergone by phenomena as soon as they are perceived by-- and become a
causal agent to-- an organism. Even a single celled phytoplankton has
abilities to detect certain aspects of its environment. Temperature, light,
salinity, and so forth... those things may be simple phenomena but as soon as
they are perceived by a complex system and they act as a causal agent in ways
that are not direct, then I would call that information.
Information implies a relationship has formed; a
relationship that has effects on that system. Information flows back and
forth from being mere phenomena to being "information" depending on the system
that is reacting to any given phenomenon. The more complex an organism
is, the more evidence of information acting on it you will be able to document.
Some things in nature are automatic, but many are not. Complexity again seems to
be the threshold.
Judith
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, February 02, 2004 6:36
PM
Subject: Re: [ROSEN] Reductionism and
information
Judith,
This relates to the comments I made in response to
Jim's #9 statement; essentially that nature is built on modeling relations. As
such, RR was saying that information (one way of thinking about the formal
model) is as real as hard matter. In fact the two are always in relationship,
from humans to quantum particles. I like to say "it goes all the way down with
the turtles." OK, that's one discussion, but assuming we get past that,
then...
The problem of information isn't so much that scientists don't
think it exists. It is more subtle. There are two exclusions I can think
of:
The laws constitute information that a scientist can learn regarding
how nature operates. Specific behaviours are the result of these general laws
of behavior operating together on the results of previous changes in material
arrangement. Seemingly new behaviours and surprising events are nothing more
than the combination of events over time, and so are fully predictable in
theory, except for practical limits. Uncertainty exists only in knowledge,
although QM had a brief romance with uncertainty as a property of nature.
Generally physicists want to get rid of that and get back to a deterministic
framework, even if in multiple dimensions. Theories of everything basically
try to get that to work by inventing enough rigid dimensions and rigid laws so
that information can be causally effective only in the mind of the scientist,
or when the universe was "set in motion."
2. If information that
operates everywhere, all the time can explain the eventual occurence of
specific events, then no other kind of information is needed other than time.
Time thus becomes an important factor in determining what can happen.
Information about the present arrangement of a system, its organization, would
be superflous except in the classroom. All we need is the initial state, the
natural laws, and the time that has elapsed. Hence, nature is passive with
regard to general laws and time and insensitive to local information about
present organization. It is thus unconscious. One can then say that any
information in nature is reducible either to general laws operating over time,
or to material arrangements themselves, this second kind of information being
causally inert. No "local" laws are permitted, i.e., no local information is
allowed to be causally effective.
These positions allowed a method of
scientific discovery of general laws. But otherwise it condemns local
information as superflous, or at best a poor surrogate for knowing the
general case. But they clearly fall apart with regard to any conscious beings.
For example, knowing about the existence of a mountain gorilla (or his seeing
you) cannot be said to change what then happens, and hence everything is
pre-ordaned. We get a fatalistic and amoral view that is ultimately
depressing. Whether the gorilla is avoided, killed, protected, photographed,
etc. must be the result of natural laws working themselves out passively in
complicated ways, and apparent response to environmental stimuli is part of
that. My eyes pick up light signals and cause responses in my brain which
govern other responses and behaviors, etc. and what I do is fully constructed
from all these physical interactions working out intricately but mechanically.
There is no intervening novelty in this view, no true decisions that alter the
mechanical course of events, only apparent ones. If there were any true
intervention, we would be invoking an intervening God with intentions,
purposes, desires, etc. Of course defending this view involves a lot of arm
waving to assert that everything can be explained by enough retrospective
story telling of a mechanical nature, and ridiculing anyone who believes in
God or themselves; but it is clearly ludicrous with respect to any real-world
experience (which is what science was originally invented to
explain).
RR's escape from this seems too easy. Account for function.
That's it. It ends the stupidity. But it also messes up a very neat little
game that was very useful for explaining certain kinds of systems that have
everything to do with what is NOT our reality (something most people want to
avoid anyway).
I personally think it should be possible to make some
headway in terms of information, simply because the term has been legitimized
by computer science - something that did come out of the mechanistic view and
is thus respected. There are too many analogies in information systems that
utilize local information, fractals that are built specifically on the idea of
informing themselves from current organization of the system, etc. Despite the
fact that mental activity should be obvious to thinkers, it is the mechanical
metaphores for information that seem to be convincing as they retain the
distant hope that someday it still can be all tied back to some passive result
of natural law acting over time, with a fixed beginning and a pre-determined
end. My prediction: The "beginning" will turn out to be the beginning of this
perceptual illusion (including time) and the end will turn out to be the
abandoning of it, as in the idea of renunciation or transcendence in Eastern
religions. There is no universal beginning or ending, only a personal one. The
world we can experience has only relative time scales, no absolute time. It is
thus infinite in the absolute, while finite in local perception. That much can
even be shown as a mechanistic possibility.
OK, I admit, it was a
sermon. My apologies.
JJK
Judith Rosen wrote:
John M. makes some insightful comments in his comparison of what we can prove the existence of with current technology and what we may be missing-- which doesn't mean what we are missing is "non-existent". As he pointed out, and as my father asserted in his work: human sensory perceptions are much more limited than the universe. We know that now, because we developed technologies that can reveal the existence of ultraviolet light or radiation or the difference between odorless gasses..... Yet science balks at the notion there all sorts of THINGS have an impact on the material world-- "Things" that science says don't "exist" according to a reductionistic paradigm of "proof". When it is pointed out just how many things we take for granted would not exist if reductionist proof was required, the whole notion seems ridiculous! Yet, my father was attacked for making SCIENTIFIC assertions about the existence of things that we cannot prove in any traditional, material
, reductionist sense.
Information is one example. Everyone knows that information exists. Everyone knows that information has causes and effects, just as any tangible matter-based thing does.... And most can recognize the difference between "data" and "information". Information has causal effects. Knowing about something can alter the behavior of a system even when the system never encounters the "thing" itself. In a way, the relationships between material parts in a complex system are partly made up of information-- as in a hormone feedback loop or temperature regulation or some other maintainance behavior of a cell. Anticipatory behavior is one of the manifestations of this kind of relationship.
>From this point of view, I suppose that anticipation is partly an organism's reaction to "awareness" on some level of something that needs to be prevented... Trying to photosynthesize during winter is difficult in areas that get cold, so a mode of preparing for other ways of spending the period of time that it will be cold is what a Maple tree does in autumn. The tree isn't "thinking". It isn't making decisions. The word "awareness" is not quite accurate, but is there another word that conveys the impact of information on a system? "Connectedness", perhaps? The behavior I'm referring to is an evolved reaction to its connectedness to information and time. The information is about the change of daylength and temperature and the reference is about the future (as in "it will get cold soon"). Attempting photosynthesize during winter is something that the organism doesn't experience directly. It has acted on the information about the timechange so that it doesn't happen. It isn't
a problem. The fact that a tree isn't "thinking" is obvious. The behaviors can be interfered with: A Maple tree that is living in a pot inside a house is going to behave differently than one growing outside in upstate NY as October progresses. Why? Because it's getting different "information" in its feedback relationships. The feedback doesn't correspond to the evolved relationships. We do this to plants all the time. There are huge businesses based on the ability to do this (Pointsettia, anyone?). And yet science says the whole concept doesn't exist?
My father referred to internal "models" with differing time scales. This is one aspect of his work that I don't entirely comprehend. But he saw behaviors that were based on something immaterial and he was developing explanations that made sense. Clearly, time and information are two things that have effects on living systems.
Judith
-----Original Message-----
From: John M <***>
Sent: Feb 2, 2004 3:09 PM
To: ***
Subject: Re: [ROSEN] Theory of Everything, determinism
Dan, I try... will write into your text below
John
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Fiscus" <***>
To: <***>
Sent: Monday, February 02, 2004 11:24 AM
Subject: Re: Theory of Everything, determinism
John M.,
I am not sure I follow you. Do you really believe in
perfect causal determinism? Is this the same as a
closed system, as in closed deterministic past, present,
future? I believe in open determinism (oxymoron?) or
open causality, as in true novelty, surprise, new laws
all can be born, emerge, arise any where, at any scale,
at any time.
[JM]:
Aha, you assign the reductionistic limited "causalism" to me.
What I state is: things happen triggered (instigated) by some
effect as interaction from outside vs. inside changes/givens.
Nothing happens "by itself - in other words. It IS sort of an
"open determinism" (not an oxymoron, rather a new thing)
with NO WAY to list ALL possible (potential) instigations.
Call it "cause" if you like. Unlimited of them.
We have a firmer knowledge of the past than of the future, it
is the result that we may (perhaps!) list a retrograde path of
a happening (in our reductionistic terms) more or less firmly,
but cannot incorporate the unlimited possibilities that work on
further changes - so you use the words "all can be born, emerge,"
I may call it deterministically occur without our pre-knowledge
of the routes of future exact changes hitting a (changing) system
by all (changing) factors in a changing world. So "emerge" it is.
That's my "open causality".
True novelty? We (I think it can be risked: "nobody") can predict
especially not by a sane human mind how organizational/structural
potentials, vulnerabilities, stability or rearrangement-trends WILL
change "in the future" by effects not restricted to boundaries of
reductionistic models we consider. Similarly NOBODY can predict
the changes in the wholeness as it "lives" on, so we may be up to
surprizes. That is expressed in the difference between past and future.
You called it "true novelty", I call it "unexpectable in human ways".
Also, if you say there are other universes beyond our
reach, what pragmatic good are they or talk about
them? If no interaction at all, either direction, is this
not the same as "non-existent" in practical matters?
[JM]:
for certain physicists: yes. They did not compare our so
'defined' "existent world" with the cognitive inventories as
defined "existent" in 1000AD, or 1000BC, nor did they
extrapolate to 3000AD (!) for that matter. Do you call really
non-existent what we don't know about? When? (Maybe it is
necessary, but insufficient!). In my narrative (naive ontology)
I allow information even influences to 'universes' towards ours,
even if we have no (info or influence) into theirs, not even
any information *about* their existence. (Today).
In my narrative about BigBangs from a Plenitude - unlimited in
number and quality - in a timeless system there may be universes
with capabilities INTO others, or none, systems entirely
different from ours, dimensions beyond our fancy, etc. etc.
I never restrict my speculations to "practical matters" which
may be a euphemism for modelled reductionist science/technology.
I'm no teacher or prophet, don't want to 'convert' an audience,
hence I don't compromise for better understandability. My belief
is not 'their' belief (stands for science).
I skip the rest (my post copied). Iwonder if my expansion was
explanatory or counterproductive.
Cheers
John M
Web address: www.rosen-enterprises.com
Alternate Email: ***
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© 2003 John J. Kineman
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