Dear all,
Merry Christmas to all of you.
I tend to associate Christmas with cinema - there's always been something good
to go and see with family and friends'. This year like last year, we have a new
Star Wars film - which entertained three generations of my family last year.
This year, I'd be intrigued to know whether this good vs evil story feels the
same in the light of recent events. I suspect it won't.
If anyone hasn't seen it, I highly recommend a more intelligent SciFi movie,
'Arrival' - which carries a lot of resonance with our recent discussions.
Have a restful time, and best wishes for the 2017 - it is just possible it
might not be as bad as we fear...
Best wishes,
Mark
-----Original Message-----
From: "Karl Javorszky" <[email protected]>
Sent: 24/12/2016 10:49
To: "fis" <[email protected]>
Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 33, Issue 41: On the relation
betweeninformation and meaning
Information and Wittgenstein
We should keep the self-evident in focus and refrain from descending into a
philosophical nihilism. We are, after all, reasonable people, who are able to
use our intelligence while communicating, and usually we understand each other
quite well. The idea, that information is just a mental creation, evades the
point: conceding that information is only a mental image, then what is that
which determines, which amino acid comes to which place and is apparently
contained in the sequence of the DNA triplets? If information is just an
erroneous concept, then what is that what we receive as we ask at the airport,
which gate to go for boarding?
No, information does exist and we do use it day by day. Shannon has developed a
method of repeatedly bifurcating a portion of N until finding that n of N that
corresponds to the same n of which the sender encoded the search pattern for
the receiver. The task lies not in negating the existence of the phaenomenon,
but in proposing a more elegant and for biology useful explanation of the
phaenomenon. The object of the game is still the same: identifying an n of N.
The same situation is here with gravitation. We have a name for it, can measure
it and integrate the concept - more or less seamlessly – into a general
explanation. We just do not know, in an epistemological sense, what gravitation
is. We have to take the normative power of the factual seriously and admit that
we may have problems in the naming of an observed fact. This does not absolve
us from the task of philosophers, that is, to try to understand and find good
explanations for the facts that we perceive and to our thoughts about the
perceptions and the facts.
Adorno summarised the critique on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, by saying, that W.
apparently had not read the job description of a philosopher carefully enough:
the task is not to investigate that what can be said exactly about a subject
that is well known to all, but the task is to chisel away the border separating
that what can be only felt and that what can be expressed understandably. This
is the envy speaking of someone who suffered an Oedipus tragedy. Socrates said
that the perpetrator of a crime suffers more than the victim, and post-war
German philosophy understandably had no time to be interested in rules of exact
speech. The grammar of the logical language, as a subject for serious study,
was swept aside by historical cataclysms, although Wittgenstein begot Frege and
Carnap who begot von Neumann and Boole who begot Shannon and Chomsky. That he
in his later life put aside his epoch-generating work is completely in the
consequence of what he had said. It is not disowning the ladder one has built
to climb up a level of abstraction while doing a cartography of what exact
talking really means, but a wise and truthful modesty of an artist who had
fabricated a tool for a specific project. No self-respecting artist would want
to be remembered for a practical tool he had assembled for a specific task.
Roughly citing, he says so much: those who have understood what is written
here, may throw [this book] away, like one has no need for a ladder after one
has climbed a level. Having found out how the technical people speak (or should
speak), he withdraws from that field, having clarified the rules of exact
thinking, closing the subject in a conclusive fashion for about 4 generations,
and acts in later life as if precognisant of Adorno’s words.
Information is a connection of a symbol with a different symbol, if this state
of the world can have a background and alternatives. If something can be
otherwise, then the information is contained in the enumeration of the cases of
being otherwise.
By the use of computers, we can now create a whole topography and dramaturgy of
exact speech. Had we the creativity of the Greeks, we would write a comedy,
performed in public, by actors and narrators. The title could be: “All acting
dutifully, striving their right place, catharsia are inevitable”. The best
youth of Sparta, Athens etc. would compete for prominent places in diverse
disciplines, but the results are not satisfactory, as the debate emerges, which
of the disciplines are above the others. The wise people of Attica have come up
with a perpetual compromise, its main points repeatedly summarised by the
chorus, ruling that being constantly underway between both correct positions:
p1 in discipline d1 and position p2 in discipline d2, is the divine sign of a
noble character. If every athlete follows the same rule, imagine the traffic
jams on the stage of the amphitheatre! The Greeks would have built an elaborate
system of philosophy about the predictable collisions among actors representing
athletes who have attended many of the concourses. They could have come up with
specific names for typical results and would have named the agglomerations
“elements” and “isotopes” that differ among each other on how many of the
actors are glued together for lack of space to pass through, where too many
paths cross, and on the form of the squeeze they constitute. They would no
doubt have categorised and sub-classified and tabulated the inevitable melee
that comes from having competing requirements to serve, a subject not far from
their preoccupations with logic and predictable, consistent, rule observing
behaviour by all, that by its very nature creates cooperation and conflict,
destruction and growth.
As long as the background and the alternatives to the statements, that describe
what is the case, are conceptually discouraged or disallowed, it appears not
very easy to use the term “information” in a consistent fashion. Information
describes that what is not the case. (The DNA eliminates all the alternatives
to that specific amino acid on that specific place; we have received
information by knowing all those gates where we will not board the plane.)
Thank you for this enjoyable year.
Karl
2016-12-24 2:39 GMT+01:00 Louis H Kauffman <[email protected]>:
Dear Steve,
You write
"But in later years he eventually recognized that the possibility of relating
propositions in language to facts concerning the world could not in itself be
proved. Without proof, the house of cards collapses. Once the validity of using
language to describe the world ini a rigorous and unambiguous way is
questioned, not much is left.”
I do not think that the issue of proof was foremost for Wittgenstein. Rather,
he later understood that a pure mirroring of language and world was untenable
and worked directly with language and its use to show how complex was the
actuality. The result is that one can still read the Tractatus meaningfully,
knowing that it states and discusses an ideal of (formal) language and a view
of the world so created that is necessarily limited. Indeed the later
Wittgenstein and the Tractatus come together at the point of the Tractatus
showing how meagre is that ‘that can be said’ from its mirrored and logical
point of view.
The Tractatus indicates its own incompleteness, and in do doing invalidates its
use by the logical positivists as a model for the performance of science. It
was in this background that (through Goedel) the Incompleteness Theorem arose
in the midst of the Vienna Circle. And here we are in a world generated by
formal computer languages, facing the uncertainties of models that are
sensitive enough (as in economics and social science) to cross the boundary and
affect what is to be modeled.
Best,
Lou Kauffman
On Dec 23, 2016, at 11:27 AM, steven bindeman <[email protected]> wrote:
I would like to contribute to the current ongoing discussion regarding the
relation between information and meaning. I agree with Dai Griffiths and others
that the term information is a problematic construction. Since it is often used
as an example of fitting the details of a specific worldly situation into a
linguistic form that can be processed by a computer, this fact in itself
introduces various distortions from the reality that is being represented. The
degree of distortion might even be an example of the degree of uncertainty.
I believe that reference to the early work of Wittgenstein might be of use in
this context, especially since his work in his Tractatus text on problems
related to logical atomism influenced the design of the von Neumann computer,
led to the creation of the Vienna Circle group and later inspired the
philosophical movement of logical positivism. Alan Turing was also one of his
students.
In this early work Wittgenstein had believed that a formal theory of language
could be developed, capable of showing how propositions can succeed in
representing real states of affairs and in serving the purposes of real life.
He believed that language is like a picture which is laid against reality like
a measuring rod and reaches right out to it. But in later years he eventually
recognized that the possibility of relating propositions in language to facts
concerning the world could not in itself be proved. Without proof, the house of
cards collapses. Once the validity of using language to describe the world ini
a rigorous and unambiguous way is questioned, not much is left. Although
propositions are indeed capable of modeling and describing the world with a
rigor not unlike that of mathematical representations of physical phenomena,
they cannot themselves describe how they represent this world without becoming
self-referential. Propositions are consequently essentially meaningless, since
their meaning consists precisely in their ability to connect with the world
outside of language. A perfect language mirrors a perfect world, but since
the latter is nothing more than a chimera so is the former.
Here are some quotes (taken out of their original contexts) from Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus that I believe are relevant to the discussion on information and
meaning:
The facts in logical space are the world. What is the case — a fact— is the
existence of states of affairs. A state of affairs (a state of things) is a
combination of objects (things). It is essential to things that they should be
possible constituents of states of affairs. If I know an object I also know all
its possible occurrences in states of affairs. Objects contain the possibility
of all situations. The configuration of objects produces states of affairs. The
totality of existing states of affairs is the world. The existence and
non-existence of states of affairs is reality. States of affairs are
independent of one another. A picture is a model of reality. A picture is a
fact. Logical pictures can depict the world. A picture depicts reality by
representing a possibility of existence and non-existence of states of affairs.
Situations can be described but not given names. (Names are like points;
propositions like arrows — they have sense.) Only propositions have sense;
only in the nexus of a proposition does a name have meaning.
Finally, with regards to the problems about information, I would add that
Alfred Korzybski (and later Marshall McLuhan) once wrote that “the map is not
the territory.” The map is merely a picture of something that it represents.
Increasing the amount of information may reduce the granularity of the picture,
but it remains a picture. This means that accumulation greater and greater
amounts of information can never completely replace or represent the infinite
complexity of any real-lilfe situation — and this is an insight that
Wittgenstein realized only in his later philosophical work.
Steve Bindeman
On Dec 22, 2016, at 7:37 AM, [email protected] wrote:
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Today's Topics:
1. Re: What is information? and What is life? (Dai Griffiths)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2016 12:44:59 +0000
From: Dai Griffiths <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Fis] What is information? and What is life?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; Format="flowed"
Information is not ?something out there? which ?exists? otherwise
than as our construct.
I agree with this. And I wonder to what extent our problems in
discussing information come from our desire to shoe-horn many different
phenomena into the same construct. It would be possible to disaggregate
the construct. It be possible to discuss the topics which we address on
this list without using the word 'information'. We could discuss
redundancy, variety, constraint, meaning, structural coupling,
coordination, expectation, language, etc.
In what ways would our explanations be weakened?
In what ways might we gain in clarity?
If we were to go down this road, we would face the danger that our
discussions might become (even more) remote from everyday human
experience. But many scientific discussions are remote from everyday
human experience.
Dai
On 20/12/16 08:26, Loet Leydesdorff wrote:
Dear colleagues,
A distribution contains uncertainty that can be measured in terms of
bits of information.
Alternatively: the expected information content /H /of a probability
distribution is .
/H/is further defined as probabilistic entropy using Gibb?s
formulation of the entropy .
This definition of information is an operational definition. In my
opinion, we do not need an essentialistic definition by answering the
question of ?what is information?? As the discussion on this list
demonstrates, one does not easily agree on an essential answer; one
can answer the question ?how is information defined?? Information is
not ?something out there? which ?exists? otherwise than as our construct.
Using essentialistic definitions, the discussion tends not to move
forward. For example, Stuart Kauffman?s and Bob Logan?s (2007)
definition of information ?as natural selection assembling the very
constraints on the release of energy that then constitutes work and
the propagation of organization.? I asked several times what this
means and how one can measure this information. Hitherto, I only
obtained the answer that colleagues who disagree with me will be
cited. JAnother answer was that ?counting? may lead to populism. J
Best,
Loet
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Loet Leydesdorff
Professor, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>;
http://www.leydesdorff.net/
Associate Faculty, SPRU, <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/>University of
Sussex;
Guest Professor Zhejiang Univ. <http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/>,
Hangzhou; Visiting Professor, I
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