Dear Marcus and All,
As usual I find a crucial element missing in both your initial text and
in the responses up to now. How can I express that abscence in two or
three lines?
"Agency" is missing. It is factually minimized under the form of
constraints and uncertainty. Communication occurs because some kind of
"emitter" agent operates as a "source" and sends "messages" via an
appropriate "channel" to some "receiver". I have put quotations to the
standard Shannonian terms. My central question: could there be any form
of non-living agency? And then, What different forms of life could
receive the "agent" label? How being alive biases the non-at-all-free
communication game?
These questions will be refined next days...
Best--Pedro
respect El 23/06/2016 a las 8:37, Loet Leydesdorff escribió:
Dear Bob, Stan and colleagues,
The Shannon formula measures "capacity" for information, *not*
information itself. Consider the "snow" pattern on a TV without a
signal. Its Shannon measure is much higher than when a picture appears
onscreen, yet we know that the snow pattern carries no information.
The expected information of a message that an event has taken place
can be measured precisely in terms of bits of information using the
Shannon formulas. As Weaver noted (and Shannon was aware), this
concept of information (uncertainty) is counter-intuitive. It enables
us among other things to distinguish between “information” and
“meaningful information”. A screen with noise carries maximal
information, but this information is not meaningful.
Providing Shannon-type information with meaning presumes the
specification of a system of reference; for example, an observer.
Different from observed information, expected information is yet
dimensionless (“a priori”). The analytical distinction between
information processing and meaning processing enables us also to
specify (perhaps measure as redundancy) the different meanings that
can be provided to the same uncertainty by different systems of
reference. For example, the white noise on the screen may be
unexpected or not (since the antenna was not correctly plugged in).
“The concept of information developed in this theory at first seems
disappointing and bizarre—disappointing because it has nothing to do
with meaning … I think, however, … that this analysis has so
penetratingly cleared the air that one is now, perhaps for the first
time, ready for a real theory of meaning.” (Weaver, 1949, p. 27)
In my opinion, a “real theory of meaning” should enable us to
specify/measure meaning as redundancy / reduction of uncertainty given
information as uncertainty. I took this further in: Loet Leydesdorff,
Alexander Petersen, and Inga A. Ivanova, The Self-Organization of
Meaning and the Reflexive Communication of Information.
<http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.05251>/Social Science Information /(in press).
Best,
Loet
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Loet Leydesdorff
Professor, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)
l...@leydesdorff.net <mailto:l...@leydesdorff.net>;
http://www.leydesdorff.net/
Associate Faculty, SPRU, <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/>University of
Sussex;
Guest Professor Zhejiang Univ. <http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/>,
Hangzhou; Visiting Professor, ISTIC,
<http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html>Beijing;
Visiting Professor, Birkbeck <http://www.bbk.ac.uk/>, University of
London;
http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYAAAAJ&hl=en
--
-------------------------------------------------
Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
-------------------------------------------------
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