Arquivo para a ‘Information Philosophy’ Categoria
Simplicity and Wisdom
06
Jul
To simplify is not to reduce concepts or things that are naturally profound, among them, love, 
wisdom and knowledge itself are difficult to be treated in a simple way, and should not be seen with simplicity and little wisdom, but it is possible with life and with very concrete examples of everyday life to show and demonstrate what is human knowing.
But in times of post-truth and book access to the production and diffusion of knowledge, the mistakes of simplism and shallow culture can have devastating effects, which does not mean confusing and unnecessarily complexing what is explained or demonstrated.
Just as the reduced knowledge of a given subject or object of study can and usually leads to reductionism, a term used in scientific terms to say that the reduction of complexity did not explain the phenomenon it was proposed to study, is one of the major causes of cultural impoverishment contemporary, to which the Web is only a “medium” of diffusion.
Studies that lead to a better structuring of knowledge such as Ontologies, Semantic Web and now a new dawn of artificial intelligence, undoubtedly lead to further progress in human thought and scientific knowledge.
It is necessary, it is emphasized to not complicate beyond what is necessary and also not to reduce beyond the possible so that the essence of a phenomenon or object of study is not lost when studying it.
In social terms, it is generally imposed by authority much more by the form than indeed by content, the pomp that has certain knowledge does not necessarily mean the wisdom or depth of knowledge, often change the form by the content.
Thus, if some deity or supreme wisdom were among us, it would scarcely be recognized, as in Christian culture, the biblical passage from Mark 6: 3 reflects: “This man is not the carpenter, son of Mary, brother of James, of Joseph, of Judas and of Simon? Your sisters do not live here with us? “And they were scandalized by him.” Do not be scandalized by simplicity, but precisely by the absence of it among those who arrogate knowledge and wisdom”.
Unity, complexity and simplicity
04
Jul
Apparently irreconcilable, some say that the paradigm of the contemporary world, complexity is
opposed to simplicity, but let us analyze this interpretation of Edgar Morin’s thinking much better by saying “… part of the phenomena, at the same time, complementary, competing and antagonistic , respects the diverse coherences that unite in dialogical and polylogical and, with this, faces the contradiction by several routes.
Thus, it uses the basic concept of a complex self-organized system “(Morin, 2000, p. 387), which refers to the idea of unity as a key notion. This complexity necessitates new strategies and coherent modes of dialogue to penetrate the mysteries, notes Morin: “(…) necessity, in their coherence and their antagonism, nations of order, disorder and organization obliges us to respect complexity physical, biological, human “(Morin 2000, pp. 180-181).
Understanding the complexity of the culture that involves it: juvenilization, cerebralization, Culturalization, which is explained in one of his basic books The lost paradigm and human nature, whose Portuguese edition is 1973.
Although there are other ideas of complexity, Morin says that the word complexity: “pushes us to explore everything and complex thinking is the thought that, armed with principles of order, laws, algorithms, certainties, clear ideas, patrol in the fog the uncertain , the confused, the Unspeakable “(MORIN, 2000, pp. 180-181).
The idea that complexity can not coexist with simplicity is the incomprehension not only of the dialogic, but of the polylogical one that consolidates and unites the two concepts: “to distinguish and make communicate, instead of isolating and disjoining, to recognize the singular traits, original, historical facts of the phenomenon rather than linking them purely and simply to determinations or general laws, to conceiving of multiplicity-unity … “(MORIN, 2000, p.354).
This alternative of unity in diversity is explained by the author using examples in the biological field, which is in practice the exercise of simplicity, where the diversity of nature composes life.
MORIN, E. Ciência com consciência (Science with conscience). Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand, 2000
History of the algorithm
07
May
The idea that we can solve problems by proposing a finite number of 
interactions between several tasks (or commands as they are called in computing languages) for several problems originates in Arithmetic.
Although the machine of Charles Babbage (1791-1871) and George Boole’s (1815-1864) Algebra make a huge contribution to modern computers, most logicians and historians of the birth of the digital world agree that the problem of fact was raised by David Hilbert’s second problem (1962-1943) at a 1900 conference in Paris.
Among 23 problems for mathematics to solve, some recently solved such as Goldbach’s Conjecture (see our post), and others to solve, the second problem was to prove that arithmetic is consistent, free from any internal contradiction.
In the 1930s, two mathematical logicians, Kurt Gödel (1906-75) and Gerhard Gentzen (1909-1945) proved two results that called new attention to the problem proposed, both referring to Hilbert, so in fact, there is the origin of the question, roughly, if an enumerable problem is solved by a finite set of steps.
In fact, Gentzen’s solution was a proof of the consistency of Peano’s axioms, published in 1936, showing that the proof of consistency can be obtained in a system weaker than the Zermelo-Fraenkel theory, used axioms of primitive recursive arithmetic , and is therefore not general proof.
The proof of the inconsistency of arithmetic, called Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem, is more complete and shows that some proof of the consistency of Peano’s axioms can be developed without this arithmetic itself.
This theorem states: if the only acceptable proof procedures are those that can be formalized within arithmetic, then Hilbert’s problem can not be solved, in other more direct form, if the system is complete or consistent.
There are polemics raised about these results, such as Kreisel (1976) who argued that the proofs were syntactic for semantic problems, Detlefsen (1990) who says that the theorem does not prohibit the existence of a proof of consistency, and Dawson (2006) that the proof of consistency is erroneous using the evidence given by Gentzen and Gödel himself in 1958 work.
The controversies aside, Kurt Gödel’s participation in the important Vienna circle in the 1920´s before the war exploded, and the subsequent discussions of his theorem by Alain Turing (1912-1954) and Claude Shannon (1916-2001) underline its importance for the history of algorithms and modern digital computer.
Desconstruction is not destruction
28
Feb
While the lay public thinks of the so-called postmodern malaise; or the non-being of postmodernity, since it only declares non-existences, absences and impossibilities, it is ultimately the recognition that is already in postmodernity, that something must be overcome.
But this new type of nihilism, the misleading and sometimes superficial understanding of deconstruction is not destruction, let alone “the end of history,” since it is always affirming, as in our previous posts, within Anglo-Saxon thought the the connection of deconstruction with literature and the way of reflecting Munslow’s historiographical work.
On the writing of history does not mean that it can not be performed to inform us the reading of Balzac helps to understand revolutionary France and antimonarchic thinking, as well as on the past and the mythical cultures that preceded current ones, part of the structuralist thought helped to understand better what followed the thought of modernity,.
So even in Anglo-Saxon thought deconstruction is a way of reflecting on historiographical work, on the process of transforming evidence and information from history into history, but it is now inevitable the historical questioning, the current work of historians to understand and explain the past through evidence facts, will help build the future.
If there is a clear demand for change, there is a clear need for a change of mentality and thinking about the very way of looking at history, of rereading literature, and especially of pointing out new solid paths to change, understanding deconstruction as destroying culture and favoring the general disinformation is part of the barbarism and not the seed of the ongoing change.
The planetary´s crisis and its origins
28
Nov
Edgar Morin in his book Terra-Pátria explains that the growth of the
planetary place of citizens in modernity, began with the globalization of the globe, which made Cristovão Colombo reach America and Vasco da Gama make the way from the coast of Africa to the Indies, but this was a way of changing the land route through India and China, historically the contempt for “civilized barbarians.”
Morin wrote: “From the beginnings of the planetary age, the themes of the” good savage “and the” natural man “were antidotes, very weak, indeed, to the arrogance and contempt of civilized barbarians. In the eighteenth century, the humanism of the Light attributes to every human being a spirit that is apt to reason and gives it equal rights “(Morin 2003: 26)
The idea that Europe, first London after Paris, and now Germany, would be the most advanced cultures have led to: “Beethoven’s music, Marx’s thought, the message of Victor Hugo and Tolstoy address the whole of humanity. Progress seems to be the great law of human evolution and history “(idem), but did it really involve the globe, or was it a time of colonial wars, then two great wars and still a process of doubtful development.
We leapt up and in the postwar period, confidence re-emerged: “Great hopes for a new world of peace and justice came to fruition with the destruction of Nazism, in oblivion or ignorance that the Red Army was bringing liberation, but another bondage, and that colonialism had resumed its action in Africa and Asia “(Morin, 2003, 32).
Quoting the Gulf War and Kuwait War (1990 and 1991), they have shown that: “The collapse of Eastern totalitarianism will not long hide the problems of economy, society, and civilization in the West, will not reduce the problems of the third (Morin, 2003: 32), showing a line of fracture in the Middle East and the Arab world, the book is a prior one but one can cite the question of the Syria and North Korea, current fractures.
Morin brings to the future now full of problems: “But the truth is that world history has resumed its turbulent march, running to an unknown future, at the same time that it returns to a vanished past” (Morin 2003: 33). calls this phase of democlean: “In 1945, the Hiroshima bomb made the age of planetary iron enter a democran´s phase.” (idem).
It pointed well before the world crisis of returning to nationalism in the elections, that this was already in Morin, he pointed out well before the world crisis of returning to nationalism in the elections, that this was already in Morin: “In a dialogical made world between the forces of cultural, civilizational, psychic, social and political integration and disintegration, the economy itself became increasingly globalized more and became more and more fragile; thus, the economic crisis that arose in 1973 from a shortage of oil goes through several avatars without being really solved.” (Morin, 2003, 34)
Arte ideal, representação e revelação
24
Nov
To see one thing one has to see beyond the apparent, that is, what Rancière
has already called (see in the previous post) of double vision, which means to see two things at the same time, is “not a matter of trompe l’oeil or effects. It is a problem of relations between the surface of the exposition of the forms and the inscription surface of the words” (Ranciere, 2003, p.89) and therefore can not be a play of illusions, or that idealist painting seeks the ideal of forms under immediacy of presence, that style of “dead nature” or “scenes of customs.”
This art which aimed at re-presentation or re-veil-action, we note well the etymology of these words that give them a more correct sense, that is, of renewing the presence and the other, of renewing the veil that covers the image, to see, therefore, it is not the “mediation of the words that configure the regime of the” mediaticisms” of presence.” (Rancière, 2003, p.89).
The imaginary, the playful and the spiritual escaped for a long time, but a revival began again with Kandinski, Henri Matisse and other more contemporary Pablo Picasso, Miró, a classic example was Matisse’s Dance II (in pincture), whose idea of the painting would have arisen from a dance of the roda called “The Sardana” of the south of France, and was commissioned by its Russian patron Sergei Schukin, to be exposed in the Palace of Trubetskoy next to another work of Matisse “The Music”.
The sinuous dance in which the movement is transported to the bodies and legs is intentional to affirm the involvement of the dancers, and this representation in a circle becomes an eternal presentation and the re-enlightenment becomes an unveiling, that is, to remove the veil of what is hidden and therefore the nakedness of the bodies, which the patron Sergei would have disagreed at first, but after seeing the sketch would have changed at the beginning, that is, it is not the nudity but of the signification that has the dance that is the harmonious involvement of the dancers.
The ideal of form becomes forms of ideals, what Matisse himself said to look for in his art: “My sleep is to realize an art of balance, purity and serenity.”
The perfect interaction between these dancers is not an idealism, but the search for interaction between people, peoples and cultures, the dream of Matisse.
There is a time of blindness, not only in the world of culture and as a consequence of art, but also social, political and even religious blindness, what José Saramago describes in his “Blindness Essay” by a driver who suddenly stands blind in a sign, in this the author seeks to remind us “the responsibility of having eyes when others have lost them.”
Art is a wonderful way to make us see and recover the lucidity, serenity and balance that are lacking to this day, while being bold and purposeful.
RANCIÈRE, J. O destino das imagens. Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto, 2003.
Inform before knowing and knowing
07
Nov
In times of cultural crisis, information is abundant and not always true, knowledge
is limited and wisdom is scarce.
Although it is common sense that for knowledge it is necessary to inform, little is known about what is information, and little knowledge time little chance to become wisdom, then overflows the “maxims” (sentences made out of context), self-help (name unfit for self-knowledge) and fundamentalism, misery of philosophy.
There are many possibilities for information, but if we consider it as a present in the life of beings, then a definition refers to the origin of the word in Latin stem (information-) of the nominative (informatio): (delineate or conceive idea) is understood as giving shape or molding in the mind, where it is in-form, being is ontological informationn (see example in Picture).
However, this format is in language, idioms or some form of signs this information already exists, and this relation has a semiotic root given by Beyno-Davies where the multifaceted concept of information is explained in terms of signs and systems of signs- signals.
For him, there are four interdependent levels, or layers of semiotics: programmatic, semantic, syntax, and empirical (or experimental, which I prefer because it is not empiricism).
While Pragmatics is concerned with the purpose of communication, Semantics is concerned with the meaning of a message conveyed in a communicative act (which generates an ontology) and Syntax is concerned with the formalism used to represent a message.
The publication of Shannon-Weaver information in 1948, entitled The Mathematical Theory of Communication is one of the foundations of information theory where information not only has a technical but also a measure of meaning and can be called a signal only.
It was Michael Reddy who observed that ” signs ” of mathematical theory are ‘patterns that can be changed’, in this sense are codes, where the message contained in the sign must express the ability to ‘choose from a set of possible messages’, not having meaning, since it must be “decoded” among the possibilities that exist.
It must have a certain amount of signals to be able to overcome the uncertainty of the transmitted signal, it will be known if the ratio between signal and noise (present in the encoding and transmission of the signal) is relevant and the degree of entropy has not destroyed the transmitted signal.
The theory of communication analyzes the numerical measure of the uncertainty of a result, so it tends to use the concept of information entropy, generally attributed to Claude Shannon.
Knowledge is one where information has already been realized ontologically.
Consciousness and information
31
Oct
The EBICC event receives today (October 31) the lecture by Gregory Chaitin,
mathematician and computer scientist who re-presented Gödel’s Incomplete Theoremis considered to be one of the founders of what is today known as Kolmogorov (or Kolmogorov-Chaitin) complexity together with Andrei Kolmogorov and Ray Solomonoff. Today, algorithmic information theory is a common subject in any computer science curriculum.
Abstract:
He make a review applications of the concept of conceptual complexity or algorithmic information in physics, mathematics, biology, and even the human brain, and propose building the universe out of information and computation rather than matter and energy, which would be a world view much friendlier to discussions of mind and consciousness than permitted by traditional materialism.
The foundations of his thinking is showed in the book: Meta Math!: The Quest for Omega (Pantheon Books 2005) (reprinted in UK as Meta Maths: The Quest for Omega, Atlantic Books 2006.
A constant and a possible Nobel of Physics
28
Aug
Constantino Tsallis (1943-), of the Santa Fe Institute is a Greek who is in Brazil, 
and is a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Physics this year, he also has brazilian and arngetine nationalities, as he likes to say: “he and the fans of Flamengo (big soccer club in Brazil) hope for this Nobel of Physics “.
He reworked Boltzmann’s constant to the point of making it more generic, more applicable, and about to change its name (or create a more general constant) called Tsallis.
The Boltzmann constant (k or kB) is the physical constant that relates temperature and energy to molecules, kMols as we have learned (or not) in physics classes.
The name is due to the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906), who made the most important contributions to statistical mechanics (even being considered its founder), in which its constant has a fundamental role. Its experimental value, in SI units, determined in 2002, is:
K = 1.3806503. 10 ^ -23 J / K
The simplest way to arrive at the Boltzmann constant is to divide the constant of the perfect gases by the constant of Avogadro.
But the contribution does not stop there, the most important concept that comes from physics is that of entropy, and together with Maxwell (although they have never worked together), they constituted what is called the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution to visualize the particle velocity distribution At different temperatures.
Constantine Tsallis, a Greek-American physicist who currently works in Brazil, in reviewing Boltzmann’s constant, he says only for the beauty of the equations,
Formulated in 1988 by Constantine Tsallis as a basis for generalizing standard statistical mechanics, it can be said almost to refound, it is a generalization of the Boltzmann-Gibbs Entropy, since Gibbs’s Particullah has recently been confirmed experimentally and is also a fundamental result For Standard Physics.
The physical relevance of Tsallis ‘theory is already widely debated in the world of physical literature, but it has been only in the past decade that researchers have shown that Tsallis’ mathematics more accurately describes power law behaviors in a wide range of phenomena, The turbulence of fluids to the fragments created in the collisions of high-energy particles.
Constantino Tsallis is a candidate for the Nobel of Physics and will attend the EBICC on EBICC da USP-SP-Brazil.
