Is 'information' a thing?
I have been reading and enjoying Paul Davies' recent book, Demon in the Machine. From the jacket blurb, 'Davies proposes a radical vision of biology which sees the underpinnings of life as similar to circuits and electronics, arguing that life as we know it should really be considered a phenomenon of information storage.'
Just now I was watching a debate between Daniel Dennett and Keith Ward (who's basically a Christian Platonist.) In the intro to the debate, Dennett introduced himself and said that, whilst as a materialist he accepts that everything basically comes down to matter and energy, that information is also fundamental, referring to the well-known quote by Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics.
Wiener said
[quote=Computing Machines and the Nervous System. p. 132.]The mechanical brain does not secrete thought "as the liver does bile," as the earlier materialists claimed, nor does it put it out in the form of energy, as the muscle puts out its activity. Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.[/quote]
First of all, I think all of this is quite true, so I'm not objecting to the basic principle. But what bothers me a bit, is the introduction of 'information' as a metaphysical simple - as a fundamental constituent, in the sense that atoms were once thought to be.
And the reason that it bothers me, is that the word 'information' is polysemic. It has many meanings, depending on the context in which it is being used, and many connotations which are far from simple.
Step back a little to the earliest formulations of atomism. All there is, said Democritus, are atoms and the void. Atoms are eternal, imperishable, and indivisible. But at the same time, by their being able to combine in countless ways, and by virtue of their variety, they can account for all the manifold phenomena in the world of appearance. The idea of the atom solved the problem of 'the many and the one', by granting to 'the many' the attributes of indivisibility, eternity and imperishability previously accorded to the One. This was the genius of atomism, and one of the main reasons it has had such enormous appeal and influence.
Now, as Wiener says, I too believe that atomistic materialism is undermined by many discoveries in science, not least the properties of living organisms. So, as he says, the materialist chestnut that 'the brain secretes thought as the liver does bile' doesn't stand up in the light of the discoveries of both genetics and semiotics, which obey laws that operate on a different level to those of physics. Information, he's saying, is irreducible.
But - what is it? It has nothing like the conceptual simplicity of the atom. And again, it means many things in many contexts. Frequently, Claude Shannon's work is rolled out in this context; but he was concerned with the transmission of signals across a medium, and what it takes to do that. Then there's the 'dogma' of genetics -'the central dogma of molecular biology describes the flow of genetic information in cells from DNA to messenger RNA (mRNA) to protein.' Which is a completely different subject to Shannon's data compression algorithms.
So - I'm totally open to the notion that 'information is fundamental', but it seems to me to leave an awful lot of very large, open questions, about what 'information' is or means or where it originates.
So when Dennett says, 'oh yes, I'm a materialist, all that exists is matter and energy - and information' - then is he still a materialist? It seems like a very large dodge to me.
Just now I was watching a debate between Daniel Dennett and Keith Ward (who's basically a Christian Platonist.) In the intro to the debate, Dennett introduced himself and said that, whilst as a materialist he accepts that everything basically comes down to matter and energy, that information is also fundamental, referring to the well-known quote by Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics.
Wiener said
[quote=Computing Machines and the Nervous System. p. 132.]The mechanical brain does not secrete thought "as the liver does bile," as the earlier materialists claimed, nor does it put it out in the form of energy, as the muscle puts out its activity. Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.[/quote]
First of all, I think all of this is quite true, so I'm not objecting to the basic principle. But what bothers me a bit, is the introduction of 'information' as a metaphysical simple - as a fundamental constituent, in the sense that atoms were once thought to be.
And the reason that it bothers me, is that the word 'information' is polysemic. It has many meanings, depending on the context in which it is being used, and many connotations which are far from simple.
Step back a little to the earliest formulations of atomism. All there is, said Democritus, are atoms and the void. Atoms are eternal, imperishable, and indivisible. But at the same time, by their being able to combine in countless ways, and by virtue of their variety, they can account for all the manifold phenomena in the world of appearance. The idea of the atom solved the problem of 'the many and the one', by granting to 'the many' the attributes of indivisibility, eternity and imperishability previously accorded to the One. This was the genius of atomism, and one of the main reasons it has had such enormous appeal and influence.
Now, as Wiener says, I too believe that atomistic materialism is undermined by many discoveries in science, not least the properties of living organisms. So, as he says, the materialist chestnut that 'the brain secretes thought as the liver does bile' doesn't stand up in the light of the discoveries of both genetics and semiotics, which obey laws that operate on a different level to those of physics. Information, he's saying, is irreducible.
But - what is it? It has nothing like the conceptual simplicity of the atom. And again, it means many things in many contexts. Frequently, Claude Shannon's work is rolled out in this context; but he was concerned with the transmission of signals across a medium, and what it takes to do that. Then there's the 'dogma' of genetics -'the central dogma of molecular biology describes the flow of genetic information in cells from DNA to messenger RNA (mRNA) to protein.' Which is a completely different subject to Shannon's data compression algorithms.
So - I'm totally open to the notion that 'information is fundamental', but it seems to me to leave an awful lot of very large, open questions, about what 'information' is or means or where it originates.
So when Dennett says, 'oh yes, I'm a materialist, all that exists is matter and energy - and information' - then is he still a materialist? It seems like a very large dodge to me.
Comments (160)
Perhaps one generous way of looking at it is that all information attests to certain asymmetries (physical or otherwise), and that asymmetries are the basis of all generativity; e.g. if you had equal amounts of matter and anti-matter at the birth of the universe, it would have all fizzled out: you need an asymmetry, an imbalance, to start the process of cosmogony, otherwise it all cancels each other out and you get no universe. That asymmetry can be understood in informational terms, and is generalizable across all sorts of domains, not just cosmogony. Is that 'fundamental' enough? Depends what you want out of fundamentality I guess.
Edit: I suppose one could accede to a kind of Platonism of information where there 'is' information (disembodied, ethereal) which gets instantiated/emboided in particular bio/physical arrangements, but that would be - like all Platonism - to put the cart before the horse.
I very much agree. :up:
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes. And I've always interpreted the combinatorial aspect of 'Swirling & Swerving-Atoms-In/(Of?)-Void' as information, or the 'physical measure' of the information content – system-states – of whatever (i.e. X comes-to-be, or X continues-to-be, or X ceases-to-be) happens.
Pedantic (contra non-materialist, non-physicalist, non-naturalist) aside: democritean Atomism seems to emphasize voids that allow for combinatorial dynamics (i.e. nonequilibria, asymmetries) of atoms (molecular/micro), which is 'intuitively analogous' to field theories; whereas, however, subsequent lucretian Materialism emphasize atoms (molar/macro) and their purported swerves, 'anticipating' statistical mechanics (i.e. compatibilist uncertainty, or "freedom").
YMMV. :smirk:
I'm not a materialist, or a dualist, I believe in Idealism, but I'm using matter for the sake of argument. I haven't yet seen a coherent definition of what "matter" even means, or is. To me, it's like talking about a Pulamorph or a Glorf, or a Puppersyndir. Meaningless.
Except Quantum Mechanics totally refuted atomism.
Fixed that for you.
How so?
Quoting h060tu
But do you think?
But the point is, information can’t be reduced to energy and matter, although I suspect that will be over your head. Otherwise, why would Norbert Wiener have made the point in the first place?
You’re not seriously asking that question are you? :worry:
Quite true! And indeed, scientists at CERN have already decided that the universe ought not to exist. But the fact that it comes into existence through an imperfection or asymmetry is, shall we say, mythologically resonant, at least.
That’s because both matter and energy can be reduced to information. Information can manifest as matter or as energy, but it can also be neither.
But then what is it? You can’t answer that question - which is the point of the OP.
Order is only that 'bit' of chaos we happen to be interested in - can make use of - for some interval.
Well, the bit of it that constitutes the alphabet is what makes communication possible, although of course the question remains moot as to whether //in this case it// serves any purpose. :roll:
For example:
Imagine a square of 100 * 100 pixels each of which is either black or white.
The complete information contained in this arrangement can be represented as a binary string reading left to right line by line top to bottom 10,000 bits.
But if there is order, the information can be compressed, and the more order there is, the more it can be compressed.
For instance:
All the pixels on the left half are black, and all the ones on the right half are white. A program to generate this pattern can be written in very much less than 10,000 bits.
To make it intuitive, to the extent there is order, there is repetition, and whenever there is a repetition, it can be abbreviated to 'and so on'.
Repetition gives the same information twice. Repetition gives the same information twice.
=
Repetition gives the same information twice. *2
Information density is the measure of disorder. Information in this example is not the pixels, but the arrangement of the pixels, not the things, but the arrangement of things.
This why the same information can be pixels on my screen and completely different pixels on your screen.
This is completely subjective, because what constitutes "information" is dependent on the defining terms. If the arrangement is set up with the intent to deceive, then what you are reading as "information" is really disinformation. And the whole concept of "information", under this precept becomes completely unsupported because of the possibility that you are wrongly interpreting what is there.
I think what you’re actually saying is that if there’s order, then it can be expressed in an algorithm, isn’t it?
To use a more rustic example, if you have a pile of pebbles in no particular order, there is no way to represent that pile of pebbles because there’s no order. The most you could say is how many there are and how big they are (which would be expressive mathematically). If a pile of unevenly sized rocks was placed in an order, for example set in a row with the smallest on the left and largest on the right, then you could write an algorithm to express that order. But if all the rocks were precisely the same size and not ordered, then their arrangement contains no information because it’s by nature a disordered mass.
The meat and potatoes of information comes in the form of answers to the 6W's and 1H:
1. What?
2. Where?
3. When?
4. Which?
5. Who?
6. Why?
7. How?
This team of 7 queries constitute the overarching paradigm that captures the essence of the universe, quite possibly any universe, taken as consisting of things and phenomena (what happens to these things).
Things and phenomena are what a universe is and so, since information is ultimately about things and phenomena in the form of answers to the 6W's and 1H, information must be as fundamental as things and phenomena themselves.
You are informing me of something, but you are wrong. What you offer as information is disinformation. But being wrong does not change the number of words you have written, any more than calling what I have written 'subjective' changes the information I have given.
But what I have explained informally can be found with more rigour by those who are interested.
The point is that you have assumed the capacity to judge between information and disinformation with your assertion that "information increases as order decreases". The truth or falsity of this assertion depends on this capacity. If you cannot validate that capacity your claim is unjustified. Perhaps what you have interpreted as information is really disinformation, then the opposite of your assertion is what is really the case.
No. this is exactly the opposite of what I am saying. A disordered system contains more information than an ordered one. Your intuition is the opposite because the information it contains is boring. Each pebble has its location in relation to the others, but because there is no order or pattern it looks superficially just like any other disordered arrangement - nothing special.
To illustrate, there is a test for photographic memory that separates a patterned picture into two pictures both of which are pseudo-random. The pattern is only revealed to those who can superimpose one picture onto the other in their mind.
No. the point is that I do not at this point distinguish information and disinformation because that is a matter of interpretation, not of information itself.
[quote=https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/deacon/]At the bottom level is the natural world, which Deacon characterizes by its subjection to the second law of thermodynamics. When entropy (the Boltzmann kind) reaches its maximum, the equilibrium condition is pure formless disorder. Although there is matter in motion, it is the motion we call heat and nothing interesting is happening. Equilibrium has no meaningful differences, so Deacon calls this the homeodynamics level, using the root homeo-, meaning "the same." There are no meaningful differences here.
At the second level, form (showing differences) emerges. Deacon identifies a number of processes that are negentropic, reducing the entropy locally by doing work against and despite the first level's thermodynamics. This requires constraints, says Deacon, like the piston in a heat engine that constrains the expansion of a hot gas to a single direction, allowing the formless heat to produce directed motion.
Atomic constraints such as the quantum-mechanical bonding of water molecules allow snow crystals to self-organize into spectacular forms, producing order from disorder. Deacon dubs this second level morphodynamic. He sees the emerging forms as differences against the background of unformed sameness. His morphodynamic examples include, besides crystals, whirlpools, Bénard convection cells, basalt columns, and soil polygons, all of which apparently violate the first-level tendency toward equilibrium and disorder in the universe. These are processes that information philosophy calls ergodic.
Herbert Feigl and Charles Sanders Peirce may have been the origin of Bateson's famous idea of a "difference that makes a difference."On Deacon's third level, "a difference that makes a difference" (cf. Gregory Bateson and Donald MacKay) emerges as a purposeful process we can identify as protolife. The quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger saw the secret of life in an aperiodic crystal, and this is the basis for Deacon's third level. He ponders the role of ATP (adenosine triphosphate) monomers in energy transfer and their role in polymers like RNA and DNA, where the nucleotide arrangements can store information about constraints. He asks whether the order of nucleotides might create adjacent sites that enhance the closeness of certain molecules and thus increase their rate of interaction. This would constitute information in an organism that makes a difference in the external environment, an autocatalytic capability to recruit needed resources. Such a capability might have been a precursor to the genetic code.
Deacon crafts an ingenious model for a minimal "autogenic" system that has a teleonomic (purposeful) character, with properties that might be discovered some day to have existed in forms of protolife. His simplest "autogen" combines an autocatalytic capability with a self-assembly property like that in lipid membranes, which could act to conserve the catalyzing resources inside a protocell.
Autocatalysis and self-assembly are his examples of morphodynamic processes that combine to produce his third-level, teleodynamics. Note that Deacon's simplest autogen need not replicate immediately. Like the near-life of a virus, it lacks a metabolic cycle and does not maintain its "species" with regular reproduction. But insofar as it stores information, it has a primitive ability to break into parts that could later produce similar wholes in the right environment. And the teleonomic information might suffer accidental changes that produce a kind of natural selection.
Deacon introduces a second triad he calls Shannon-Boltzmann-Darwin (Claude, Ludwig, and Charles). He describes it on his Web site www. teleodynamics.com. I would rearrange the first two stages to match his homeodynamic-morphodynamic-teleodynamic triad. This would put Boltzmann first (matter and energy in motion, but both conserved, merely transformed by morphodynamics). A second Shannon stage then adds information (Deacon sees clearly that information is neither matter nor energy); for example, knowledge in an organism's "mind" about the external constraints that its actions can influence.
This stored information about constraints enables the proto-organism in the third stage to act in the world as an agent that can do useful work, that can evaluate its options, and that can be pragmatic (more shades of Peirce) and normative. Thus Deacon's model introduces value into the universe— good and bad (from the organism's perspective). It also achieves his goal of explaining the emergence of perhaps the most significant aspect of the mind: that it is normative and has goals. This is the ancient telos or purpose.[/quote]
From my brief reading on the subject, I would find this easier to understand if it were rewritten as "novel information increases as unpredictability increases". However, your expression may be more concise.
Yep. In the below, the second, asymmetric ('disordered') organization of dots contains much more information than the first ('ordered') arrangement of dots.
While on the other hand this:
Contains the least information of all (hence commonly known as white noise!)
(One of the reasons why 'order' and 'disorder' can be misleading).
Unless it happens to be the code that opens the vault at Fort Knox.
Actually the third picture contains a quite staggering amount of information, it's just (most probably) useless information. But never mind the quality, feel the width.
Quoting Wayfarer
"Consciousness" and "mind" are also terms that leave an awful lot of very large, open questions, about what "consciousness" and "mind" is or means or where it originates, yet idealists claim it is fundamental.
I don't know what Dennett could mean by "materialist" other than meaning that everything is causal. When we talk about "information" we are talking about causal relationships. Effects are about their causes, hence effects carry information about their causes. In providing explanations, we are providing causes to the effect we are explaining.
Tree rings carry information about the age of the tree, not because some mind came along and observed the tree and projected the meaning into the tree rings. The tree rings arose as a result of how the tree grows throughout the year, independent of minds. It is only based on observations of how the tree grows over time that we learn what kind of information the tree rings carry - or what they are about, or mean.
The mind is just another effect of the world, hence it is about the world and informs of the world. Minds are also causes of effects in the world, hence things like written words means, or informs us of, the user's idea and their intent to communicate them.
One can even find information in the use of words other than what the words mean, like how skilled the user is with the language, where they are from in the case of hearing their spoken accent, etc. So information is wherever one looks, or applies their view to some level of the causal chain.
So information isn't necessarily a "thing", but a relationship between things - cause and effect. In this sense, information is fundamental.
Exactly. Order and disorder would be based on some view (larger scale vs. smaller scale).
As I understand it, information is the capacity to distinguish between possible alternatives. One bit of Shannon information is fundamentally a relation between two possibilities, not two potential alternatives, or two actual alternatives.
So information, at its most fundamental, manifests ‘the difference that makes a difference’ between a binary of possibility: matter/anti-matter, for instance, or true/false or I/0. As such, it is the basic building block of existence.
Now, from the perspective of a tiny bug on a printed copy of this image, who is chemically attracted to the inked sections, this image would be a wealth of information...
Here's a question:
Does "information" at all solve anything related to the hard question of consciousness? Specifically, I am thinking of qualia. I am still seeing the hard question alluding this as well. There is still an unexplained element of how information explains how color and smell are the same as its physical constituents that cause it. There is a bifurcation there that seems to always elude. You can talk meaningfully about information in terms of physical (neural signals, bio-chemistry, physics) and psychological (the color red can indicate certain things- blood, ripe fruit, red is not green, but close to orange, etc.). However, it does not necessarily close the explanatory gap between the two (Ah, so information means X = Y!). Nope.
On review, I ought to have said that this:
Has the least information of all. :up:
Not in any straightforward way. There have been efforts to use information theory in order to shore up a theory of consciousness that accounts for the hard problem ("integrated information theory") but no one seems to understand what its authors are on about.
Potential information is being confused as actual information here. When the information is predictable then disorder resolves to order, but that is only done once the pattern is explained - the relationship between the pattern and the cause of the pattern. Until it is explained there are many potential causal relationships, therefore it may seem like there is more information, but that is like thinking that you have multiple choices when making a decision, but all of those choices aren't actual outcomes, only one becomes actual.
Some system has more information than another if it has more causes involved with it than another - kind of like how iron has more information than hydrogen because there were more causal processes involved in the creation of iron over hydrogen.
Come back when you have the faintest idea what we're talking about. I won't be holding my breath.
Hint: an image is what it is. It has no potential, and the information content cannot change except by the destruction of the image.
Indeed so. I gave the example of black pixels on the left and white pixels on the right as an ordered arrangement A chequerboard configuration would be an example of an ordered mixed distribution.
There's a whole statistical mind-fuck for measuring the degree of disorder.
Actually that is an excellent article and he raises exactly issues that I'm talking about. I have heard of IIT and Tononi and Koch's attempt at using it to solve the problem of consciousness. Although probably the most thorough theory using information, information itself just might not be able to get at it.
Lack of information!
No - it contains nothing ordered. White noise and piles of rocks are not algorithmically compressible - the position of the rocks, being random, can’t be described by an algorithm.
Web definition of 'information':
That last is from Shannon's work.
So, if it's random, then it is not ordered. A 40 kilo pile of pebbles doesn't contain twice as much information as a 20 kilo pile of pebbles - it only contains twice as many pebbles
Quoting Harry Hindu
What Dennett means is that only the objects of physics are real, everything else is derived from that. He says that what we experience as consciousness is really the output of billions of cellular processes which are in themselves unconscious - 'unconscious competence', he calls it.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I don't think so. The point I'm making in the OP is that to admit that information is one of the fundamental constituents of reality amounts to admission of defeat for reductionist materialism because it acknowledges that information, however conceived, can't be reduced to matter (or matter-energy). I don't think Dennett realises the implications.
Quoting unenlightened
interestingly, if a holographic image is fragmented, each fragment contains the whole image albeit at a lower resolution. Different topic, though.
The pebbles will not all be the same size, so a 40 kilo pile may or may not contain twice as many pebbles as a 20 kilo pile, but it will indeed hold much more information.
How so? I'm not asking about information ABOUT the pile, but what information it contains. If you see a bag of stones, do you think it contains any information? If so, what?
Quoting StreetlightX
The problem with IIT (IMHO) is that it defines both conscious experience and information as actual - consisting of a cause-effect relationship. But the psi it refers to is NOT the most fundamental unit of consciousness they claim it is, anymore than atoms are the most fundamental unit of reality. That’s just as far as scientific certainty goes. Nevertheless, I think the theory has potential, if explored in the context of quantum rather than classical physics. But that’s only an intuitive assessment - I can’t make head or tail of the calculations in either theories, only the interpretations, so I’m not really qualified to take it further.
FWIW - Qualia, as I see it, refers to qualitative potential information or value, in much the same way that probability refers to quantitative potential information. This is information the brain pieces together to make predictions about our interaction with the world - given that the brain doesn’t interact directly with the world, but rather as an allocation of energy (potential) and attention (value) to the various parts of the organism in relation to these predictions. Consciousness would then be the five-dimensional conceptual predictive ‘map’ we each continually reconstruct about ourselves in relation to the world, as a relational structure of both qualitative and quantitative potential information relative to its differentiation from the ongoing sensory event of the organism in 4D spacetime.
So now we know the boundaries of your definition of information.
But the dictionary says:
"Information:
2. what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things."
https://www.google.com/search?q=information+definitiion&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS850US850&oq=information+definitiion&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l7.5143j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Does a bag of rocks contain what it conveys?
It doesn't convey anything. Now, if I was lost on a desert island, and spelt out 'help' with that bag of rocks, and a passing helicopter saw it - then it's conveyed something.
What’s with the distinction from information ABOUT? That’s essentially what information does - it informs one system about another system. But the information we perceive that a pile of stones has as a system is dependent upon our capacity to interact with that system’s capacity to inform.
This highlights the actual/potential misunderstanding about information. What @Janus is referring to is potential information - the pile’s capacity to inform - whereas Wayfarer is referring to actual information: the differentiated result of an interaction between my perceived potential to observe and the pile’s potential to inform. It is the potential information that is more objective - the actual information is subject to your capacity (and willingness) to interact with a pile of stones, and is therefore a limited perspective of information.
The bag of rocks doesn't convey the fact that it's a bag of rocks and not a strawberry pie? Then how do you know it's not a strawberry pie?
But random stuff contains no information, as a matter of definition. A person, or a scientist, can discover information about it - composition, density and so on - but that doesn't mean that it contains information.
Look at the SETI program - it's been scanning the cosmos for 30 years looking for 'telltale signs of life'. No doubt that search has generated petabytes of stored data - but the 'telltale sign', which is ordered information, has never been found.
Quoting Possibility
Thank you.
Quoting Possibility
Objectivity is defined by in relation to subjects. Without a subject, there is nothing objective about it.
Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm
Hey it is! It's delicious! Like some?
Do what you would call examples of ordered stuff, for example written texts or ancient tablets, contain information that is independent of their being, respectively, anyone to read, or decipher?
I might take a look, and make the judgement that it suits what I understand by "bag of rocks", and not what I understand as "strawberry pie". So I would claim that it's a bag of rocks.
Objectivity is a relation beyond the subject, not in spite of it.
Uncertainty and error from noise is a given in relation to actual information. We go to a lot of trouble to ignore, isolate and exclude all of this uncertainty, to collapse it to a binary true-false that we call logic. But in reality, what we make use of in our own (often subconscious) interactions with the world - what enables us to learn from the past and form predictions about the future - is a subjective relation to irreducible potential/value information. And beyond that subjectivity is all the potential information with which we can interact in a meaningful way through subject-to-subject relations, increasing our understanding of an objectivity beyond our limited capacity to collapse potential information.
Just because we have no way to structure that information in relation to our limited perception of the cosmos, doesn’t mean the information doesn’t exist. It’s irrelevant to our perceived capacity to make predictions about anything at this stage, but essentially it’s still information.
That's more prudent than taking a bite.
Quoting Possibility
I don’t agree. It broadens the definition of information to be so all inclusive that it becomes meaningless.
Only if you’re looking for a definition in terms of what it is that everything else isn’t. But if information is fundamental, then everything IS information. It is the diversity of meaning itself: the difference that makes a difference.
Come back when you know how to read.
Destruction of the image is a causal process, so yes that would change the information content.
What the image is is a relationship between its effect of an image and what caused it to be an image. There are many potential causes but only one actual cause.
Why don't you show exactly what is the information that is missing from the ordered image that exists in the disordered image.
Order and disorder are simply different views of the same thing - one view with a causal explanation and one view without.
Because I already have. About as clearly and graphically as could possibly be.
Quoting unenlightened
Come back when you know how to read., No, actually, don't. Just stop chasing me from thread to thread with your vacuous contrarian nonsense.
Ok, but then where does this valuative element come from? It's still not answering the hard question of why value at all. What I mean is, how are brain states or physical states equivalent to value? If they are not equivalent, how do you account for this dualism?
Methinks that unenlightened posts would be considerably better if he really was logical.
Quoting unenlightened
So the ordered image has twice the amount of information of the disordered image?
Why does repetition give the same information only twice? It seems to me that repetition could potentially be infinite.
Quoting unenlightened
Both images are an arrangement of things.
You still haven't come close to showing how the disordered image has more information than the ordered one. If anything, you have shown the opposite.
You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind. You are blind.
I don't understand the connection you're making here. If the question I'm asking of the dataset is "what is unenlightened saying?", then the repetition carries no more information. If the question I'm asking of the dataset is "what state is each sentence in?" then the measure of information is the degree of decrease in probability for the total unit. Say each sentence could be either 'You are blind' or 'You are not blind', then each has a P=0.5. Every sentence which is specified by your post reduces that uncertainty. So the information is the total degree to which uncertainty is reduced (the total possibilities which are set to certainties). At least, that's how Shannon defines it.
What you seem to be describing is the efficiency of data compression, which is not the same thing as information quantity (in terms of probability reduction).
The only way I can see you conflating measures of information compression with measures of information quantity is with expectation. If the value of one sentence somehow dictates the following value, then my expectation is lower (less information has been carried). But you ruled that out by saying that the information was 'in the picture' and had nothing to do with the interpretation.
So I'm lost as to what you're trying to present here (yet it sounds interesting). Are you trying to explain Shannon - in which case you need to make clearer the difference between compressibility and total information, or are you presenting something new of your own thinking?
It certainly contains more information than this:
sdp m-0w3r] sfd'gmp nAWE(0b7rb[ asid
vp dsfg sd
rgsdfh dfghjt-r9hume5[po6iu
sufyumw4-5t9nme
sdfgh s
What information does the above disordered post contain that isn't possessed by your ordered post?
Well I am not the statistician round here, But Shannon was dealing with distinguishing signal from noise. And indeed the way to do that is by repetition. Each repetition of my sentence can be seen as further confirmation that I did not accidentally write "blind" when I actually meant "bland". But the repetition or the 'order' in the message distinguishes it from noise, it does not add information. in a noisy channel one sacrifices bandwidth (information density) for clarity. However, if you got the information the first time, you get nothing new from my saying over again.
Useless information. Like the most of your posts. Again, I have already gone into this. However, information that looks as useless as this can be useful information that has bee encrypted. I have also mentioned this in passing.
You're simply talking about types (useful vs useless) of information, not quantity of information. Information is only useful for some goal. If you don't possess that goal, then that doesn't mean that the information doesn't exist, only that the information isn't useful for that purpose.
There's minimum description length: how precisely something can be stated in full [hide=*](specified completely in some formal language)[/hide]. The digits of "1/3" in base 10 are fully specified by "One 0 and then 3's forever", whereas there's no way to specify all the digits of Pi shortly. The minimum description length for all of Pi's digits is just writing them out in order; so there's a relationship between that and the degree to which a string can be compressed. There's a further relationship between this lack of compressibility and randomness.
There's the Shannon one, which is (very roughly) a measure of how disorderly / undominated by patterns some (discrete) thing is. The Shannon entropy of something depends on how likely its elements are to occur (given some model of how likely they are to occur). If you're flipping a coin, and it's weighted on tails, it'll come up heads every time. That's dominated by the pattern than "it'll come up heads every time". The way for the coin flipping process to be least dominated by patterns of heads or tails would be for the flips to be independent of each other and for the coin to be fair. In that regard, the Shannon entropy can be considered a "distance from equiprobability". There's a relationship between this and compressibility; if no algorithm exists that could reliably guess the head/tail sequences from a particular coin, given data from it, then the head/tail flipping mechanism is both equiprobable over all sequences of heads/tails and incompressible.
Edit: just to be clear, the sequences generated from the flipping mechanism will be somewhat compressible in general, if you've already observed them. IE: "Heads, Tails, Heads" is a fully specified length three sequence, the probability of "what we just observed" being "heads, tails, heads" is one.
Encrypting information is a kind of processing information. And in processing information, you are adding information, like the algorithm used to encode and then decode the encryption. The encrypted scribbles (the effect) would then be a causal interaction between the original information and the encryption algorithm (the causes). The encryption would be about both, and therefore be more complex than just one of the causes by themselves, and therefore have more information than just one of the causes by themselves.
In other words, the symbols refer to the information of which none of it was lost, because when decoded all the information is there.
In data compression, the actual information does not change, but the internal representation of the information changes.
Compression on computers is often compression with loss, though. You can't get the uncompressed input from the compressed output with most image, video, audio file formats. Encryption is invertable, so distinct from compression.
To say that loss occurred during compression is agreeing with me that the information was there, but now it is gone after compression. The compressed version is not the same as the uncompressed version. So the original still has information that is removed when compressed. So again, how is it that uncompressed, ordered marks have less information than uncompressed disordered marks?
When compressing information is a lossy format, then you are essentially saying that there is information that exists but isn't useful to keep, hence a compressed version.
This is the same as saying that the information that is removed is irrelevant to the position of the marks in the image.
It can be, yes. I was struggling to marry that with your idea that the information was somehow in the picture (your first example), or in the paragraph here, regardless of the interpreter.
What you said above is only true if my expectation is that you're about to make a proposition. Then my uncertainty is resolved by the first sentence, and only resolved marginally more by the subsequent ones.
If, however, my expectation is that you are about to deliver a 200 sentence paragraph and I'm uncertain as to the content of each sentence, then neither the content of the first sentence, nor the pattern generated by the first few, reduce that uncertainty without my interpretation.
The information reduced by repetition cannot be both expressed in terms of Shannon's reduction in entropy, and be the same regardless of an interpreter. A pattern only reduces uncertainty by expectation. Someone needs to be doing the expecting.
Thank you. That's the name of the thing I was scrambling for when I was taking about 'efficiency of data compression'. I couldn't remember the correct term.
Fascinating though it is to see various notions of information displayed in their varyingly mystical colours, I'm surprised no one has questioned the interpretation of Dennett and Wiener in the OP?
Quoting Wayfarer
Could you share a link or pdf of the context, here? I'm struggling to see this (or even Dennett's "adding information to the list" [of fundamentals]) as problematising or refashioning materialism. Of adding a "meta-physical simple", as you put it. It sounds to me more like the opposite. As contesting the notion of thought as an additional kind of stuff. Like he was referring to a tradition of psychology that wittingly or unwittingly encouraged such an assumption.
Quoting Wayfarer
Materialist chestnut, are you sure??
That could mean we need a third kind of physical quantity, or it could mean we don't, and information is merely patterning, or form. (Whatever that is, sure.)
Quoting Wayfarer
Irreducible to patterns in physical stuff? Why shouldn't he be reminding us that is exactly what it (e.g. DNA transfer) reduces to?
I'm genuinely puzzled, and couldn't find the source, so, grateful for more if you have it.
No, I don't think it's at all controversial... in a world of people for whom the relevant information is what the words in the books say. What I think is controversial, at least to me, is...
Quoting unenlightened
If the information content cannot change, then I can only interpret that as meaning all the information (the location and state of all the matter in the picture), regardless of the expectations of an observer (otherwise the information would change - it would be different for a different observer).
Consider a pattern of raised or coloured dots. Each is either blue or raised but never both. The dots spell out the letter A in either raised or blue dots (the background dots are neither raised nor blue). To most people the information is not random. They recognise the 'A' pattern. To a blind man, the dots are random, he only distinguishes the raised ones. His expectation uncertainty for subsequent dots in the pattern has not been reduced by the state of the first few.
If you want to claim that this is merely the fault of the blindness, that the pattern is 'really' there and so also the information, then you'd have to say the same for every conceivable pattern (electromagnetic variation, electron spin, fibre angle...). And doing so, we're back to an ordered picture having no less information than a disordered one because it is only ordered in one context.
To bring it back to your library example. What you say about repetition not increasing information would be true for everyone except the auditor. For him every repeat of a book is a new piece of information. So, in the absence of either readers or auditors, we cannot say that the amount of information in the libraries is the same. Blind everyone and promote auditing to a religion and suddenly the information contained in your repetitious libraries has indeed gone up. The total count of books has become relevant, their content less so.
I sort of get you, but then I just think you've changed the subject without changing the object.
I was talking about the written information, not the logistics of the library. Print books do not inform the blind very much, but blind people do not wipe out the information in them either. They remain as they were. Those who are illiterate cannot get at the information in books, but the information is there still. The books can be scanned, processed by an OCR program and vocalised by an artificial text reader. And then the information can be made available to the blind and the illiterate and even the auditor. And if you do that for a thousand books that are all the same, you will have wasted a deal of your own time and energy. Do it for a thousand different books and you have an audio library. Hurrah.
Now, imagine that the book is the Bible. Think about how much conflicting information has been interpreted from the Bible. The amount of (potential) information is exacerbated by our ignorance as to the origin of the Bible, and what many of the passages mean, or what the authors intended - the information they intended to convey (the actual information) vs our interpretation of what they intended to convey (potential information).
When some intelligent historian comes along and provides an explanation along with evidence as to the origin of the Bible, then the many bits of potential information collapses into just one - the actual information - that the Bible is simply a rough account of ancient history in the Middle East, and does not contain any religious information, only historical information.
As Issac and I have been trying to convey to you, information is everywhere, and it is your goal of the moment that determines what information is useful in the moment. The library has a lot of different information depending on where you look, and where you look is dependent upon your goal. The number of copies, their condition, how they arrived at the library, how may times each copy has been borrowed, etc. is all information.
Now if you want to focus on the informational content of the book itself, then yes, that library has less information than a library with a larger variety of books, but that also goes along with my assertion that information is causal. The more causation, the more information. The more diversity of books equates to more different types of causal processes that led to different effects (different books caused by different authors writing about different things).
I just don't see how this follows from your explanation of repetition of dots in an image. The books are different entities even though they contain the same symbols that mean the same thing. What are the different dots in the image about that says that they contain the same information? You seem to be confusing how information can be represented with the information itself.
OK, we can limit the examples to that. So "trees are green, the sky is blue" contains more information than "trees are green, trees are green".
But still, this is only true with reference to the question "what colour is stuff?". With reference to the question "what propositions do those sentences contain?" they both have the same information (in terms of entropy reduction). Think of it in terms of knowledge. In the case of the first question, I started out uncertain about two colours. After reading the first sentence I'm now certain about two colours (100% reduction in uncertainty). After reading the second sentence I'm only certain about one colour (50% reduction in uncertainty - less information in Shannon's terms).
But in the second case, I'm uncertain about what the author will say in each half of the sentence. After reading the first sentence I'm now 100% certain what the author will say. After reading just the second sentence I'm now also 100%certain what the author will say. Same amount of information (in Shannon's terms). The repeat in the second sentence is still something the author said and I still had 100% uncertainty about whether they were going to say it prior to reading it, which was reduced by 100% after reading it.
Quantity of information depends on the question and so requires a questioner. We can't therefore measure the amount of information in something without reference to which uncertainty is being reduced.
Bizarre! I cannot continue this discussion, because I have no idea what you are referring to. Where is the uncertainty in the content of a text? What is the question and how does it determine the content of a text? Alas, I do not want answers to these questions, I merely lay them before you as tokens of bafflement. I do not think you can reduce my uncertainty.
What are the questions you are attempting to answer in regards to the images with dots? What the dots represent answers a different question than what the space between the dots represents.
In the same way as an unseen pile of pebbles is an undeciphered pile of pebbles; something which bears information even if no one has discovered that information? The whole of nature can be understood to be like this: you know, the "book of nature", there for us to read?
Cipher: a secret or disguised way of writing; a code.
"he wrote cryptic notes in a cipher"
The 'book of nature' is Galileo's metaphorical description of the manner in which mathematics can be used to interpret natural regularities.
The Norbert Wiener quote is frequently quoted especially in this context. I read that Wiener quote in the context of a thread on this subject on this or some other forum. It's reproduced here https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener.
As to the irreducibility of information - there's a paper that I was introduced to by Apokrisis, The Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiosis, Howard Pattee. It's findable on the Web. It considers the relationship between the symbolic and the physical order:
[quote=Howard Pattee]All signs, symbols, and codes, all languages including formal mathematics are embodied as material physical structures and therefore must obey all the inexorable laws of physics. At the same time, the symbol vehicles like the bases in DNA, voltages representing bits in a computer, the text on this page, and the neuron firings in the brain do not appear to be limited by, or clearly related to, the very laws they must obey. Even the mathematical symbols that express these inexorable physical laws seem to be entirely free of these same laws.[/quote]
The fact that they exist on a different plane to physical laws and relationships can be demonstrated by the fact that the same information can be represented in numerous media and languages. So if you take a piece of definite information - a recipe or a formula - you can represent that, or encode it, in any number of languages, systems or media. Yet in each case, the information remains the same. So the informational content is separable from the physical form in which it is encoded - which is strongly suggestive of dualism in my book.
The big conceptual problem occurs when you try and consider what it is that encodes and interprets codes. That is, as Pattee says, a metaphysical question. And the way that our mainly scientific culture deals with metaphysical questions is to ignore them, bracket them out, or pretend they don't exist. Which is basically what Dennett does, and does so well that he is able to ignore the fact that he's ignoring it. (This is why his first book, Consciousness Explained, was almost immediately dubbed Consciousness Ignored.)
Right, I already knew that; so what's your point?
Quoting Wayfarer
The fact that they are understood in different ways does not entail that "they exist on different planes" unless by "plane" you are merely proposing something like conceptual planes.
Quoting Wayfarer
The alternative title "Consciousness Explained Away" was much more clever. But either is not really a relevant criticism, because Dennett was only "ignoring" or "explaining away" our ordinary pre-reflective notions of what consciousness is. Dennett himself has said to his critics that he has never denied that consciousness exists, but is just saying that it is not what we think it is.
Simply that random collections of objects are not ordered, and therefore are not able to be ‘deciphered’ as there was no ‘cipher’ to begin with.
'The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat.'
Perhaps it would be stretching the term to say that working out the individual sizes, weights and shapes, and the spacial relationships and orientations to one another of a pile of pebbles is an act of deciphering, but it is fine to call it an act of discovering, and in order for something to be discovered there must be something there to be discovered.
It's not incoherent, but it's a metaphor, and in the context of this discussion it obfuscates the subject.
I have been so impressed with the notion that Information is the "fundamental constituent" of the world that I created a website to present my emerging worldview as a thesis. I called it Enformationism to distinguish it from the obsolete worldviews of spooky Spiritualism and mundane Materialism. In the light of 21st century science, those contradictory views are obsolete. Instead, the world seems to be, philosophically, a bit of both : Spiritualism (Meta-physics, Mind, Ideas) and Materialism (Physics, Matter, Atoms). I support my compatiblist view by noting that Information has been found in two real-world forms : malleable tangible Matter & creative intangible Energy, as expressed in the equation, E=MC^2, and two Meanings (polysemic) : Shannon's meaningless syntax, and Bergson's meaningful semantic “difference”. In my thesis, Energy is EnFormAction.
Paul Davies is probably the most prolific proponent of Information as the fundamental “atom” of modern Science. But there are many other scientists and philosophers who have come to the same conclusion. Yet, they wrestle with the implications of Matter as enformed Mind, and that the world functions like an intentionally programmed system. Some of those Information advocates remain Atheists or Agnostics (by adopting a cartesian Dualist stance), but others become resigned to the assumption of a Creative Mind of some kind (the Monistic origin of the Mind/Matter dichotomy).
You say you are open to the Information revolution, “but what is it?”. My website and blog are dedicated to answering such questions. :nerd:
Is Information Fundamental? : https://www.closertotruth.com/series/information-fundamental
Enformationism : http://enformationism.info/enformationism.info/
Blog Glossary : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page2.html
The EnFormAction Hypothesis : http://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page23.html
"Hard as Shannon tried to keep his listeners focused on his pure, meaning-free definition of information, this was a group that would not steer clear of semantic entanglements."
___James Gleick, The Information
It's not really a metaphor, merely a less strict usage. Explain how you think it "obfuscates the subject".
The only problem I can think of with such a usage of the term 'decipher' would be that it might lead someone to fall into the idea that if there is something to be deciphered then there must have been some agent deliberately creating the thing and the meaning of the thing, to be deciphered. But there is little danger today of us committing such a teleological fallacy in relation to the fossil record.
The reason why the scientific culture ignores metaphysical questions is because their is no way to falsify the answers to the questions, which is a fundamental part of the scientific method.
It's like asking the scientific culture go out of their domain and not do science, by asking them to not ignore metaphysical pondering.
I would like to add John D. Collier's Information, Causation, and Computation and Causation is the Transfer of Information
Thanks. I agree with this phrase : "Causation can be understood as the transfer of information". That is what I call EnFormAction in my thesis.
Yes, I’ve looked at them.
Ah so, grasshopper! you "looked" but did not see. :joke:
If you say, well, everything is information - the space between every atomic particle, the composition of every object - then you're saying nothing meaningful. Someone already said that I'm sticking to a strict definition of 'information' - this is true. To define something is to say what it isn't - de-fine, delimit, mark out. So if you simply say 'well everything is information', it doesn't say anything, because it makes the term so broad as to be meaningless.
Quoting Harry Hindu
The point of falsifiability is to distinguish empirical statements from those that are not. But to then say that ‘only empirical statements are meaningful’ is to endorse positivism, which is another thing altogether.
Generally, I'm more in agreement with you than (for instance) I am with diehard materialists. But I think your philosophy is a little too idiosyncratic, and little on the pop-sci end of the spectrum, for my liking. I'm still (and forever) trying to grasp or intuit what I think was a very profound understanding that was present in Greek philosophy which has died out in Western culture in such a way that we can't even imagine what it was; we don't understand what we've forgotten. The nearest recent text I've encountered on it is De-fragmenting Modernity by Paul Tyson. That's not actually directly relevant to this thread but forms part of the background to my philosophical interests. (See the second-last paragraph of this blog post for an excerpt.)
Incidentally for anyone interested, @Galuchat recently posted a link to a chapter on Philosophy of Information, although it's rendered in a very hard-to-read font and format.
The space between atomic particles has never conveyed information to me in the same way as a cherry pie or a bag of rocks. I've heard rumors and theories about the space between particles but a bag of rocks or a cherry pie is different from a theory or a rumor.
It would be hard to argue empty space is information.
I was under the impression that unpredictability was a key feature of information entropy. The Wikipedia article on the subject states:
Quoting Wikipedia article
"The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages" (my emphasis).
Information can be entirely meaningless, utterly devoid of significance, sheer gibberish - it would nonetheless be information. The OP is no doubt trying to milk semantics from information. But it's a mostly dead end.
It is the same with Boltzmann entropy. Like Shannon information, Boltzmann entropy has to do with uncertainty - uncertainty about the physical state. But which state? If we are measuring temperature with a thermometer, then the states that we are interested in are defined by thermal degrees of freedom. But if we are interested in magnetization, for example, then the states of interest are the orientations of magnetic dipoles (and the associated "temperature" in that case can actually become negative!)
Turning back to information, semantics doesn't matter for the mathematical theory of information, but it is what motivates its applications. Without meaning - physical meaning, as in the case of physical entropy, or symbolic meaning, as in the case of written communication - there would not be such a thing (things) as information. What constitutes information in each particular case depends on what it means for us.
So the OP is... what's that phrase, inauthentic narrative?
I've been reading more of Davies' book and just came across this example:
Davies, Paul. The Demon in the Machine (pp. 119-120). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
This is in the context of other examples which posit electrical fields as possibly have an influence in epigenetics and therefore morphogenesis. I wonder if they’re related to the magnetic fields that purportedly allow pigeons to navigate and salmon to find their home creek. Nature sure seems to have memories.
So you want to employ information without reference to any of its specificity? Just a rhetorical crutch? Par for Wayfarer course.
Nicely illustrating the fact that the boundary between ‘information’ and ‘meaning’ is a rather porous one. Information, however, sounds more scientific, and so poses less of an apparent conceptual problem to the likes of Daniel Dennett, who would naturally tend to shy from any discussion of the inherent reality of ‘meaning’.
I don't know why you bother with philosophy or science when you just make stuff up like this.
The latter sentence doesn't follow from the prior one.
All statements are empirical. Statements are about a particular view from somewhere. We are visual creatures and our language represents that. Statements take empirical forms of ink scribbles on paper and sounds in the air, that represents other empirical forms (like other visuals, sounds, feelings, etc.)
The point of falsifiability is to distinguish between provable from unprovable statements.
Any claim that can't be proven is just as (in)valid as any other claim that can't be proven.
What reasons do you have to choose one unfalsifiable claim over another? None. Evidence would be reasons why you choose to hold one claim over another, but you aren't providing any, so your claim gets ignored.
Quoting SophistiCat
I'd say it's very doubtful that a useful definition of "information" could be formulated which would not require that information has meaning, necessarily. If it were possible that some information had no meaning, then it would be necessary to have a principle to distinguish the information which has meaning from that which does not, or else any meaning derived from any information might be false because that information might not really have any meaning. Therefore it is much more likely that the definitions of information which are actually employed assume that all information has meaning.
How were humans informed of the Big Bang if not by observing space expanding? The expansion of space (the effect) is information because it was caused by the Big Bang. It is about the Big Bang. It informs us that the Big Bang happened.
Space also informs us that we are separate entities, not one and the same.
So meaning is how useful some bit of information is?
It seems to me that it is all useful to someone at some time, even when they don't know it, as in the case where someone is rejecting actual information in favor of their potential information. Some bit of potential information may be useful in keeping the truth (actual information) hidden from your emotional centers of your brain (delusions), but none of that is actual information.
Not that weird. He’s implying more information or ‘knowledge’ than is necessary to form a tine. The brain doesn’t interact with the world directly, rather it maps sensory information according to the energy (potential) and attention (value) requirements of the organism over time and space. The relative position of the notch in relation to predictions for energy, attention and time isn’t all that complex. It isn’t ‘memory’ at the level of value differentiation (qualia and logic) that humans can have, but it works in basically the same way. Most animals with brains would have this level of capacity for integrating information into an interoceptive network, without conscious awareness of the information itself. It’s how most so-called ‘instinctual’ behaviour works.
The presentation of Enformationism is unapologetically idiosyncratic, and the website was inspired by the site of another far-out "peculiar" thinker, Gevin Girobran : http://everythingforever.com/.
Since I am not an academic philosopher, and have a tendency to whimsy, rather than profundity and gravitas, the playful theme of the site is based on the movie The Matrix. That may seem "pop-sci", but the movie raised deep philosophical questions that sober philosophers have taken seriously. I don't take myself too seriously, but I am earnest about the validity of the general Enformationism thesis, and the BothAnd philosophy.
The general worldview of Enformationism may sound superficially similar to the various New Age religion/philosophies. But where they tend to look backward to ancient religions (e.g. Hinduism), my intent is to look forward to a reintegration of science, philosophy, and religion. I personally have no religious practice, but I don't look down on those who do. :cool:
BothAnd Philosophy : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page2.html
Yes, Wayfarer seems to be trying to turn the focus from the Reductive methods of Shannon Information Theory to a more Holistic approach. It's not a "rhetorical crutch". but a philosophical category shift : "These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem". If you can't understand why a philosopher would prefer to focus on human "meaning" than mathematical "specificity", you're on the wrong forum. :cool:
It's not a matter of saying everything is information; but of saying that everything contains, or bears, or carries, or embodies, or manifests information.For us the world is our knowing of information, of our being in-formed. As Wittgenstein says (roughly): "The world is the totality of facts, not of things". Of course, that is from our point of view, which is not uniquely privileged.
I don't know what you're trying to drill down to, to validate or prove to yourself, but in your thinking you seem all lost at sea, and swimming in circles, to me.
I'm not so sure. The closest Dennett has ever really come to laying all his metaphysical cards on the table (that I am aware of) was in his paper "Real Patterns". The metaphysics laid out in that paper is (perhaps unwittingly) much closer to Platonism than traditional atomistic materialism. In the paper he basically describes the world as a great mass of data in which various patterns can be found. For Dennett, patterns are just algorithmic compressions that can be used to reproduce the original data to some degree of accuracy. If you understand "data" as "sense data" and "real patterns" as "Ideas", then you're basically knocking at Plato's door.
It's a bit of muddle, but you can read the paper here if you haven't already:
https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-zenon-pylyshyn/class-info/FP2012/FP2012_readings/Dennett_RealPatterns.pdf
That does not quite recognise the gravity of our situation.
That's because meaning is left hanging.
Now, if we forget about meaning, and instead look to the use to which the information is put... (who was it said that?)
Quoting unenlightened
So information has two enemies: order and disinformation. In short, information is the opposite of Fascism.
Sounds about right.
Just a clarification question here: What would be the difference then between the definition of communication and information in this conception? I don't even necessarily disagree, but just wondering what your thought is on that.
What is transmitted is information insofar as it is univocal from one end to the other: that it is the same message that gets from A to B, regardless if that message is total junk.
That seems a bit redundant, like he is repeating what communication is with information. So information is then something like the success of communication? In other words, it's the fidelity of the message being received matching what was sent?
Seem to me that you need to know what a word means (what word refers to) to know how to use it. When looking up a word in the dictionary, we find the definition and then examples of the use of the word - two separate entries in the dictionary for the same word, so it seems to me that the definition (the meaning of the word) is separate from its use.
Merriam-Webster's definition of meaning:
1a: a statement of the meaning of a word or word group or a sign or symbol
dictionary definitions
b: a statement expressing the essential nature of something
c: a product of defining
Merriam-Webster's definition of information:
1a(1): knowledge obtained from investigation, study, or instruction
(2): INTELLIGENCE, NEWS
(3): FACTS, DATA
b: the attribute inherent in and communicated by one of two or more alternative sequences or arrangements of something (such as nucleotides in DNA or binary digits in a computer program) that produce specific effects
c(1): a signal or character (as in a communication system or computer) representing data
(2): something (such as a message, experimental data, or a picture) which justifies change in a construct (such as a plan or theory) that represents physical or mental experience or another construct
d: a quantitative measure of the content of information
specifically : a numerical quantity that measures the uncertainty in the outcome of an experiment to be performed
From the bolded text, one can claim that noise is information. If you can't make a statement expressing the essential nature of noise, then how can you make the claim that it is different from information? And in making a statement expressing the nature of noise, you'd necessarily imply that noise has meaning.
One could perhaps with reasonable certainty say that the fundamental unit or ‘quanta’, of information are bytes. Bytes can be expressed in countless systems in countless different ways. One can assign the notion of ‘bytes’ to transistors, saying that there is a 1 when it is switched on and zero when off. Equally one could create a system in which we have a crowd of people interacting in a way such that when someones hand is raised, this represents a 1 and lowered represents a zero- computation can be achieved just as effectively, data can be stored; as far as things go, such a system would have the exact same properties of any computer with its information processing etc. The point here is that any physical object or system can have these ‘bytes’ and the bytes themselves can manifest themselves in innumerable physical ways. So if bytes/information are a real, physical thing, how can they express themselves in the same ways in completely different physical systems?
Maybe information is this invisible, transcendental thing that can be seen to express itself in all manners of completely different systems in arbitrary ways or perhaps, information is simply an abstract concept we assign to things- surely it is one of the two. There is little reason to believe the former- to do so would be faith (there is no proof for information being some real, physical thing after all). It is more reasonable to assume that information is an abstract concept we assign to systems- there is no ‘physical’ aspect to it (as there is really no reason to believe it is). A physical thing would have limits to what it can be seen in and influence, whereas information does not. The physical reality is that the transistor has current flowing towards it or doesn’t, the individual has raised his\her hand or not- we then take the leap to label each of these binary states 1 or 0 and say that they transmit or store ‘information’. In reality these systems are completely different, there is no physical thing that is being stored/transmitted by both as there is really no common ground between them besides our labelling of certain aspects of them.
So in the conventional sense at least id say that information is not ‘real’.
How do we define this abstract concept? Well, if system A has a lot of ‘information’ on system B, then from system A’s state (from its fundamental quantities maybe, its position, momenta, temperature, order etc) we can deduce a lot about system B and the quantities associated with it. Again, the key is we can ‘deduce’. In reality these two systems are simply similar to one another or connected- we take the step to take certain qualities of A that are similar to B and label these ‘information’, disregarding the innumerable other qualities of the system that we can deduce less about B from. There is nothing physically special about these qualities apart from the fact that we can use them to find out more about the nature of B.
Paul Davies is a physicist, whose focus has shifted from tiny particles to the universe as a whole system : the Cosmos. And he believes, not based on "faith" but on evidence, that Information is the essence of reality --- of both Matter and Mind; both "invisible transcendental" Energy, and visible tangible Matter. This notion is gaining traction among even atheist scientists in the 21st century. :nerd:
The Demon In The Machine : Paul Davies interview, "Recognizing the power of information to dramatically transform material systems. . . . This is a more ambitious approach in which our work applies information theory to consciousness as well as life. There is a chapter in my book called ‘The Ghost in the Machine’ that addresses the consciousness puzzle.
https://www.plusalliance.org/press-room/demon-machine-professor-paul-davies
From Matter to Life : Information and Causality
https://www.amazon.com/Matter-Life-Information-Causality-ebook/dp/B01N0Y8ECG/ref=sr_1_6?dchild=1&keywords=paul+davies+information&link_code=qs&qid=1588528200&sourceid=Mozilla-search&sr=8-6
Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics
https://www.amazon.com/Information-Nature-Reality-Metaphysics-Classics-ebook/dp/B00J8LQJA2/ref=sr_1_7?dchild=1&keywords=paul+davies+information&link_code=qs&qid=1588528283&sourceid=Mozilla-search&sr=8-7
There, you have your answer! :D
Seriously, the question is more about to what degree we can all agree on different subjects. Funnily enough it depends on the common information we share and how we apply it.
A particular use of philosophy is to formulate definitions that most people can agree on and then build from.
Carlo Rovelli had this to say about quantum mechanics in relation to information theory, that sounds similar to, but not quite what you’re describing here. I’m wondering if you could shed some light on why Rovelli’s description makes more intuitive sense to me (given my limited understanding of physics):
> Tell someone to go to the door. They will listen and go there.
In this case, there was an interaction between Object 1 and Object 2, a cause and effect. However, Object 1 didn't apply traditional force on Object 2, for example, didn't push them, or didn't use magnets, electro magnetic force, or even gravity. It's also fair to assume that sound waves do not have sufficient force to push someone aside.
So what caused Object 2 to move? It is information. Object 2 has a topology of information landscape where they are being pushed around by mental forces of the universe. Information packets alter this topology which alters the force trajectories in the mental pane. This in turn, has an effect on the physical world, which manifests in Object 2 going to the door.
Does this mean information requires a mental force field to work? Not necessary. Information can also encode the arrangement of stuff. The fact that our world is one of all possible worlds out there is determined by information.
I don't think 'everything' is information because that would mean that all that exists is abstraction and I don't see how abstraction can exist without substance. If information exists it must have some kind of substance (mind?) to keep it in being. You can't have 0s and 1s by themselves. You have to store them on something, even if that something is a mind.
Which is analytic philosophy at its most absurd.
Fields are just as fundamental, if not more so, than particles. Materialism is an incomplete understanding. The world is made up of more than particles.
Atomism - pre-Hobbes, Gassendi, La Mettrie, d'Holbach, Feuerbach ... "materialism" - includes 'void' as well as 'atoms'. Besides, the intractable incommensurability of QM and GR suggests that the current fundamental physics is "incomplete" (i.e. approximate) as well.
Not sure if there are good philosophical puzzles about the name, the concept or the property that "information" has. If there are, I would be glad to try them out
Information seems to have something in common with art that thing being it generally involves some conscious input. Back to perception. A bird (hopefully several) can crap on a windshield in a way that happens to resemble "2 + 2 = 4". It has no more or less information than if an esteemed math professor wrote it on a chalkboard.
Neat topic.
What are the differences and similarities between information and communication? Intent?
Differences: communication is a vehicle capable of transporting something that carries information. Information is not a vehicle. Information might be stored, communication cannot.
Similarities: They both might be inappropriate. In an environment that requires silence, communication that is conveyed through sound will likely be regarded as inappropriate. In an environment that requires discreetness, blossoming information about one's life will also likely be regarded as inappropriate. It also seems to me that they are similar, in a sense that both of them need to have a certain "shape" to work as the key that is gonna open the lock.
To think about intent: if it is the case that communication is the phenomenon of receiving/sending things that carry information, it might be stated that machines, that have no intention at all, also communicate. That being the case, intent would not account as a substantial trait of communication. If much, it would be an accidental trait.
Our communication is transporting some good chunks of information, right mate?
It just occurred to me: if it is the case that there may or may not be intention behind communication, but it is not the case that information, by itself, has intention behind it, then, although not a, lets say, "full" difference between them both (they might be the same in respect to this matter), the fact that there might be intention behind communication, accounts as a distinctive trait between communication and information, even if accidental. In other words, there is a chance for this accident to happen with regard to communication, and no chance to happen with regard to information (as I think of it as a property that objects might have)
Information is my thing. It's the subject of my thesis website Enformationism. The thesis touches on all of your questions, and the BothAnd Blog goes into more detail on specific applications of the Information concept beyond computers. :nerd:
Information is : the Universal Substance of Spinoza. It's both physical (material, Quanta) and metaphysical (mental, Qualia). It's abstract meaningless Shannon data, and Bayesian statistical truth, and Bateson's meaningful "difference that makes a difference". It's Ideal Platonic Forms, and Real enformed Things.
Information means : [i]According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest historical meaning of the word information in English was the act of informing, or giving form or shape to the mind, as in education, instruction, or training.
The English word was apparently derived by adding the common "noun of action" ending "-ation" [Hence, En-Form-Action][/i]
Information originates : in the creative power to be, and to become (BEING). In our universe, Information is the power to enform matter & mind. You can think of its ultimate origin as The Enformer, The Creator, or The Programmer. If those names don't work for you, perhaps Einstein's "pantheistic god of Spinoza". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_and_philosophical_views_of_Albert_Einstein
Information -- Shannon vs Deacon : http://bothandblog4.enformationism.info/page26.html
Enformationism : http://enformationism.info/enformationism.info/
BothAnd Blog : http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page29.html
The Program in the Machine : http://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page6.html
Let's say that in a room lies a body that is completely inertial to itself and its surroundings. On the other hand, the things that compose its surroundings, react to one another. To its surroundings, in what concerns possible reactions that might occur between distinct bodies, the inertial body does not carry any kind of information. An observer, otherwise, might find information on the inertial body, by taking into account that it is a completely inertial thing.
If I'm able to think on a good definition of information, I'll share it here and try to develop something
edit: with a good definition, I might be able to find the kind of information that, from a given standpoint, will necessarily be attached to all of those things that strike our senses... Until then, I follow with this inquietude in mind