Thank you Bob!
The medium is a very restricted form of communication on the internet, of
course...
Are our circular deliberations about information victims of the so-called
"information technology" which enables them? Is this a variety of
Wittgenstein's realisation that the problems of philosophy were problems of
language? Perhaps we cannot see the constraints that communications technology
itself has on our discourse. How might we try to see them?
Maybe this goes some way towards accounting for the strange political situation
we find ourselves in at the moment!
Best wishes,
Mark
-----Original Message-----
From: "Bob Logan" <[email protected]>
Sent: 18/12/2016 15:14
To: "Loet Leydesdorff" <[email protected]>; "Robert Ulanowicz"
<[email protected]>; "Alex Hankey" <[email protected]>
Cc: "fis" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Fis] Fwd: What is life?
Hello Loet, Bob U, Alex et alia - I agree with Bob U when he wrote "The problem
is that information is not an absolute.” As I have stated before on this list
information is relative and depends on the context.
And I agree with Loet when he wrote, "Different systems of reference, of
course, can attribute different meanings to the same information.”
In fact McLuhan expressed Loet's thought long ago with the one-liner: "The
user is the content” Applying this idea to Shannon’s original paper might
explain why we have so many definitions of information as each reader of his
original paper has their own interpretation of Shannon because as McLuhan said
"the user is the content”.
For this user, Shannon information theory should be called Shannon signal
theory as Shannon himself said his theory was not concerned with meaning only
the accuracy of sending a signal from point A to point B. What does information
without meaning mean anyway?
I enjoy these conversations about the meaning of information and even wrote a
book on the subject entitled What Is Information? (Available for free at
demopublishing.com) but I get the feeling we are like the dog chasing its own
tail. I agreed with Bob U’s point that information is not an absolute and then
I agreed with Loet’s disagreement with Bob U’s point. Talk about a dog chasing
its tail.
And if this is not enough consider another McLuhan one-liner: "The medium is
the message” in which he suggests that there is additional information in the
medium that carries the signals from point A to point B independent of those
signals.
cheers - Bob L
______________________
Robert K. Logan
Prof. Emeritus - Physics - U. of Toronto
Fellow University of St. Michael's College
Chief Scientist - sLab at OCAD
http://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertKLogan
www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan
www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Logan5/publications
On Dec 18, 2016, at 2:16 AM, Loet Leydesdorff <[email protected]> wrote:
The problem is that information is not an absolute. The same code when measured
against different references (English vs. Spanish in this case) will yield
different measures. It's the obverse of the Third Law of Thermodynamics. See
<http://people.clas.ufl.edu/ulan/files/FISPAP.pdf>
Dear Bob,
It seems to me that you confuse information with what information means for a
system of reference. Different systems of reference, of course, can attribute
different meanings to the same information.
@Alex: this confusion is unfortunately pervasive. Unlike Shannon-type
information, “information” is often defined (following Bateson and McKay) as “a
difference which makes a difference”, without articulation that the second
difference presumes the specification of a system of reference.
A series of differences of the first type can be considered as a probability
distribution that contains uncertainty. “A difference which makes a
difference”, however, can be considered as “meaningful information”. In my
opinion, this “meaningful information” should not be equated with information
because one then uses the same word for two different things and thus generates
confusion.
Best,
Loet
[The entire original message is not included.]
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