Steven,
The relations between meaning and information have been addressed several times
in the FIS forum. I agree with Francesco that these relations should be
explicited in your approach.
Your wording: ‘meaning refers to the responsive behavior of an apprehension’
does not tell that much about origin and nature of meaning. It would be
interesting you address the meaningful/meaningless aspect of information for an
agent as well as their relations with the behavior of the agent.
Regarding meaningful information and locality, I agree that they are tightly
linked. Interpretation (meaning generation) is done by an agent that has a
locality.
More can be said. You may remember about an evolutionary perspective on
locality starting within an abiotic universe populated with ubiquist
physico-chemical laws applying averywhere. Life emerged in that universe as a
far from thermodynamical equilibrium status that maintained itself localy. The
satisfaction of a local constraint was something new in a universe submitted to
ubiquist laws. And such local constraint satisfaction naturaly introduces
meaning generation with links to teleology, agency, autonomy, and of course
life (see Chart 10 in
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279941646_Biosemiotics_Aboutness_Meaning_and_Bio-intentionality._Proposal_for_an_Evolutionary_Approach).
But I’m not sure how that fits with your approach.
best
Christophe_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
From: ste...@iase.us
Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2015 01:17:41 -0700
To: 13francesco.ri...@gmail.com
CC: fis@listas.unizar.es
Subject: Re: [Fis] Information and Locality.
On Sep 21, 2015, at 11:19 PM, Francesco Rizzo <13francesco.ri...@gmail.com>
wrote:Assisted translation to English:I bring the thought of Chilean
neuro-biologist Maturana: "The experience of the physical, that deals with
classical physics, relativity or quantum, does not reflect the nature of the
universe, but the 'ontology of the observer as a living system, because he
"operates linguistically" while achieving physical entities and the operational
coherences of their domains of existence. As Einstein said' theories
(explanations) of science are free creations of the human mind ‘" (Maturana,
1993).
In this context, "operate linguistically" means being and living in language,
cooperating behavior, recursive and described semantically. Everything exists
and takes place within the communication, not outside. And that is why one can
not ignore the relationship between information and meaning.
It is important to have a clear epistemology.
Einstein, in fact, said many things of epistemic merit and he was very clear to
draw the distinction between existence (ontology) and merely language. So for
me your presentation here does not hold. I have no doubt, however, that he said
that theories are the "free creations of the human mind.” But he did not intend
to imply that physics arises as a consequence, he clearly believe in the
process of empirical science.
Now he is known to engage in speculation, for example asking the question is
the moon still there if no one is looking. Einstein was very much a determinist
and absolutely did believe in a world independent of our ideas.
Maturana seems too vague to me, but his idea of autopoiesis is interesting.
I started this discussion with a very clear description of the relation between
information and meaning.
To recap, meaning refers to the responsive behavior of an apprehension. Even
referential meanings are captured by this definition. We have no need to say
that “this does that” or “A is a B” and suggest anything in the world.
We may say, for example, that "this train takes me to the city” and the meaning
of this sentence is that I get onto the train and am taken to the city. I may
say that “pretty flowers grow in spring” but the meaning of this sentence is
that I pick those flowers in spring and give them to someone I love, for you it
may simply mean that you have an allergic response when in their proximity.
In this way we can, for example, determine the meaning of the Spanish text you
sent me, for my case - its meaning is that I immediately translated it to
English text and then wrote this email.
In short, the sentence alone holds no meaning, it is merely a sentence, marks
upon paper. Interpretation cannot be fixed.
Meaning is only present when we act upon the apprehension of such a mark.
Language is simply a convention that tells me how to treat marks of this kind
and provides some social pragmatics. When I hear the sentence that “this train
takes me to the city” I know that it means I may act and use the train to
travel to the city. If I ignore the sentence then it has no meaning to me, it
has no effect.
A = B, only has meaning to those who act upon apprehending it.
Also note that, for me, communication is simply a way of speaking about the
engineering of machines and the activity of social groups. In essence
communication is simply a convenience, a way to speak about a group of
apprehenders, be they machine or human.
Similarly “intelligence" is also a way of speaking about actions that we deem
are the product of intent.
The bottom-line is that if you live only in language then you live in an
impoverished world.
Of course all theories are the free creation of the mind, it is what comes next
that matters.
This inevitably leads me to the work of Benjamin Peirce, who may have been the
first to observe that all the laws of nature are necessarily the algebraic sum
of their action together. The idea was developed by Einstein, though Einstein
was motivated by Maxwell’s work on covariance, as General Covariance and
emphasizing that the natural laws are necessarily independent of any particular
coordinate system.
The challenge that Benjamin Peirce saw was how to unify this purely
mathematical view with the physical sciences. I believe he set both of his sons
James and Charles upon this task.
This goal of unifying pure mathematics and the physical sciences has yet to be
achieved, although I am hopeful. In particular the movement against truth value
systems may be gaining momentum.
And this leads me to mention locality because Einstein was concerned by
concerns that I share. It is certainly the case that in GR we can speak only of
the local event but if you want to solve real problems you yourself provide the
unification of calculations, for example, to take man out of the solar system.
Indeed, to do anything at all requires that we provide the missing locality.
Regards,Steven
--
Dr. Steven Ericsson-Zenith, Los Gatos, California. +1-650-308-8611
http://iase.info
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