Normal
0
false
false
false
MicrosoftInternetExplorer4
/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal";
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-ansi-language:#0400;
mso-fareast-language:#0400;
mso-bidi-language:#0400;}
Dear Bob, Loet, Gyuri and All,
Progress?! Between Bob, Loet, and
something of my logical approach, I see the “art of understanding information”
developing in its necessarily dialectically connected synthetic and analytical
aspects. Here are a few of the ideas suggested by Bob’s historical notes, very
useful for me, and by Loet’s elaboration of the complexity of difference.
1. The quantitative
characteristics of information are more or less clear. My list of definitions
was not intended to be exhaustive.
2. The semantic question of
MacKay of what to send and where to send it is a process taking place in the
sender’s mind. His definition of information as the change in a receiver’s
mind-set and thus (concerned) with meaning also describes a dynamic process. He
should have added simply that there is, when the signal is finally sent, a
change in the sender’s “mind-set” also. These relations and changes can be
described in my logical terms.
3. The Gestalt description of sufficiently complex information and meaning
connected as figure and ground should have been obvious to me long ago, it
wasn’t, but it certainly is now. Logic in Reality provides a principled dynamic
description of the linked changes of figure and ground, alternately
predominating in the mind in two dimensions. The analogy is not perfect,
however. One needs to keep in mind, here, the vertical, inter-level relation
between information and meaning. It is this kind of information, and that in
point 2., that I would like to describe as logical information operators.
4. Information without meaning,
(Bob’s paragraph 2) is information that is incapable of making a direct causal
difference, to all intents
and purposes, such as a data base.
5. The description of differences
in terms of levels of complexity and recursion affecting Shannon-type
information is essential because it provides an analytical basis of meaning
also. Perhaps the sequence goes from
vector to tensor to spinor (?) as you go up in dimensionality of the entropy to
yield valuedness or valence?
6. The concept of allegedly self-organizing,
autonomous and autopoïetic systems, however, requires the further explication
of the origin of these wonderful properties in reality. Loet’s statement that
the two approaches are “very akin” is very welcome in the analytic domain,
since it is indeed more strict and parsimonious and différance is only a
philosophical concept. However, différance is in a sense directly related
to complex real physical systems, such as information producers and receivers.
Ascription
of autonomy, etc. where it does exist complicates things. I am trying to get a
handle on information as an ontological operators, not one related to epistemic
or doxastic differences.
7, From this perspective, a
clarification to Gyuri’s note about the “simple form of information” to which
he gives the very intriguing designation “information on existence”. Everything
that has to do with existence is of interest to me, but my Logic in Reality does
not and is not intended to apply to the entire extant domain. The examples you
give, Gyuri, are binary or in other cases in a one-to-many relation. There is
existence here, double-valuedness and information and at an even more
fundamental level parity, as a property of quantum entities. But this is not
binary
opposition; there is no opposition
here, no exchange of energy, no caused differences. At the limit, there is no
physical
change at all of the duals as such, or if there is, it is only of the
state-transition type (cf.
Loet’s Y/N, F/T, open-closed and your same color – different color, presence -
absence). So by all means let’s discuss the concept of existence type
information,. For me the test of its utility would be the extent to which it
might apply to or be included in (as lowest level semantic information is)
something complex and interactive.
Many thanks.
Best,
Joseph
----Message d'origine----
De: [email protected]
Date: 22.02.2010 15:07
À: <[email protected]>
Copie: "Pedro Clemente Marijuan Fernandez"<[email protected]>,
"fis"<[email protected]>
Objet: Re: [Fis] Derrida's "diferAnce" and Kolmogorov's Information Operator
Dear Joseph - once again your post was most stimulating, provocative and
enjoyable. Kolmogorov's definition of information that you quote is most
interesting but like Shannon's definition incorporates the notion that
information is a quantitative concept that can be measured. The Bateson
definition that you refer to was a critique of this notion of information as a
quantitative measure. The criticism began with MacKay (1969 Information,
Mechanism and Meaning. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.) who wrote "Information is a
distinction that makes a difference" which Bateson (1973 Steps to an Ecology of
Mind. St. Albans: Paladin Frogmore.) then built on to come up with the more
popular: "Information is a difference that makes a difference". MacKay was the
first to critique Shannon's quantitative definition of information when Shannon
wrote his famous definition: "We have represented a discrete information
source as a Markoff process. Can we define a quantity, which will measure, in
some sense, how much information is ‘produced’ by such a process, or better, at
what rate information is produced?" – Shannon (1948 . A mathematical theory of
communication. Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 27, pp. 379-423 and 623-656,
July and October, 1948.) According to Claude Shannon (1948, p. 379) his
definition of information is not connected to its meaning. Weaver concurred in
his introduction to Shannon’s A Mathematical Theory of Communication when he
wrote: “Information has ‘nothing to do with meaning’ although it does describe
a ‘pattern’." Shannon also suggested that information in the form of a message
often contains meaning but that meaning is not a necessary condition for
defining information. So it is possible to have information without meaning,
whatever that means. Not all of the members of the information science
community were happy with Shannon’s definition of information. Three years
after Shannon proposed his definition of information Donald Mackay (1951) at
the 8th Macy Conference argued for another approach to understanding the nature
of information. The highly influential Macy Conferences on cybernetics, systems
theory, information and communications were held from 1946 to 1953 during which
Norbert Wiener’s newly minted cybernetic theory and Shannon’s information
theory were discussed and debated with a fascinating interdisciplinary team of
scholars which also included Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts, Gregory Bateson,
Margaret Mead, Heinz von Foerster, Kurt Lewin and John von Neumann. MacKay
argued that he did not see “too close a connection between the notion of
information as we use it in communications engineering and what [we] are doing
here… the problem here is not so much finding the best encoding of symbols…but,
rather, the determination of the semantic question of what to send and to whom
to send it.” He suggested that information should be defined as “the change in
a receiver’s mind-set, and thus with meaning” and not just the sender’s signal
(Hayles 1999b, p. 74). The notion of information independent of its meaning or
context is like looking at a figure isolated from its ground. As the ground
changes so too does the meaning of the figure.The last two paragraphs are an
excerpt from my new book What is Information? to be published by the University
of Toronto Press in late 2010 or early 2011. Your post Joseph has stimulated
the following thoughts that I hope to add to my new book before it is
typeset.As MacKay and Bateson have argued there is a qualitative dimension to
information not captured by the Shannon Weaver quantitative model nor by
Kolmogorov's definition. Information is multidimensional. There is a
quantitative dimension as captured by Shannon and Kolmogorov and a qualitative
one of meaning as captured by MacKay and Bateson but one can think of other
dimensions as well. In responding to a communication by Joseph Brenner on the
Foundations of Information (FIS) listserv I described the information that he
communicated as stimulating, provocative and enjoyable. Brenner cited the
following Kolmogorov definition of information as “any operator which changes
the distribution of probabilities in a given set of events.” Brenner's
information changed the distribution of my mental events to one of stimulation,
provocation and enjoyment and so there is something authentic that this
definition of Kolmogorov captures that his earlier cited definition of
information as "the minimum computational resources needed to describe a
program or a text" does not. We therefore conclude that not only is there a
relativistic component to information but it is also multidimensional and not
uni-dimensional as is the case with Shannon information.Joseph - many thanks
for your stimulating post - I look forward to your comments on this riff on
your thoughts. - Bob
______________________
Robert K. LoganChief Scientist - sLab at OCADProf. Emeritus - Physics - U. of
Toronto www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan
On 22-Feb-10, at 12:43 AM, [email protected]
wrote:Normal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4 table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:"";
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400;
mso-bidi-language:#0400;} Dear FIS Colleagues and Friends,As you have for a
long time before me, I have been trying to tame (I prefer the French make
private – apprivoiser) the notion of information. One thought was suggested by
Bateson’s seemingly generally accepted dictum of “a difference (and/or
distinction) that makes a difference. But I think this difference is no
ordinary “delta”; this is an active referring or better differing term like the
différance of Derrida. I’m sure someone has made a reference to this before –
I’m new here – but then Derrida uses différance to question the structure of
binary oppositions, and says that différance “invites us to undo the need for
balanced equations, to see if each term in an opposition is not after all an
accomplice of the other. At the point where the concept of différance
intervenes, all of the conceptual oppositions of metaphysics, to the extent
that they have for ultimate reference the presence of a present
…(signifier/signified; diachrony/synchrony; space/time; passivity/activity,
etc.) become non-pertinent. Since most of the usual debates about information
are based on such conceptual oppositions, and classical notions of here and
now, it may be high time to deconstruct them.I am sure you are familiar with
this, but I found it rather interesting to read that Kolmogorov had given one
definition of information as “any operator which changes the distribution of
probabilities in a given set of events”. (Apparently, this idea was attacked by
Markov.)Différance in the informational context then started looking to me like
an operator, especially since in my process logic, where logical elements of
real processes resemble probabilities, the logical operators are also
processes, such that a predominantly actualized positive implication, for
example, is always accompanied by a predominantly potentialized negative
implication.At the end of all this, then, one has, starting from the lowest
level:a)information as what is processed by a computer;b)information as a
scalar quantity of uncertainty removed, the entropy/negentropy
picture;c)semantic information as well-formed, meaningful data
(Floridi);d)information as a process operator that makes a difference to and
for other processes, including above all those of receivers and senders.A first
useful consequence is that information “operations” with my operator are
naturally polarized, positive, negative or some combination which I’ll leave
open for the moment. The negative effects of some information follow naturally.
Many of you may conclude I’m doing some oversimplification or conflation, and I
apologize for that in advance. But I believe that Kolmogorov’s original idea
has been neglected in the recent discussions of information I’ve seen, and I
would very much welcome comments. Thank you and best
wishes.Joseph_______________________________________________fis mailing
[email protected]https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
[email protected]
https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
