On Mar 7, 10:42 am, archytas <[email protected]> wrote: > There are some fairly standard arguments on information in semantics. > How data can come to have an assigned meaning and function in a > semiotic system in the first place is one of the hardest problems in > semantics. One can turn to whether data constituting information as > semantic content can be meaningful independently of an informee. Data > (as relata) can have a semantics independently of any informee. > Before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, Egyptian hieroglyphics were > already regarded as information, even if their semantics was beyond > the comprehension of any interpreter. The discovery of an interface > between Greek and Egyptian did not affect the semantics of the > hieroglyphics but only its accessibility. That is, meaningful data > being embedded in information-carriers informee-independently supports > the possibility of information without an informed subject.
It seems like that only if we use a model of semiotics which presumes only single layer of semantic content. What I propose looks more like this: http://multisenserealism.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/slide19.jpg http://multisenserealism.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/slide20.jpg http://multisenserealism.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/zig_stack.jpg We can tell that Egyptian hieroglyphics seem like human language texts because our frames of human experience include making sense of iconic visual signals. A cat is not going to be able to tell that hieroglyphics or Greek seem like language - writing is above the anthropological threshold. A cat may be able to tell if you are angry at it (a dog even more) but probably not a cockroach. This indicates to me not that information exists independently of a subject, but rather that subjects have many different channels of sense which they share and do not share with other subjects. I think that is it a mistake to take perception for granted - to assume that because we do not understand an explicit cognitive meaning from a given text that we are not already interpreting a variety of visual semantic cues which allow us to categorize the text in a general way. What could 'information' or 'data' be without some capacity to detect it? What causal efficacy could it have? Nothing. Information that does not inform something in some way is not anything at all. > Meaning is > not (at least not only) in the mind of the user. Right, it's in the sense experiences of the whole person, body, organs, cells, and molecule. The way that sense works is that it is not contained by volumes of matter, rather it is the interior experience available through matter. It uses matter as an antenna and tendril. It is subtractive rather than additive, so that when we turn on the light in a room, rather than being bombarded with trillions of 'photons' or 'bits' of information which have to be assembled into static images, our visual sense actively sees the concrete optical environment of the entire room as it appears from our anthropological- level perspective. We see a continuous world which corresponds with our other sense channels, thus tapping into a presentation of realism 'in here' which faithfully (as far as such a complex and cumbersome thing can relate as a single subject) recapitulates the conditions 'out there'. This is not a solipsistic projection, although there is projection going one. It is not veridical reception, as we are not universal receivers of all truths of all perspectives. Instead it is the appropriate interiority of the human organism that we are to relate to the many worlds potentially accessible through our experiences as human beings and even as individuals. Each of us may have extended sense ranges or even budding sense channels which are not yet recognized by the species at large. > This is the weak end > of such claims, to be distinguished from the stronger, realist thesis, > supported for example by Dretske [1981, Knowledge and the Flow of > Information, Oxford: Blackwell], according to which data could also > have their own semantics independently of an intelligent producer/ > informer. > > I tend to the realist hypothesis (as in structural realism). The Bar- > Hillel-Carnap Paradox states that a self-contradictory message even > contains too much information to be true! I must admit the > argumentation gets so complex I go with Sam's (not quite) notion of > poking a stick at the singularity! I think it's impossible to understand what information is if we are working from a mechanist model. There really is no plausible explanation as to why, if information were concretely real, there would be anything besides information, or how physics and information would interact. What would be the purpose for all of the transductions from one modality to another - ie, why have any senses at all if you can simply download information from your environment directly? What possible difference would it make to a computer, regardless of how sophisticated, whether a given resource was seen, heard, smelt, tasted, etc.? With a sense-based realism model, information is revealed as an inside- out model of realism. A shadow or silhouette of concrete experiences on many different levels in which coherence is related through accumulated experience ('time') rather than space. Information is only a name for our experience of detecting similar patterns which we understand as being common to multiple contexts. Our consciousness is ultimately the common denominator of all that we consider to be information. If we are trying to actually understand consciousness, I think it is a catastrophic mistake of inversion to conceive of 'information' itself as an independent agent. It's a modern equivalent of magic spells or phlogiston...an exercise in tortured reasoning to prop up a mechanistic model which is expiring. Craig -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Epistemology" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/epistemology?hl=en.
