[Fis] Reply to Emanuel (A Prioro Modeling)

[Marcus Abundis]

Dear Emanuel – thank you for your opinions and judgements.

> The video . . . looks great <
• Given what follows, I am unsure of how to view this note.
> I asked you to provide me with a printed version . . . <
• I had no request and I offered nobody anything beside the introductory
text and its attachments. Thus, I am unsure of what you are referring to.
>. . . it turns out that all [your?] efforts were in vein <
>. . . I also did not understand nothing (sic). <
• I am sorry to hear this, if you understood nothing.

> From this mass of unknown . . . and bizarre notions:<
>"universal meaning", "aesthetic entropy","generative <
>informatics", "entropic mimicry", "behavioral entropy" <
> and so on . . . I will try to comment only on - the <
> "theory of meaning".<
> Therefore, with your permission . . . <
• If I understand you correctly, you *do not* grasp any of the concepts in
the material. Instead of asking questions to improve your grasp, you now
wish to share your opinions and judgements?

>. . . you mention the Shannon-Weaver (1949) "theory of <
> meaning" as a basic key component of your attempts <
• If I say such a thing this is an error (please specify so I can make
corrections). There is no theory of meaning; in my introductory I refer to
a “meaningful void“ as the central problem I wish to address.
• In your ensuing notes on Shannon (1948) and Shannon & Weaver (1949), the
points you wish to make seem unclear. It is plain (I think) to most readers
that no claim is made in any of Shannon’s/Weaver’s papers about a “theory
of meaning.“

> [Shannon] calls the child by his real name - <
> semantics! That is the name of his choice! Essentially <
> semantic information is the name of the issue that is <
> at the heart of all our current [session] . . . <
• Do you ascribe a different role to “meaning“ versus “semantics“? My
dictionary defines semantics as: “relating to meaning in language or logic.“

> 1952, Bar-Hillel and Carnap have . . . "Semantic <
> Information" that [has] since become the dominant theme <
> of the ongoing scientific discourse. <
• On your further comments re Bar-Hillel & Carnap, or Shannon (1956), I
think it is generally seen that a failed attempt at “meaning“ was made; I
agree. If you instead wish to dismiss my use of “meaning“ rather than
“semantics,“ I see this idea as lacking intellectual content (per above).

> The same as Terrence Deacon (whom you quote in support <
> of your claims) . . . <
I make no such claim, I have no idea of Terry’s view of my work. My *guess*
is that he would see it as a competing model and he would speak against it,
if at all.

> Shannon (1956) warned against such a misuse of his <
> information theory “. . . a few exciting words like <
> information,entropy, redundancy, do not solve all our <
> problems". These are Shannon’s words. But who cares? <
• Well, I care! A thoughtful view of Shannon’s words here leads one to
think there are other *important* problems still needing solutions. He does
not expressly frame those problems for us, beyond what Weaver (1949) does.
We are now in the 21st century and those undefined problems demand
“something new“ – which I hope to offer, and you cannot grasp? Such is life
– I try my best . . .

And then I find this surprising bit of news
> that the Sun is rising [in] the East.<
With recent Brexit voting, I see the sun has finally set on a once great
empire. But your news here, that the sun continues to rise in the east lets
me rest easy . . . for now.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

Marcus
___
Fis mailing list
Fis@listas.unizar.es
http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis

Re: [Fis] _comment to the "A Priori Modeling of Information"

[Loet Leydesdorff]

As a first step in the specification of the relevance of Shannon's
engineering model for developing a theory of meaning, Weaver (1949, at p.
26) proposed two minor additions to Shannon's diagram of a communication
channel, as follows: 

 

"One can imagine, as an addition to the diagram, another box labeled
"Semantic Receiver" interposed between the engineering receiver (which
changes signals to messages) and the destination. This semantic receiver
subjects the message to a second decoding, the demand on this one being that
it must match the statistical semantic characteristics of the message to the
statistical semantic capacities of the totality of receivers, or of that
subset of receivers which constitute the audience one wishes to affect. 

Similarly one can imagine another box in the diagram which, inserted between
the information source and the transmitter, would be labeled "semantic
noise," the box previously labeled as simply "noise" now being labeled
"engineering noise." From this source is imposed into the signal the
perturbations or distortions of meaning which are not intended by the source
but which inescapably affect the destination. And the problem of semantic
decoding must take this semantic noise into account." 

 

 

cid:image003.png@01D1CF8B.1F207680

 

Figure 1: Weaver's (1949) "minor" additions penciled into Shannon's (1948)
original diagram.

 

Since the "semantic receiver" recodes the information in the messages
(received from the "engineering receiver" who only changes signals into
messages) while having to assume the possibility of "semantic noise," a
semantic relationship between the two new boxes can also be envisaged. Given
Shannon's framework, however, this relation cannot be considered as another
information transfer-since semantics are defined as external to Shannon's
engineering model. 

 

Semantics are not based on specific communications, but on relations among
patterns of relations or, in other words, correlations. In the case of a
single relation, the relational distance is not different from the
correlational one; but in the case of relations involving three (or more)
agents, the distances in the vector space are different from the Euclidean
distances in the network space. In a triplet, the instantiation of one or
the other relation can make a difference for the further development of the
triadic system of relations. 

 

A system of relations can be considered as a semantic domain (Maturana,
1978). In other words, the sender and receiver are related in the graph of
Figure 1, while they are correlated in terms of not necessarily instantiated
relations in the background. The structure of correlations provides a latent
background that provides meaning to the information exchanges in relations.
The correlations are based on the same information, but the representation
in the vector space is different from the graph in the network space of
observable relations. 

 

In other words, meaning is not added to the information, but the same
information is delineated differently and considered from a different
perspective (including absent relations; i.e., zeros in the distribution).
As against Shannon-type information which flows linearly from the sender to
the receiver, one can expect meanings to loop, and thereby, to develop
next-order dimensionalities. New meanings generate new options and thus
redundancy. In my opinion, the task is to specify mechanisms which generate
redundancy (cf. Leydesdorff & Ivanova, 2014).

 

Source: Loet Leydesdorff, Alexander Petersen, and Inga A. Ivanova, The
Self-Organization of Meaning and the Reflexive Communication of Information.
  Social Science Information (in press).
 
Loet Leydesdorff and Inga A. Ivanova, Mutual Redundancies in Inter-human
Communication Systems: Steps Towards a Calculus of Processing Meaning
 , Journal of the Association for
Information Science and Technology 65(2) (2014) 386-399.

 

  _  

Loet Leydesdorff 

Professor, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)

  l...@leydesdorff.net ;
 http://www.leydesdorff.net/ 
Associate Faculty,   SPRU, University of
Sussex; 

Guest Professor   Zhejiang Univ., Hangzhou;
Visiting Professor,   ISTIC,
Beijing;

Visiting Professor,   Birkbeck, University of London;


 
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYJ&hl=en

 




  _  

___
Fis mailing list
Fis@listas.unizar.es
http://listas.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis