Thanks Steven. I find it curious that you have referred to
biophysical/physical grounds to establish meaning and apprehension. In
the latter, it is rather unclear for me whether you put together in the
same footing the taking away of a metabolite from the environment and
the taking away of a signal (which is not really taken 'away'). For the
living cell this difference is crystal clear, although very few people
have worked on it --notoriously Gerhardt great paper on eukaryotic
signaling paths (1999) and also some of my bioinfo works. In my view,
this distinction is essential to draw a natural history of
communication, and particularly to understand meaning. Locality, in the
way you have started to introduce it, looks quite close to "embodiment":
in what extent can one talk about locality without endorsing some form
of embodiment and of situatedness? As Landauer (1987) put, "information
is always physical", which I agree, but not with the coda that often
accompanies it : "and hence ultimately quantum".
best--Pedro
From: Steven Ericsson-Zenith <[email protected]>
Subject: Information and Locality, on the Introduction
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2015 09:54:52 -0700
To: Foundations of Information Science Information Science
<[email protected]>
Dear List,
First a few clarifications on the definition of terms for my usage.
"Semantics" are the rules of transformation for syntax, per Carnap.
"Meaning" is the physical behavior that is the consequence of
apprehension, where apprehension is a biophysical taking away from the
world in an organism.
Strictly, "apprehension" begins with a sense that leads to a response.
Depending on the type of organism, apprehension may involve a physical
processing by the organism. This may result in a failure to manifest a
response external to the organism.
I understand that this use of the term "meaning" differs from its
ambiguous informal use. The reason for this rigor is to enable the
discussion to be unified in the physical sciences.
Because many in this forum are familiar with the work of Charles
Peirce, let me note that this is a stricter Pragmaticism. I intend to
leave Charles Peirce's semiotic theory aside (except to acknowledge it
here).
One of the reasons for the form of my introduction is to highlight the
distinction between Communication and Information. We can ignore dance
and other arts as communication for now and consider the arts solely
as something in the environment to apprehend.
I do not intend to diminish the arts by this move. In fact, I will
treat everything of the arts and sciences as of the environment.
One of the first criticisms to make of the standard presentation of
Information Theory is the acknowledgment of the binary digit (bit) but
the failure to observe the lack of locality in the mechanisms of the
presentation. Of course, the reason for this is its pedagogical nature
but it also reflects the dogma of modern thought and engineering.
It should be clear that the bit alone is local and that any
organization of the bit what-so-ever, be it in the form of a word, a
Turing machine tape, in some form on a disk drive or in a text book
is, to some degree, lacking that locality. Indeed, this organization
is entirely separate and, worse, arbitrary.
The statistical matters that we may consider have nothing at all to do
with the bit.
More shortly...
Regards,
Steven
--------------------
Dr. Steven Ericsson-Zenith
Los Gatos, California. +1-650-308-8611
http://iase.info
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Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
[email protected]
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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