Dear FISers -I have been following the FIS conversation re Terry's paper. I
have let Terry and Jeremy carry the burden of the dialogue with FIS. As an
FISer and a Pirate I have been neutral and did not want to enter the fray but I
now have something worth sharing - some of it stimulated by the FIS dialogue
and some by internal Terry and the Pirates conversations within our research
group. I have a rather long post to make up for my absence in the conversation
to date. I hope that I will have the benefit of your comments. I have just
shared this paper with my T&P colleagues through our normal email channel.
The Many Dimensions of Information; No Word is an Island – A Mind Map
Bob Logan
Prolegma and an Abstract: The concept of information has many dimensions and is
described in many different ways. It has many different associations. It has
many different definitions. It has many different interpretations. It has many
different interpreters. This is an attempt to identify all of these
associations, definitions, interpretations, and interpreters. It is in a
certain sense a mind map but it is the map of my mind, my definitions, my
associations, my interpretations, what is significant for me about information,
what information means for me, the thoughts that thinking about information
inspire and the thinkers that I believe have and can provide insights into the
nature of information. It is a catalogue. It is a hypothesis. It has been
compiled by induction, deduction and abduction. For you the reader it is to
communicate the complexity and many dimensions of information. For me it is a
starting point to rethink every thing I ever thought about information including
1. My reading of Incomplete Nature by Terrence Deacon
2. The discussions I have had with Terry and the Pirates (Terry is Terrence
Deacon, and the Pirates are the group that meets with Terry more or less once a
week in his home in Berkeley California with others like me joining by Skype.
The group continues those weekly discussions by email).
3. My FIS (Foundations of Information Science) listserv discussions.
4. The paper I co-authored with Stuart Kauffman and others entitled “The
Propagation of Information: An Enquiry” where we posited that “the constraints
that allow autonomous agents to channel free energy into work are connected to
information: in fact, simply put, the constraints are the information, are
partially causal in the diversity of what occurs in cells, and are part of the
organization that is propagated.”
5. My book What is Information? - Propagating Organization in the
Biosphere, the Symbolosphere, the Technosphere and the Econosphere (Logan 2014)
Acknowlegement: This mind map project is inspired by Terry Deacon’s remarks
during our Jan 21 T&P session and by an email he sent the following day, where
he wrote,
Maxwell formulated the laws of electromagnetism not as one equation but as four
interrelated equations, each defining a fundamental relation, i.e. formalizing
the findings of Gauss, Faraday, and Ampere. Perhaps to formalize information we
will need at least three: corresponding to medium properties, referential
properties, and significance properties— and possibly a fourth defining
interpretation (though this may be what the
three together define)
I. Words
The Semantic Web: Words are interconnected –they form a Semantic Web. Their
meaning arises in association with all the other words in their language and,
as is the case with the word information, in association with its Latin and
French origins. Words are entangled, networked, interdependent, interconnected,
interwoven, elements of a web, contextualized.
No word is an island entire of itself; every word is a piece of the language
from which it emerges, a part of the language; the death of any association
with a word diminishes it because every word is involved with every other word.
Never ask what is the exact meaning of a word or for whom that word has
meaning; depending on all your experiences that word tolls for thee and has a
particular meaning for thee. (A riff on John Donne’s 'No Man is an Island'):
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
That no word is an island is especially true of the following words:
Information, Inform, Form, Formal, Formal Cause, Formality, Formation (in
English this word has the meaning of a form of organization whereas in French
it has the meaning of training). And these associations are just the beginning.
Formal cause links to efficient cause, material cause and final cause ala
Aristotle.
Origin of the word information as forming the mind:
“The English word information according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
first appears in the written record in 1386 by Chaucer: “Whanne Melibee hadde
herd the grete skiles and resons of Dame Prudence, and hire wise informacions
and techynges.” The word is derived from Latin through French by combining the
word inform meaning giving a form to the mind with the ending “ation” denoting
a noun of action. This earliest definition refers to an item of training or
molding of the mind (Logan 2014).”
Other words associated with information:
Interpretation, interpret, clarify, construe, decipher, depict, elucidate,
explicate, connotation, exegetics
Sign: significance, signify, signification, significant, sign, designate,
specify, identify
Reference, refer, referee, referential, infer, indicate, indicative, index,
point out,
Represent, stand for
Semiotics: icon, index, symbol
Language, concept, conceive, percept, perceive
Language, semantics, syntax, pragmatics, grammar, langue, parole (as defined by
de Saussure)
Inspire; Inspiration;
Meaning, the mean, the means
Sentience
Cybernetics – Wiener - feedback
Medium; The medium is the message; The two messages of a medium: its content
and its effect independent of its content - McLuhan.
Message
Communicate, communication, commune
Rhetoric; Context; The context of information helps define the meaning of a
communication or utterance; Feedforward – I. A. Richards, pragmatics
Figure/ground: The meaning, significance or the interpretation of a figure
depends on the ground. environment or surroundings it operates in - McLuhan
Umwelt innenwelt umgebung – Euxkull
One can apply the notion of umwelt to humans and each individual has their own
unique umwelt or context in which they percieve the world and conceive their
thoughts. Their innenwelt or self-oriented features shape their umgebung or
world-oriented features. Translating this into McLuhan speak the innenwelt is
the ground and the umgebung is the figure from which I conclude it is the
innenwelt that detrmines the interpretation of what is perceived to form the
umgebung, or world-oriented features.
Shannon information, sender, channel, receiver
Selective information versus structural information: “Mackay’s first move was
to rescue information that affected the receiver’s mindset from the
‘subjective’ label. He proposed that both Shannon and Bavelas were concerned
with what he called Selective information, that is information calculated by
considering the selection of message elements from a set. But selective
information alone is not enough; also required is another kind of information
that he called ‘structural.’ Structural information indicates how selective
information is to be understood; it is a message about how to interpret a
message—that is, it is a metacommunication (Hayles 1999a, pp. 54-55 cited by
Logan 2014).” [bolding mine]
Shannon was not shannonian {He did not overdo the interpretation of Shannonian
entropy as did many advocates of information theory.
Understand, comprehend, apprehend, appreciate,
Respond, reply
Deixis (deictic) words that point, words and phrases that cannot be fully
understood without additional contextual information; a word whose meaning is
dependent on context
Words are woven together to form a text just as threads are woven to form a
textile, which usually refers to written communication. There is also the
notion that one spins a yarn, which describes oral communication.
Letters, literacy, literal
Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom: The relationship of data, information,
knowledge and wisdom
“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” – TS Eliot
“Where is the meaning we have lost in information?” – RK Logan
“• Data are the pure and simple facts without any particular structure or
organization, the
basic atoms of information,
• Information is structured data, which adds meaning to the data and gives it
context and
significance,
• Knowledge is the ability to use information strategically to achieve one's
objectives, and
• Wisdom is the capacity to choose objectives consistent with one's values and
within a larger social context (Logan 2014).”
______________________
Robert K. Logan
Prof. Emeritus - Physics - U. of Toronto
Chief Scientist - sLab at OCAD
http://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertKLogan
www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan
www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Logan5/publications
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