Dear Howard,
Thank you very much for your great effort and nice explanation!
I like it!
Only what I needed to see is a concrete answer to the question “what it the
Information?”
You absolutely clearly described it and I totally agree with your
considerations.
Only what is needed is to conclude with a short definition.
I think it may be the next:
The Information is a reflection which may be interpreted by its receiver in the
context the receiver has in his/her memory.
>From this definition many consequences follow. In future we may discuss them.
Friendly regards
Krassimir
PS:
Dear FIS Colleagues,
1. At the ITHEA web side, the conferences for year 2016 have been announced.
One of them is the XIV-th International Conference on “General Information
Theory”.
Please visit link:
http://www.ithea.org/conferences/conferences.html
Welcome in Varna, Bulgaria !
2. May be it will be interesting to read the paper, published in our
International Journal “Information Theories and Applications” (
http://www.foibg.com/ijita/ ) :
Formal Theory of Semantic and Pragmatic Information - a Technocratic Approach
by Venco Bojilov
http://www.foibg.com/ijita/vol22/ijita22-04-p05.pdf
Please send your remarks to the author to e-mail: off...@ithea.org
Krassimir
From: howlbl...@aol.com
Sent: Tuesday, February 02, 2016 8:46 AM
To: pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es
Cc: fis@listas.unizar.es
Subject: [Fis] _ Closing lecture
First, a few responses. I agree with Hans von Baeyer. Pedro’s kindness is
magic.
I agree with Gyorgy Darvas that quarks communicate.
I also agree with Jerry Chandler. Brute force is not the major mover of
history. Values and virtues count. A lot. In fact, a culture organizes
itself by calling one way of doing things evil—brute force—and another way of
doing things a value and a virtue. Our way is the value and the virtue. The
ways of others are brute force and evil. We see cooperation and warmth among
us. But only enmity and destruction among them.
The brute force is not within groups, where values, virtues, and compassion
prevail. It’s between groups. It’s in the pecking order battles between
groups.
Which means, in answer to Marcus Abundis, yes, groups struggle for position in
inter-group hierarchies like chickens in a barnyard. For example, America and
China are vying right now for top position in the barnyard of nations.
Russia’s in that battle, too. On a lower level, so are Saudi Arabia and Iran,
whose proxy war in Syria for pecking order dominance has cost a quarter of a
million lives. That’s brute force. Between groups whose citizens are often
lovely and loving to each other. Whose citizens are proud of their values and
virtues.
Now for a final statement.
Information exists in a context. That’s not at all surprising. Information is
all about context. As the writings of Guenther Witzany hint. And as Ludwig
Wittgenstein also suggested. Information is relational. Information does not
exist in a vacuum. It connects participants. And it makes things happen.
When it’s not connecting participants, it’s not information
FIS gets fired up to a high energy level when discussing the definition of
information and its relationship to Shannon’s entropic information equation.
Alas, these discussions tend to remove the context. And context is what gives
information its indispensable ingredient, meaning.
There are two basic approaches in science:
·the abstract mathematical;
·and the observational empirical.
Mathematical abstractionists dwell on definitions and equations. Empirical
observers gather facts. Darwin was an observational empiricist. I’d like to
see more of Darwin’s kind of science in the world of information theory.
One of Darwin’s most important contributions was not the concept of natural
selection. It was an approach that Darwin got from Kant and from his
grandfather Erasmus. That approach? Lay out the history of the cosmos on a
timeline and piece together its story. In chronological order. Piece together
the saga of how this cosmos has created itself. Including the self-motivated,
self-creation of life.
Communication plays a vital role in this story. It appears in the first
10(-32) of a second of the cosmos’ existence, when quarks communicated using
attraction and repulsion cues. OK, it’s not quite right to call the cues
attraction and repulsion cues. When two quarks sized each other up, they
interpreted the signals of the strong force differently. If you were a quark,
another quark might size you up and promptly speed away. But a quark of a
different variety might detect the same signals, find them wildly attractive,
and speed in your direction. One quark’s meat was another’s poison, even in
that first form of communication in the cosmos.
Information is not a stand-alone. Again, it’s contextual. It’s ruled by what
Guenther Witzany calls syntax, semantics, and, most
