Dear Terry and FIS friends - I agree with all that Terry has said about agency. I do wish to however to point out that an agent has choice and a non-agent has no choice. I would suggest that the defining characteristic of an agent is choice and therefore an agent must be a living organism and all living organisms are agents. Agents/living organisms have choice or are capable of choice or agency and they are the only things that have choice or can interpret information. Abiotic non-agents do not have information because they have no choice. We humans can have information about abiotic objects but those objects themselves do not have that information as they have no mind to be informed. That includes this email post, it is abiotic an has no agency. It has information by virtue of you reading it because you are able to interpret the visual signs with which I have recorded my thoughts. Marshall McLuhan would add to my comments that “the user is the content” as well as saying that Shannon’s work was not a theory of information but a "theory of transportation”. I think of Shannon’s work in a similar light. I also do not regard Shannon’s work as a theory of information but it is a theory of signals. Shannon himself said his theory was not about meaning and I say what is information without meaning and that therefore Shannon only had a theory of signals.
Another insight of McLuhan’s that of figure and ground is useful to understand why we have so many different definitions of information. McLuhan maintained that one could not understand a figure unless one understood the ground in which it operates in. (McLuhan might have gotten this idea from his professor at Cambridge, I. A. Richards, who said that in order to communicate one needs to feedforward [he coined the term btw] the context of what one is communicating.) The different definitions of information we have considered are a result of the different contexts in which the term information is used. We should also keep in mind that all words are metaphors and metaphor literally means to carry across, derived from the Greek meta (literally ‘across') and phorein (literally 'to carry'). So the word information has been carried across from one domain or area of interest to another. It entered the English language as the noun associated with the verb 'to inform', i.e. to form the mind. Here is an excerpt from my book What Is Information? (available for free at demopublishing.com): "Origins of the Concept of Information - We begin our historic survey of the development of the concept of information with its etymology. The English word information according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) first appears in the written record in 1386 by Chaucer: 'Whanne Melibee hadde herd the grete skiles and resons of Dame Prudence, and hire wise informacions and techynges.' The word is derived from Latin through French by combining the word inform meaning giving a form to the mind with the ending “ation” denoting a noun of action. This earliest definition refers to an item of training or molding of the mind.” This is why abiotic objects have no information as I claimed above because they have no mind that can be informed. I hope that by informing you of the origin of the word information I have shed some light on our confusion about what is information and why we have so many definitions of it. It might even shed some light for that matter as to what is an agent. Got the ticket? If so that makes me a ticket agent. I hope you get the joke. all the best - Bob ______________________ Robert K. Logan Prof. Emeritus - Physics - U. of Toronto Fellow University of St. Michael's College Chief Scientist - sLab at OCAD http://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertKLogan www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Logan5/publications https://www.physics.utoronto.ca/people/homepages/logan/ On Oct 19, 2017, at 7:11 PM, Terrence W. DEACON <dea...@berkeley.edu> wrote: AUTONOMOUS AGENCY: The definition I propose for autonomous agency It is open to challenge. Of course, there are many ways that we use the term 'agent' in more general and metaphoric ways. I am, however, interested in the more fundamental conception that these derived uses stem from. I do not claim that this definition is original, but rather that it is what we implicitly understand by the concept. So if this is not your understanding I am open to suggestions for modification. I should add that it has been a recent goal of my work to describe an empirically testable simplest model system that satisfies this definition. Those of you who are familiar with my work will recognize that this is what I call an autogenic or teleodynamic system. In this context, however, it is only the adequacy of the definition that I am interested in exploring. As in many of the remarks of others on this topic it is characterized by strange-loop recursivity, self-reference, and physicality. And it may be worth while describing how this concept is defined by e.g. Hofstadter, von Foerster, Luhmann, Moreno, Kauffman, Barad, and others, to be sure that we have covered the critical features and haven't snuck in any "demons". In my definition, I have attempted to avoid any cryptic appeal to observers or unexamined teleological properties, because my purpose is instead to provide a constructive definition of what these properties entail and why they are essential to a full conception of information. CENTRALITY OF NORMATIVE PROPERTIES: A critical factor when discussing agency is that it is typically defined with respect to "satisfaction conditions" or "functions" or "goals" or other NORMATIVE properties. Normative properties are all implicitly teleological. They are irrelevant to chemistry and physics. The concept of an "artificial agent" may not require intrinsic teleology (e.g. consider thermostats or guidance systems - often described as teleonomic systems) but the agentive properties of such artifacts are then implicitly parasitic on imposed teleology provided by some extrinsic agency. This is of course implicit also in the concepts of 'signal' and 'noise' which are central to most information concepts. These are not intrinsic properties of information, but are extrinsically imposed distinctions (e.g. noise as signal to the repair person). So I consider the analysis of agency and its implicit normativity to be a fundamental issue to be resolved in our analysis of information. Though we can still bracket any consideration of agency from many analyses my simply assuming it (e.g. assumed users, interpreters, organisms and their functions, etc.), but this explicitly leaves a critical defining criterion outside the analysis. In these cases, we should just be clear that in doing so we have imported unexplained boundary conditions into the analysis by fiat. Depending on the goal of the analysis (also a teleological factor) this may be unimportant. But the nature and origin of agency and normativity remain foundational questions for any full theory of information. On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 12:47 PM, Stanley N Salthe <ssal...@binghamton.edu <mailto:ssal...@binghamton.edu>> wrote: Here is an interesting recent treatment of autonomy. Alvaro Moreno and Matteo Mossio: Biological Autonomy: A Philosophical and Theoretical Enquiry (History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences 12); Springer, Dordrecht, 2015, xxxiv + 221 pp., $129 hbk, ISBN 978-94-017-9836-5 STAN On Thu, Oct 19, 2017 at 11:44 AM, Terrence W. DEACON <dea...@berkeley.edu <mailto:dea...@berkeley.edu>> wrote: AN AUTONOMOUS AGENT IS A DYNAMICAL SYSTEM ORGANIZED TO BE CAPABLE OF INITIATING PHYSICAL WORK TO FURTHER PRESERVE THIS SAME CAPACITY IN THE CONTEXT OF INCESSANT EXTRINSIC AND/OR INTRINSIC TENDENCIES FOR THIS SYSTEM CAPACITY TO DEGRADE. THIS ENTAILS A CAPACITY TO ORGANIZE WORK THAT IS SPECIFICALLY CONTRAGRADE TO THE FORM OF THIS DEGRADATIONAL INFLUENCE, AND THUS ENTAILS A CAPACITY TO BE INFORMED BY THE EFFECTS OF THAT INFLUENCE WITH RESPECT TO THE AGENT’S CRITICAL ORGANIZATIONAL CONSTRAINTS. On Wed, Oct 18, 2017 at 6:00 PM, Koichiro Matsuno <cxq02...@nifty.com <mailto:cxq02...@nifty.com>> wrote: On 19 Oct 2017 at 6:42 AM, Alex Hankey wrote: the actual subject has to be non-reducible and fundamental to our universe. This view is also supported by Conway-Kochen’s free will theorem (2006). If (a big IF, surely) we admit that our fellows can freely exercise their free will, it must be impossible to imagine that the atoms and molecules lack their share of the similar capacity. For our bodies eventually consist of those atoms and molecules. Moreover, the exercise of free will on the part of the constituent atoms and molecules could come to implement the centripetality of Bob Ulanowicz at long last under the guise of chemical affinity unless the case would have to forcibly be dismissed. This has been my second post this week. Koichiro Matsuno From: Fis [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es <mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es>] On Behalf Of Alex Hankey Sent: Thursday, October 19, 2017 6:42 AM To: Arthur Wist <arthur.w...@gmail.com <mailto:arthur.w...@gmail.com>>; FIS Webinar <Fis@listas.unizar.es <mailto:Fis@listas.unizar.es>> Subject: Re: [Fis] What is “Agent”? David Chalmers's analysis made it clear that if agents exist, then they are as fundamental to the universe as electrons or gravitational mass. Certain kinds of physiological structure support 'agents' - those emphasized by complexity biology. But the actual subject has to be non-reducible and fundamental to our universe. Alex _______________________________________________ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es <mailto:Fis@listas.unizar.es> http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis <http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis> -- Professor Terrence W. Deacon University of California, Berkeley _______________________________________________ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es <mailto:Fis@listas.unizar.es> http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis <http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis> -- Professor Terrence W. Deacon University of California, Berkeley _______________________________________________ Fis mailing list Fis@listas.unizar.es <mailto:Fis@listas.unizar.es> http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis <http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis>
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