On Thursday, February 13, 2014 8:18:01 AM UTC-5, haitic...@gmail.com wrote:   
   > On Monday, February 10, 2014 10:51:13 AM UTC-5, gghe...@gmail.com wrote:   
   >    
   >,snip previous stuff>   
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   > Yes thanks. I just went over to wikipedia, where the writer was celebrating   
   Shannon as the "father of Information Theory." I added there that he just   
   derived his approach from Leo Szilard. First of all, that's a big omission.   
   Second, I don't think    
   Shannon's Law is a theory of information, at least not a general one. Norbert   
   Wiener, if memory serves, tried to generalize it in his popular writing, along   
   with cybernetics, his term for feedback loops. (The latter term stuck, and   
   cybernetics sounds    
   pompous.) The Wikipedia is largely re-written now, about "information theory."   
   >    
   > Entropy can be defined in restricted systems like statistical mechanics and   
   it's extension to wet chemistry. Though it's interesting that the major role   
   entropy plays in biological tissues like the structure of proteins, DNA,   
   receptor binding, membrane    
   structure, etc. - It's interesting that the theory of entropy in statistical   
   mechanics did not point directly at that truth - it did not "fall out" of the   
   equations and insights about entropy. I believe mathematics sometimes helps,   
   but sometimes obscures.   
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   >    
   >    
   > And if you ask many physical chemists or biochemists what holds a protein   
   together, they will often say, "hydrogen bonds." or the like. I believe that's   
   because we hoomans (after R Crumb) think in terms of forces. You could call   
   this "conceptual    
   injection locking" where a brand new idea just doesn't fit into patterns of   
   thinking, called "paradigms" by California physicists in leisure suits sipping   
   capuccino. Getting back to those love affairs with forces, it's worth noting   
   that really sharp    
   scientists like Schrodinger ("What is Life") and Linus Pauling ("The Nature of   
   the Molecular Bond") were completely fooled by the entropy issue in regards to   
   the structure of DNA. Somehow the vast mathematical armamentum at their   
   disposal did not lead    
   them to the truth, but away from it.    
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   >    
   >    
   > I'm going to go off on a tangent for a moment and mention a bit more about   
   this cognitive dimension, which we can call "conceptual locking of thought."   
   As I tried to make clear, I got into this philosophy of science because I had   
   a few "WTF?" moments    
   over the thinking of medical researchers. But as I investigated this phenom of   
   CLT, it became clear that this is the way politicians and societies do thought   
   control. The story of the last century is a story of those "thought engineers"   
   who grabbed    
   control of peoples' thinking via their techniques. This happened in parallel   
   with the advancement of science in other areas. We have Marx, who concocted a   
   theory of violent revolution with a philosophical justification about the   
   "value of labor." (Marx    
   never worked a day in his life, bumming off relatives. Today we have Rawl's   
   "Social Justice.")   
   >    
   > And another such engineer, Adolf Hitler, said, "The way to control a   
   population is to control their contextual thinking." (weltenschaung) We can   
   think of these people as evil, like criminals, but that ignores their   
   technical accomplishments. They did    
   run the twentieth century as much as science did. And they were just the   
   visible tip of the ice berg. I think we could state their success in terms of   
   a cognitive control, is the point I'm driving at. We are still there.   
   >    
   >    
   >    
   > Getting back to a general theory of information, I dug in my heels over   
   Shannon being portrayed that way - and the Wikipedia has been re-written. The   
   simple idea, that entropy as probability, coming from statistical mechanics,   
   depends on the "context"    
   of the probability. Sure, when you have a vast number of molecules, everything   
   averages out. But when you are claiming "information," simple math expressions   
   have not worked out. First, information (like entropy) is not something you   
   can get a pound of    
   at the store. "Give me a pound of energy" is sorta believable if you don't   
   nit-pick the dimensions, but "Give me a pound of information?" or "Give me a   
   pound of entropy?"    
   >    
   >    
   >    
   > In any case I'm not a big fan of the reductionism of information, due to   
   doubts about the equating of entropy (probability) and information, as well as   
   issues about the relativity of entropy itself, based on the boundary   
   conditions of the closed    
   thermodynamic system in which it is defined. "Information" seems like   
   something that everyone knows what it is, but nobody can define it. I could   
   grant that entropy-probability 'describes' information in a similar way that   
   Newton 'described' gravitation,    
   but I don't see a general theory of 'information' coming out of probability. I   
   may have an "odd" thought, like the moon is made from green cheese, but the   
   information value is not there.   
   >    
   >    
   >    
   > There is a contemporary example of "information as stuff" illusion.   
   Yesterday a friend told me on the phone that he is going to live to 125. Why?   
   Because the docs are sequencing your DNA, and they will tailor their treatment   
   to your profile. There is    
   an army of scientists today who believe this bull shit. The Human Genome   
   project flopped because a worm has about the same dna sequences we do. The   
   Gene jockeys thought there was simple relationship between genes and phenome,   
   like Mendel's peas. What we    
   are, and what hdden epigenetic influences we have, is another discussion.     
   >    
   >    
   >    
   > jb   
      
   Wow, that's quite a rant.     
   I guess my view of science is that though it is a human endeavor (and subject   
   to all the foibles of humanity) it is in the long run self-correcting.   The   
   explanations/ideas that work are the ones that get adopted.     
      
   I read Schrodinger's "What is Life" back in college.  A fun read.  I don't   
   know of anyone else who could put so many ideas into a single sentence.   It   
   would sometimes take me a few minutes of rereading to parse it correctly.  And   
   of course he wasn't    
   even writing in his native language.    
    Hey it's on the web.   
   http://whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf   
   George h.   
       
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)