CHAPTER 8: INFORMATION THEORY, EVOLUTION THEORY, AND PHILOSOPHY

(selected from Lu's Monograph: Generalized In formation Theory)

Unlike the study of many people who concentrate their efforts on philosophic problems of science, the author's study focuses on scientific problems of philosophy. It shows that not only how science and philosophy are interrelated with each other, but also how philosophic problems might be resolved through science [14]. After careful study of general information, the author has come to a better understanding of aesthetic problems, color-visual problems, and some philosophic problems that he had considered before. This Chapter is a review as well as a conclusion about these problems, with the last section dealing with some questions in generalized information theory that need further discussion.

8.1 The Philosophy about Another Kind of Aims

There is a book entitled ?Philosophy about Aims [15] in which aim is defined as the expected result that already exits in concept before man does something. According to this definition, going to Beijing, entering a university, or buying soy sauce can be an aim, and realizing communism can also be an aim, an ultimate aim. For the moment, let's name such aims rational aims.

Next the aim to be discussed refers to the ultimate pursuit of man or animals. To be more detailed, it implies perceptual behaviors that lead to various pleasant feelings including feelings of beauty and sublimity. For example, eating and

drinking, love-making, game-playing, dancing, fishing, hunting, art appreciating, honor winning, etc. Might be the aims that people might pursue only for themselves without taking them as the way leading to other aims. For the moment we name such aims perceptual aims. According to this definition, the above?mentioned rational aims are only means; for example, entering a university and realizing communism are the means leading to more ideal perceptual aims. Perceptual aims are usually instinctive, long?lasting and unconscious while rational aims are usually acquired, short-lived and conscious. Perceptual aims are the active causes of rational aims, in turn rational aims affect perceptual aims. In the following sections, aim refers to perceptual aim.

Perceptual contents can be classified into two categories. One includes perceptions that only provide information about objective things, such as perceptions of color and sounds. We simply refer them to perceptions. The other includes pleasant and unpleasant feelings, such as feelings of fragrance or stink, of comfort or bitterness, of beauty or ugliness, etc., all of which we simply refer to as feelings. The perceptions mainly affect recognition of objective things while feelings affect man's wills and desires. It can be said that the perceptions are communication signals and the feelings are control signals. The feelings usually occur together with the perceptions. The perceptual aims depend on the feelings.

How man's various perceptual aims, or rather, his mechanisms of various pleasant feelings came into being, and got developed in the processes of his biological evolution and of various activities  This is not merely a biological question, but also a question in control theory as well as in behavioral science or psychology.

About the developments of man's acquired aims, western humanism psychology holds that man's requirements can be divided into several levels, from physiological satisfactions to psychological satisfaction and that requirements on higher level are the natural result of the satisfactions on lower levels.

However, Marx stressed that man's requirements got developed gradually in practice [16] and that man created not only the objects of his practice but also his sense organs that can appreciate the objects [17]. The author extends Marx's idea into biology, believing that it is true not only with the acquired development of his feeling mechanism but also with their innate evolution  [5].

Darwin brought forth the tree of life evolution and Popper came up with the tree of knowledge evolution [18]. Here the author would like to present the tree of aim evolution.

Man's aim is like a big tree, with his existence as the root. All his various other aims came into being and got evolved in the process during which means changed into aims. Drinking, eating and love-making are only the means of man's existence. After means change into ends, all those perceptual activities themselves become aims. For these new aims, perceptual activities such as dancing, fishing and hunting are means. Once these means change into aims, the activities themselves can become enjoyments for man. Man's mechanism of pleasant taste feeling enables him to change eating some foods from the mean (of existence) into an aim; man's pleasant visual and aural feelings enable him to change approaching some objects from the mean into an aim. The statements about those means changes into aims can also be found in Marx's early works [17].

means changing into aims can also be expressed as means changing into ends; but different from the "means changing into ends" we have heard of. The latter's implication can be seen in the following example: Democratic revolution is the means of socialist revolution and means can change into end or aim during certain period. Obviously, this aim is a rational aim and the means is rational means.

From the viewpoint of control information theory, peasant and unpleasant feeling depend on control information or effective control content I(X;yj). The nearer reality advances approaching an idea and the rarer the idea is, the greater the effective control content is and the more intense the pleasant feeling is. On the contrary, the nearer the reality makes a man approach some object and the more impatiently he wishes or needs to avoid, the more negative control information there is and the more intense the unpleasant feeling is. It is not that requirements come after the corresponding pleasant feelings but that peasant feelings come after corresponding requirements. According to the above exposition, it won't be difficult to understand the following phenomena.

1) Whether certain activity can bring pleasant feelings and whether the pleasant feelings are intense is related to subjective ideas or wishes. This is because of that the nearer the result of certain activity approaches the aim, the greater the control information content is and vice versa.

2) The more previously unsatisfied man's some desire was, the more intense the later pleasant feeling is. This is because control information depends not only on the present state, but also on the previous state before the activity, usually with the later placing an even more important role. This is quite similar to the case of information-conveying where the prior small probability proposition is more important as emphasized by Popper.

As to why man adopts the mode of means changing into aims or why nature gives man this control mode, this is because, strictly speaking, existence is not his aim. If existence brings only sufferings and there is no hope to change it, man would rather die. However, generally man's genes are able to reach their aim of existence while man pursues his aim.?

Of cause, man's mechanisms of various feelings are by no means perfect. His abnormal indulgence in drinking, smoking and drugs-using shows that his mechanisms of feelings cannot adapt themselves to new surroundings. But surely these mechanisms will correct their errors continuously in the process of natural selection and will become adapted to changed surroundings.

The control mode of mean of means into aims of man and animals also has its models, such as rivers, in non-organic world. Winer has ever mentioned that joining the sea is the aim of water flows. Now it can be interpreted as follows: joining rivers is the mean for water follows to join the sea and joining rivers is the mean for water flows to join the see and joining streams is the mean for water flows to join the rivers. Since the means become the aims, the aims of water flows form a big tree. Just like the man's mechanisms of various feelings were involved in man's pursuit, the erosions of water flows formed riverbeds in nature.

People have ever had such perplexity:

One biological conclusion is that gene is selfish. Selfish gene naturally leads to selfish and cheating behaviors. But why man has such behavior as offering help and showing sympathy.

Now it is not difficult to explain it in this way: Since the mean can changes into the aim, it is possible that man's behaviors seem separated far away from the aim of existence of gene. This is not the defect of gene because good gene should enable man's behaviors to adapt to various possible environments and avoiding negative aims is usually more important than approaching positive aims. It is also because extremely selfish behavior is risky, just as risky prediction may lead to great loss of information and to the ruin of previous efforts, whereas conservative strategies may increase average control information.

Two significant conclusions may be derived from the theory of means into aims:

1)The control mode of means into aims will be the most effective way to provide robots with the motivation of behavior.

2) Since happiness is nothing but the integral of feelings with respect to time, rich feeling mechanisms or aims are more important to get more happiness; whereas they come into existence and get developed only as results of man's continuous pursuit.

8.2 The Meanings of Communication and Control of Aesthetic Feeling and Sublime Feeling

There has been being a contrary between French utilitarianism and Kant's prior ethics concerning the aim of man's behaviors. Utilitarian believe that man's any behavior aims at seeking some satisfaction and its consequent pleasant feelings while Kant believed in the existence of certain ethical behavior, which man pursued only for itself rather than other satisfactions [19]. The ethical behavior proposed by Kant is the behavior that can bring sublime experience. In aesthetics, sublime feeling means solemn and stirring feeling, such as feeling produced when you are (or imagine to be) faced with danger or distress without yielding to them, or when you face nature with unparalleled and overwhelming courage. Kant claimed that such ethical behavior transcended any natural law and indicated that nature took man as the ultimate aim. At this point, Kant deviated from science to mystery.

Why man can have the sublime feeling  From the viewpoint of the theory of means into aims, it is nothing but the result of that his unyielding behavior is changed from the mean into the aim. Now it is easier to understand why those who repeatedly meet with hardship yet never yield tend to have sublime feelings, though their lower requirements may not be satisfied. The tribulation of Kant (who claimed to have been treated like a slave in his childhood) and his great achievements in science and philosophy[21] also confirm the above point.

Among various pleasant feelings, aesthetic feeling, i.e. feeling of beauty, just as sublime feeling, seems especially difficult to be understood. Kant had made excellent analysis of aesthetic feeling, but his explanation of the cause of aesthetic feeling also fell into mystery. The problem of aesthetic feeling is not only one of aesthetics, but also one of biology. Darwin had been greatly perplexed with the problem of aesthetic feeling of living things[22,23].

In order to avoid confusion, here aesthetic feeling indicates pleasant feeling from visual or aural activities, which is, of cause, its literal definition. Philosophers can have different essential definitions according to their views. However, if there is no identical literal definition, people won't understand what you talk about. Some people are satisfied with the definition that aesthetic feeling is pleasant feeling brought by beauty. According to this definition, we will never know why aesthetic feeling occurs.

The author has ever given aesthetic feeling an essential definition that aesthetic feeling is the feedback signal that stimulates loving passion. He believed the intensity of aesthetic feeling depends on past dissatisfaction [10]. Now from the viewpoint of control information theory, it should be added that what aesthetic feeling reflects is the information of control that makes reality conform with the ideal: approaching favored objects; aesthetic feeling changes approaching favored objects from the mean into the aim. Thus, the more desirable and more difficult the approach is, the more intense the aesthetic feeling is. Of cause, man's mechanism of aesthetic feeling also has its inheritance. But, the inheritance is nothing but judgment of gene upon reality on the basis of historical experience; it includes information that indicates whether the object is worth approaching.

One important reason why aesthetic feeling perplexes people is that people always believe that satisfaction is the cause of pleasant feelings. However, aesthetic feeling, like sublime feeling, does not accompany any psychological or biological satisfaction, which can be illustrated when one sees yet cannot approach the person he loves. In order to get rid of the perplexing, people have to give up the paradoxical idea that satisfaction is the cause of aesthetic feeling except seeing, hearing or approaching the object is understood as satisfaction.

The control significance of sublime feeling and aesthetic feeling can be shown in the decrease of the motivation of man's behavior when those feelings are assumed to be absent.

8.3 Viewing the Evolution of Color Vision Mechanism from Information Theory

Early holders of the theory of reflection in history believed that a color perception was similar to the color that was reflected. Later, Demokritus realized what color perceptions appeared was related to man's sense organs and a color perception was totally different from what it reflected. Although Locke confirmed the dissimilarity between color perceptions and natural lights, he was positive that natural lights had the ability of causing certain color perceptions in man's mind.

Doubting about the ability, Kant had asked sharply: if objective things existed as we saw, why we happened to have such sense organs that could unchangeably reflect them[24]. Then Kant came up with his theory of subjectivity-reforming-objectivity. From this theory, he slipped into agnosticism.

In the last century, Helmholtz built the mathematical model of color vision on the basis of Young's tri-pigments theory of color vision. In Philosophy, he inherited Demokritus and Kant's ideas about color vision. As Lenen had said, on one hand, Holmholtz's theory confirmed the physical basis of color vision; on the other hand, it joined in the symbol theory and agnosticism.

The author also agrees that color perceptions are symbols. At the same time, he also agrees that the series of color perceptions has its structure and that the similarity between different color perceptions reflects the similarity between different objects. And he agrees that the differences between color perceptions contain information about objects, which can only be measured by the generalized information measures. This can be referred to as analog symbol theory.

It is believed in the tri-pigments theory that man's eyes have three kinds of color sensitive cells, which bear red, green, and blue pigments respectively. The three kinds of cells respectively respond to the long wave, middle wave and short wave in natural lights. As far as different natural lights give the three kinds of cells the same stimulus, these lights will look the same. Color TV is a product of this theory.Another long established theory of color vision is Hering's opponent colors theory, in which it is believed that there are three kinds of color-visual unites: black white, red green, and blue?yellow in man's eyes; each two colors are opposite and complementary to each other. It seems more reasonable to explain the phenomenon of negative after image (For example, one can vaguely see a blue shadow on a white wall after he has looked at a yellow block for a while). At the present, the popular color vision model is zone model, which tries to unify the above two theories. Zone model has a number of versions, but none of them can well explain how man's color vision got evolved and why color vision mechanism has the structure as it is.

The author's decoding model of color vision mechanism is also a version of zone model. In this model, tri-pigments signals are regarded as three analog signals, through analog or fuzzy logic calculation of which, psychological color parameters: hue, colorfulness, and brightness can be reached. The evolution of color vision can be directly explained through this model as follows [2]:

At the beginning there is only one kind of color sensitive cells, namely the response curves of all color-sensitive cells are identical, only 2^1=2 kinds of color perceptions: black and white can be produced. With the color-sensitive cells gradually splitting into two kinds, 2^2=4 colors (plus blue and yellow) are perceived. Later, the color sensitive cells split into three kinds so that 2^3=8 colors (plus red, cyan, green, and magenta) are perceived. With this model, it is very easy to explain color, blindness. At least, this model has fair theoretical advantage. From the viewpoint of color optics, it is no inferior to models with many modification parameters[11]. That the decoding model cause some disputes is that it affirms not the usual three pairs, but the four pairs of opponent colors: white and black, red and cyan, green and magenta, blue and yellow as we see on TV the color stripes for inspection. As a matter of fact, there are also some people who believe there are more than four unique colors (namely red, green, yellow and blue)[26].

Among the six colors, blue and cyan, red and magenta are some somewhat similar, but this only indicates that the mechanism of color vision has not perfectly evolved, or that color sensitive cells have not completely split from two kinds into three kinds. From the viewpoint of information theory, three 0?1 codes can determine one of the eight symbols of information source; if they are used to determine one of the six symbols, the coding efficiency will be lower. Color perceptions have similar patterns. In other words, the more unique colors there are, the higher the discrimination of color vision is. If the mechanism of color vision conveys information in the best way, it should turn the signals of three primary colors into eight different psychological color signals. Since the signals of opponent colors from visual nerves usually don't form two or three obvious kinds, it needs further physiological tests to determine which theory is correct.

Actually, the author's study of generalized information theory originates from his study of color-visual information. Shannon's information theory is inadequate to know how the color-visual discrimination affects visual information. The new information theory, which clarifies the relationship between the discrimination and visual information, also gives support to the decoding model of color vision.

8.4 Logical Possibility of Inverted Color Perceptions ?and Relativity of Perceptions

Many philosophers in North America have been so perplexed by the logical possibility of inverted color perceptions that they reached many pessimistic conclusions[8]. The logical possibility of inverted color perceptions (or inverted spectra as called by Americans) may be illustrated in the following case: Two men were born with different color perceptions. One of them has perceptions A and B responding respectively to red flowers and green grass while the other has perceptions B an A.

It is possible that neither of them realizes that they have different color perceptions. It seems that no one can deny this logical possibility. If this logical possibility is tenable, the naive theory of reflection, which insists that a perception is similar to a property of objects, cannot hold water. Besides, idealism, positivism, and their varieties will also meet with fatal strike [9]. Whether it is Berkeley, Mach or logical positivists, they all believed that words, such as "red" and "green", were all defined with man's perceptions. Yet the logical possibility of inverted color perceptions shows that different color perceptions corresponding to the same objects cannot prevent people from accepting unanimous definitions of words such as "red" and "green". So it can be seen that those words are not defined according to perceptions, but to natural lights or to properties of objects reflecting natural lights.

The author has independently discovered the logical possibility of inverted color perceptions [1] and arrived at a series of optimistic conclusions ( as a result of the advantage of being ill?informed), one of which is that the relativity theory in physics can be extended to philosophy.

A visual organ is just like a reference frame and color perceptions are just like the coordinates. A sense organ that reflects objects as they are simply described as a standard sense organ, which is quite similar to the absolutely static space. The Galileo's relativity principle in physics is that one who stays on a reference frame that has constant velocity relative to the absolutely static space has no way to know whether a reference frame is moving. The Galileo's relativity principle about perceptions is that a man who can discern different objects as the standard sense organ has no way to perceive that he has different sense organ with standard sense organ.

Einstein's special theory of relativity says that all reference frames that move away each other at constant velocity are equivalent and cannot be differentiated. The corresponding relativity theory about perceptions is that all sense organs with the same discrimination are completely equivalent and cannot be differentiated.

Another important conclusion from the logical possibility of inverted color perceptions that the objective content in perceptions is information only. From this, reflection theory can be improved to be more scientific.

8.5 Reform of Reflection Theory

From information theory, especially from the new information theory, we can get an improved reflection theory. It differs with the popular reflection theory (some of whose conclusions come from the misunderstanding of Marxist theory) in the following aspects. 1)The objective content of reflection; 2)the definition of reflection; 3)the evaluation of theories of knowing the world and changing the world; 4)the motivation of knowing the world and changing the world; 5)the instrumental meaning of perceptions and theories.

1. About the Objective Content of Reflection

It is believed in naive theory of reflection that the objective content of perceptions is the similarity between a perception and the reflected thing. Our conclusion now is that the objective content of perceptions (including feelings) is the information about the objective things or about whether the objective things conform to man's ideas. Before this, some researchers had proposed information-reflection theory, whose basic idea is to agree that the objective content of perceptions is information. However, the definition of information in their theory is not clear, since it does not exclude taking the similarity between a sensation and something that is objective as information. According to the information theory, the classical or the generalized, the similarity cannot be called information, and it cannot be quantitatively described. Yet, the information, which the author takes as the objective content of perceptions, can be quantitatively described. Affirming the objective content of reflection does not exclude that subjective ideals or requirements are the reflected objects. From previous discussion we can see that the aesthetic feeling is different from color perceptions as well as control signals are different from communication signals. The former is related to man's subjective ideals. It can be said that literature and arts are man's extended feeling mechanism. Like the reflection of man's various pleasant feeling, the reflection of literature and arts is about the differences and its changes between reality and ideals. From this, we can extricate ourselves from the difficult position in which the naive theory of reflection gets when it explains "non-equilibrium of the development of arts and that of politics and economy"[27], and explains why usually beautiful images are lack in real life. Subjective ideals or requirements have objectiveness because they come into being and get developed by the way of means into aims; or say, the objectiveness is historical or social.

2. About the definition of Reflection

People often regard reflection as the way mirrors reflect things, that is why there are many philosophers who hold objection to reflection theory. For this, it is necessary to give a strict mathematical definition to reflection. Fortunately, the definition of "mapping" in mathematics can be applied to the definition of reflection in philosophy without change, namely, we may let reflection = mapping or fuzzy mapping (see Sections 3.4 and 3.8). So log as there is certain relationship between two objects or symbols, there are information and the relation of reflection between them.

3. About the Evaluation of Theories of Knowing and Changing the World

Concerning the evaluation of theories of knowing the world and changing the world, the author naturally agrees that practice is the criterion of testing truths. But at the same time, he believes that most important thing is not to test the truthfulness of a theory, but to test how much progress of the theory towards the truth is, or in the other words, to test how much information the theory provides. This is in agreement with Popper's idea, namely, information should be the sole criterion in evaluating the progress of a theory. Thus, the testability of a logical truth, such as 2+2=4, can be excluded.

similarly, the important thing of evaluating a theory of changing the world is to see if the result of changing is closer to man's ideal, which can be measured with control information measures. In the long way, the varieties of man's perceptive aims or his happiness should be the criterion in evaluating theories of changing the world.

4. About the Motivation of Knowing and Changing the World.

Some people claim that the motivation of knowing the world and changing the world comes from practice. Although the claim is not wrong, it is too vague since it provides very little information.

The new theory of aims supports the theory that man's motivation to change the world comes from the difference between ideals with reality, or from dissatisfaction and desires. The motivation to understand the world, when seen historically, comes from the inconsistency between theoretic predictions and observed facts; when seen from reality, it comes from the necessity of changing the world.

5. About the Instrumental Meaning of Perceptions and Theories

Since Helmoholtz's symbol theory has led to agnosticism, holders of reflection theory refuse to take it. But the new symbol theory, namely analog symbol theory, is very different from the old one, and can be compatible with the new reflection theory.

Since the instrumentalist in epistemology, holding that scientific theories are only instruments or tools for arranging perceptions and experiences, denies the objective information in scientific theories, it is rejected by the reflection theory. The new information theory supports a new instrumentalist, which emphasizes that scientific theories are instruments to predict facts; the more information they provide, the better they. Unlike the naive reflection theory, the new instrumentalist emphasizes that scientific theories are subjectively selective.

Now we can answer Kant's question why we have the sense organs as they are. It's true that our sense organs and mind cannot reflect objects or natural lights in themselves appearances (In fact, it is meaningless to talk about itself appearance of an object without any viewer as it is meaningless to talk about the velocity of an object without any reference frame). But the sense organs can reflect the differences between objects through the differences between perceptions. That sense organs have such ability because with it they can differentiate various objects better or because it is necessary for man to exist or to get retained through natural selections.

Concerning the knowledge about universal and inexorable laws, Kant had raised similar question: If objectively inexorable laws do exist, how can we get to learn them or how can we reach them through induction  Our answer is that we cannot exactly know an inexorable law but can predict it; we believe some laws to be universal and inexorable because they have undergone the strict tests of facts and will give us more information.

The author believes that as natural science, especially information theory, develops, the basic problems in philosophy will get clarified better than ever before, materialism will win more support, and non?scientific or language fuzzy philosophic theories, being lack of information, will become out of date.

8.6 Problems to be Further Studied

Information theory, especially the generalized information theory involves many problems. In Chapter five, we have talked about that the generalized information measure is used for the assessment and optimization of linear prediction, but we haven't reached the general method of the solution. In Chapter seven, we defined the rate-of-keeping-precision function of control, but the general method of the solution has also not been reached. The following are, in addition, some problems worth further study.

Some people raised information dynamics. Are the new information measures and entropy measures useful to it  Can they can be used in evolution equations to describe economic, biologic, physical systems and the like to obtain some meaningful consequences. 

The fuzzy coding and decoding method the author used in setting up the mathematical model of color vision is the extension of binary coding and decoding method[2,11]. At present, in remote sensing systems, multi-spectral sensors are selected so that their response curves do not overlap each other. Imitating man's mechanism of color vision, we can use fuzzy coding and decoding method to arrange multi-spectral sensors, each of whose sensitive curves probably has several wave crests and partially overlaps with the others. Meanwhile, we can decode n spectral

signals into 2^n false color signals. We can select three out of the 2^n signals as primary color signals for color display. In this way, the man's visual discrimination to spectral features of objects can be improved and more information will be provided for given n signals from spectral sensors. This idea needs to be tested by practice.

Some people have proposed to make computers of fuzzy logic or continuous-value logic. Since for such computers numbers should be continuous, some errors must be permitted. The generalized information theory seems applicable in the optimization of coding and decoding of the computers. The optimizing methods for predictions and pattern recognition in the generalized information theory are also applicable in the designing of intellectual computers.

The measurement of semantic information such as the information in weather broadcasts requires that the linguistic meaning comes from set-values statistics (see Section 3.9). Further study is needed as to how to get the meanings of more sentences or words out of fewer statistics and how to determine the changes of the linguistic meaning with different circumstances.

G. J. Chaitin proposed arithmetic information theory [28]. He believed that there is a length?shortest program for producing a given sequence of symbols and Godel's theorem of incompleteness can get simple explanation from the arithmetic information theory. The author believes that the length shortest program is the length shortest coding if the sequence of output symbols is regarded as messages from information source and the program is regarded as codes for the messages. With the help of the generalized information theory, we can have the shortest program as approximate calculations require certain errors limiting. Chaitin claimed that the calculation time didn't depends on the sequence of symbols. Can the control information measure mentioned previously be used to reflect the shortest calculation time.

Zha You-liang deduced a equation for physical measurements from Shannon's formula of channel capacity, and claimed that it was more general equation for the inaccuracy of measurements in physics so that the inaccuracy relation of measurements in physics is special case of this equation when C/(1+M/N)=1, where C is channel capacity, M and N are respectively the powers of the source and of the noise. Yet, this can prove at most that the inaccuracy relation of measurements is tenable some times, not always. The relationship between information and the inaccuracy relation of measurements needs further study.

There have been many efforts on the information of biologic inheritance. Can we get any breakthroughs in the field with the help of the new information theory?

The new information theory can measure the information provided by lies, which may be negative. It can provides theoretic basis for coding secrete codes that can be improperly decoded into lies to reduce enemy's information. Further study is needed for this kind of secrete codes.

References for Chapter 8