Thursday, February 23, 2006
The Second School of Semantic Science
ontologyMapping Glass Bead Games
On the limits of the OWL standard à [184]
Reading material [1]
Reading material [2]
Reading material [3]
Summary of the discussion up to this point à [186]
Communication from Judith Rosen about Rosen Relational Theory
Edited
slightly by Paul Prueitt [4]
I agree with others that Shannon's original work was more a mechanical engineering problem/solution than an attempt to generate foundational theory-- that came later. I further agree that "information" is a mind-independent entity:
Clearly, if organismal "soma" can interact with information, it is not something that requires a thought process or even a brain. Consider the nature of living systems, which have a self-defined value for optimality and survival-- both of which would be impossible except in an anticipatory system. Metabolism and repair, the two functional processes which characterize life, are equally anticipatory in nature, and are fully integrated with those systemic values for optimality and survival.
Living systems are partly made up of information; they can be said to have information as components. This should make it clear that, in spite of being a mind-independent entity, information is anything but "objective".
The myth of scientific objectivity is one of the carry-overs from a mechanistic view of the universe. As soon as one is dealing with living systems, one has left the realm of mechanism and must contend with realities that are entirely context-dependent.
Each living organism will have a self-generated value system, which includes such aspects as optimality and which, thereby, determines what is "information" to that system.
The study of semiotics in biology is an attempt to learn the subjectivity peculiar to each organism.
These truths are equally testable, via empirics and experimentation, and would serve you far better in any efforts using a Shannon model. Shannon models pretends that information is a designation as intrinsic to a physical entity as the chemical nature of elements...
The chemical nature of elements is actually far more relational [5] than has been recognized, and the designation of what is information will be entirely relational.
Relational values are critically important in any interaction. They determine the exact nature of the interaction and the ultimate effects resulting from interaction. Small differences in relational values within system organization can generate overwhelming differences between two otherwise identical systems or system behaviors. This is the only way to explain how two allotropes of the same element can be as different from each other in expressed behavior as graphite and diamond.
Judith
[1] http://dip.semanticweb.org/documents/ECIS2005-A-Methodology-for-Deriving-OWL-Ontologies-from-Products-and-Services-Categorization.pdf
[4] Editing is mostly in adding paragraph returns so that less is said in each paragraph.
[5] Editorial comment: the Rosen notion of relational is not the sameAs the Codd notion of relational.