IMPLEXI MUNDI: International Arts and Sciences Complexity Worlds

The Contemporary Rosetta Challenge: Spanning the Gap between the Exact Sciences
By: Jerry Chandler on: Sat 20 of Feb, 2010 [14:56 UTC] (129 reads)

Jerry LR Chandler, Research Professor, Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, George Mason University. Fairfax, Virginia, Jerry_LR_Chandler@Mac.com

The ancient writings of the early Egyptian dynasties were indecipherable to modern scholars prior to the finding of a stone fragment inscripted with three different synthetic symbol systems: the artificial scripts of modern Egyptian, classic Greek scripts and ancient hieroglyphics. As the two readable messages were the same, the third was transliterated by a stepwise symbolic triangulation of meanings.

A Rosetta-like situation exists today for modern symbols and interdisciplinary communication. A distinctive sign system within a discipline, designed to communicate symbolic messages within that discipline, block communications with other disciplines. The meanings of codes acquired within one sign system are not translatable directly into the meanings of codes in other sign systems. For example, the meanings of mathematical codes are not translatable into the meaning of chemical or musical codes, although all three synthetic symbol systems are associated with the concept of number. Critically, communication between the exact sciences and biology and medicine is often a source of grave misunderstandings that slow inquiry and can cause life-threatening errors. Acquisition of the physiological and mental codes necessary to exchange messages in a particular symbol system, such as a spoken language, mathematics, chemistry or music, requires several years of study with skilled teachers. Thus, acquiring indexes for multiple scientific codes is both an extremely expensive and a very time consuming task. Here, a simple, exact relational method to encode factual human communication is demonstrated.

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The codes of human communication emerged over the millennia, each designed for a particular social purpose and for individual needs. Our modern sub-cultures continue to refine our existing codes. Examples are the extension of mathematical encodings by a plethora of recent computer languages and the extension of medical encodings by new terminology and molecular biological symbology. The contemporary Rosetta challenge is to find Rosetta relations that transliterate among the meanings of codes used in different disciplines (a.k.a. “complexity theory”).

I approach the conundrum of the Rosetta relations among contemporary sign systems from the perspective of the stimulus-response relations of physiological psychology. This scientific approach is patterned after that of C. S. Peirce, Logic of Relatives, Monist, 1897, p. 161. The logic of the spanning arguments starts from the first principles of scientific reasoning; antecedence implies consequence and Aristotelian causality, categories and syllogisms. From first principles, two disciplines, chemistry and mathematics, are contrasted. The Rosetta relations show the distinction between the two kinds of logical diagrams, the two kinds of grammar and the two kinds of logic. For these two quantitative codes, the Rosetta relations support an inference following Dalton’s ratio of small whole numbers. This algebraic inference maps from the structural graphs of chemistry to the three classical physical-chemical equations, thus bridging the gap among the several symbol systems used to describe life.

The deep structures of the numeric logical diagrams, the philosophy of quantity and the relations among scientific symbol systems are published (An Introduction to the Perplex Number System, Discrete Applied Mathematics, 2009, Algebraic Biology, Axiomathes, 2009, Ordinate Logics, Simultaneity, Eds. Vrobel and Rossler, 2008.)

In conclusion, the stimulus-response relations of human physiology create and implement the self-referential character of the synductive logic of the perplex number system and the generative relations of life itself.

Feb. 16, 2010. McLean, VA

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