Friday, October 5, 2007, 1:53:51 PM, Loet wrote:
|
> |
Dear colleagues,
I agree with a lot of Christophe Menant's last mail, but I think that I can take it a step further.
The _expression_ of Bateson "A difference which makes a difference" presumes that there is a system or a series of events for which the differences can make a difference. This system selects upon the differences (or Shannon-type information) in the environment of the system. The Shannon-type information is meaningless, but the specification of the system of reference provides the information with meaning. The Shannon-type information which is deselected is discarded as noise. |
That's (at least approximately) what I mean when I say that intentional information is always encoded in physical information. Intentional information is the ordinary concept of information and is meaningful. Physical information is very closely related to Shannon information and has no intrinsic meaning, being mere physical patterns -- on this conceptualisation, which is widely accepted within physics, all physical patterns are treated as Shannon-type information. Intentional or semantic information, on the other hand, requires a context, which plays the part of a decoding key. Thus semantic information, or meaning, is always encoded within physical patterns.
|
> |
Meaning is provided to the information from the perspective of hindsight. |
I don't think "hindsight" is strictly correct, because it implies a conscious "looking back", whereas the processing of meaning (decoding) often occurs prior to consciousness.
|
> |
The meaningful information, however, still follows the arrow of time. Meaning processing within psychological and social systems reinforces the feedback arrow (from the hindsight perspective) to the extent that control tends to move to this next-order level. The system can then become anticipatory because the information which is provided with meaning can be entertained by the system as a model. Perhaps, human language is required for making that last step: no longer is only information exchanged, but information is packaged into messages in which the information has a codified meaning. |
Modelling is certainly what allows anticipation, but some modelling, at least, does not require language: consider catching a ball that's thrown to you. You model the trajectory, I would suggest, in order to put your hand in the right place at the right time, but language is obviously not involved there. Of course you might say that meaning plays no part in that scenario, but I think it's a very big mistake to deny a continuum from significance of any sort at one extreme to the highly abstract and sophisticated meanings of the messages on this list, at the other. What both extremes have in common is the concept of use, as in Wittgenstein's later view of meaning: it is our use, I would suggest, of physical patterns, that encodes significance and meaning within them, and the modelling of a trajectory has significant similarities with the modelling of correspondents and their intentions (though significant differences too, of course).
--
Robin Faichney
<http://www.robinfaichney.org/>
_______________________________________________ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
