[Fis] Concluding the Session (& Picture)

[PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUAN FERNANDEZ]

Dear FISers,

I have been requested the URL of the Nativity scene (blocked by some servers). 
It is in a very beautiful and monumental Church (El Pilar) worth some google 
exploration. Here it is the address:

https://www.google.es/search?q=2016+belen+zaragoza&client=firefox-b&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj7wu_xx4zRAhUJbRQKHRWcBLUQ_AUICCgB&biw=1920&bih=910#imgdii=NX1D4OvBxc9ZkM%3A%3BNX1D4OvBxc9ZkM%3A%3BiuHRpaLHICLYoM%3A&imgrc=NX1D4OvBxc9ZkM%3A


During these holidays, our tradition at fis is to postpone discussions. After 
Arturo's closing comments (and some others afterwards), a pause is highly 
recommended. We will reassume discussions with the NEW YEAR LECTURE (to be 
announced soon).

All the best--Pedro
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Re: [Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 33, Issue 41: On the relation between information and meaning

[Karl Javorszky]

Information and Wittgenstein



We should keep the self-evident in focus and refrain from descending into a
philosophical nihilism. We are, after all, reasonable people, who are able
to use our intelligence while communicating, and usually we understand each
other quite well. The idea, that information is just a mental creation,
evades the point: conceding that information is only a mental image, then
what is that which determines, which amino acid comes to which place and is
apparently contained in the sequence of the DNA triplets? If information is
just an erroneous concept, then what is that what we receive as we ask at
the airport, which gate to go for boarding?

No, information does exist and we do use it day by day. Shannon has
developed a method of repeatedly bifurcating a portion of N until finding
that n of N that corresponds to the same n of which the sender encoded the
search pattern for the receiver. The task lies not in negating the
existence of the phaenomenon, but in proposing a more elegant and for
biology useful explanation of the phaenomenon. The object of the game is
still the same: identifying an n of N.

The same situation is here with gravitation. We have a name for it, can
measure it and integrate the concept - more or less seamlessly – into a
general explanation. We just do not know, in an epistemological sense, what
gravitation is. We have to take the normative power of the factual
seriously and admit that we may have problems in the naming of an observed
fact. This does not absolve us from the task of philosophers, that is, to
try to understand and find good explanations for the facts that we perceive
and to our thoughts about the perceptions and the facts.

Adorno summarised the critique on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, by saying, that
W. apparently had not read the job description of a philosopher carefully
enough: the task is not to investigate that what can be said exactly about
a subject that is well known to all, but the task is to chisel away the
border separating that what can be only felt and that what can be expressed
understandably. This is the envy speaking of someone who suffered an
Oedipus tragedy. Socrates said that the perpetrator of a crime suffers more
than the victim, and post-war German philosophy understandably had no time
to be interested in rules of exact speech. The grammar of the logical
language, as a subject for serious study, was swept aside by historical
cataclysms, although Wittgenstein begot Frege and Carnap who begot von
Neumann and Boole who begot Shannon and Chomsky. That he in his later life
put aside his epoch-generating work is completely in the consequence of
what he had said. It is not disowning the ladder one has built to climb up
a level of abstraction while doing a cartography of what exact talking
really means, but a wise and truthful modesty of an artist who had
fabricated a tool for a specific project. No self-respecting artist would
want to be remembered for a practical tool he had assembled for a specific
task. Roughly citing, he says so much: those who have understood what is
written here, may throw [this book] away, like one has no need for a ladder
after one has climbed a level. Having found out how the technical people
speak (or should speak), he withdraws from that field, having clarified the
rules of exact thinking, closing the subject in a conclusive fashion for
about 4 generations, and acts in later life as if precognisant of Adorno’s
words.

Information is a connection of a symbol with a different symbol, if this
state of the world can have a background and alternatives. If something can
be otherwise, then the information is contained in the enumeration of the
cases of being otherwise.

By the use of computers, we can now create a whole topography and
dramaturgy of exact speech. Had we the creativity of the Greeks, we would
write a comedy, performed in public, by actors and narrators. The title
could be: “All acting dutifully, striving their right place, catharsia are
inevitable”. The best youth of Sparta, Athens etc. would compete for
prominent places in diverse disciplines, but the results are not
satisfactory, as the debate emerges, which of the disciplines are above the
others. The wise people of Attica have come up with a perpetual compromise,
its main points repeatedly summarised by the chorus, ruling that being
constantly underway between both correct positions: p1 in discipline d1 and
position p2 in discipline d2, is the divine sign of a noble character. If
every athlete follows the same rule, imagine the traffic jams on the stage
of the amphitheatre! The Greeks would have built an elaborate system of
philosophy about the predictable collisions among actors representing
athletes who have attended many of the concourses. They could have come up
with specific names for typical results and would have named the
agglomerations “elements” and “isotopes” that differ among each other on
how many of the actors are glued together f

Re: [Fis] What is information? and What is life?

[Francesco Rizzo]

Cari Tutti,
ho scritto più volte le stesse cose per cui sono d'accordo con Voi,
specialmente con gli ultimi intervenuti. E dato che sono un forestiero
rispetto alle Vostre discipline, ma non uno straniero dell'armonia del
sapere o del sapere dell'armonia, questo è una bella cosa. Auguri di buon
Natale e per il nuovo anno.
Francesco

2016-12-24 7:45 GMT+01:00 Loet Leydesdorff :

> Dear Terrence and colleagues,
>
>
>
> I agree that we should not be fundamentalistic about “information”. For
> example, one can also use “uncertainty” as an alternative word to
> Shannon-type “information”. One can also make distinctions other than
> semantic/syntactic/pragmatic, such as biological information, etc.
>
>
>
> Nevertheless, what makes this list to a common platform, in my opinion, is
> our interest in the differences and similarities in the background of these
> different notions of information. In my opinion, the status of Shannon’s
> mathematical theory of information is different  from special theories of
> information (e.g., biological ones) since the formal theory enables us to
> translate between these latter theories. The translations are heuristically
> important: they enable us to import metaphors from other backgrounds (e.g.,
> auto-catalysis).
>
>
>
> For example, one of us communicated with me why I was completely wrong,
> and made the argument with reference to Kullback-Leibler divergence between
> two probability distributions. Since we probably will not have “a general
> theory” of information, the apparatus in which information is formally and
> operationally defined—Bar-Hillel once called it “information calculus”—can
> carry this interdisciplinary function with precision and rigor. Otherwise,
> we can only be respectful of each other’s research traditions. J
>
>
>
> I wish you all a splendid 2017,
>
> Loet
>
>
> --
>
> Loet Leydesdorff
>
> Professor, University of Amsterdam
> Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)
>
> l...@leydesdorff.net ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/
> Associate Faculty, SPRU, University of
> Sussex;
>
> Guest Professor Zhejiang Univ. ,
> Hangzhou; Visiting Professor, ISTIC,
> Beijing;
>
> Visiting Professor, Birkbeck , University of
> London;
>
> http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ych9gNYJ&hl=en
>
>
>
> *From:* Fis [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] *On Behalf Of *Terrence
> W. DEACON
> *Sent:* Thursday, December 22, 2016 5:33 AM
> *To:* fis
>
> *Subject:* Re: [Fis] What is information? and What is life?
>
>
>
> Against information fundamentalism
>
>
>
> Rather than fighting over THE definition of information, I suggest that we
> stand back from the polemics for a moment and recognize that the term is
> being used in often quite incompatible ways in different domains, and that
> there may be value in paying attention to the advantages and costs of each.
> To ignore these differences, to fail to explore the links and dependencies
> between them, and to be indifferent to the different use values gained or
> sacrificed by each, I believe that we end up undermining the very
> enterprise we claim to be promoting.
>
>
>
> We currently lack broadly accepted terms to unambiguously distinguish
> these divergent uses and, even worse, we lack a theoretical framework for
> understanding their relationships to one another.
>
> So provisionally I would argue that we at least need to distinguish three
> hierarchically related uses of the concept:
>
>
>
> 1. Physical information: Information as intrinsically measurable medium
> properties with respect to their capacity to support 2 or 3 irrespective of
> any specific instantiation of 2 or 3.
>
>
>
> 2. Referential information: information as a non-intrinsic relation to
> something other than medium properties (1) that a given medium can provide
> (i.e. reference or content) irrespective of any specific instantiation of 3.
>
>
>
> 3. Normative information: Information as the use value provided by a given
> referential relation (2) with respect to an end-directed dynamic that is
> susceptible to contextual factors that are not directly accessible (i.e.
> functional value or significance).
>
>
>
> Unfortunately, because of the history of using the same term in an
> unmodified way in each relevant domain irrespective of the others there are
> often pointless arguments of a purely definitional nature.
>
>
>
> In linguistic theory an analogous three-part hierarchic partitioning of
> theory IS widely accepted.
>
>
>
> 1. syntax
>
> 2. semantics
>
> 3. pragmatics
>
>
>
> Thus by analogy some have proposed the distinction between
>
>
>
> 1. syntactic information (aka Shannon)
>
> 2. semantic information (aka meaning)
>
> 3. pragmatic information (aka useful information)
>
>
>
> This has also often been applied to the philosophy of information (e.g.
> see The Stanford Dictionar

Re: [Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 33, Issue 41: On the relation betweeninformation and meaning

[Mark Johnson]

Dear all, 

Merry Christmas to all of you. 

I tend to associate Christmas with cinema - there's always been something good 
to go and see with family and friends'. This year like last year, we have a new 
Star Wars film - which entertained  three generations of my family last year. 
This year, I'd be intrigued to know whether this good vs evil story feels the 
same in the light of recent events. I suspect it won't. 

If anyone hasn't seen it, I highly recommend a more intelligent SciFi movie, 
'Arrival' - which carries a lot of resonance with our recent discussions. 

Have a restful time, and best wishes for the 2017 - it is just possible it 
might not be as bad as we fear...

Best wishes,

Mark

-Original Message-
From: "Karl Javorszky" 
Sent: ‎24/‎12/‎2016 10:49
To: "fis" 
Cc: "bindem...@verizon.net" 
Subject: Re: [Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 33, Issue 41: On the relation 
betweeninformation and meaning

Information and Wittgenstein
 
We should keep the self-evident in focus and refrain from descending into a 
philosophical nihilism. We are, after all, reasonable people, who are able to 
use our intelligence while communicating, and usually we understand each other 
quite well. The idea, that information is just a mental creation, evades the 
point: conceding that information is only a mental image, then what is that 
which determines, which amino acid comes to which place and is apparently 
contained in the sequence of the DNA triplets? If information is just an 
erroneous concept, then what is that what we receive as we ask at the airport, 
which gate to go for boarding?
No, information does exist and we do use it day by day. Shannon has developed a 
method of repeatedly bifurcating a portion of N until finding that n of N that 
corresponds to the same n of which the sender encoded the search pattern for 
the receiver. The task lies not in negating the existence of the phaenomenon, 
but in proposing a more elegant and for biology useful explanation of the 
phaenomenon. The object of the game is still the same: identifying an n of N.
The same situation is here with gravitation. We have a name for it, can measure 
it and integrate the concept - more or less seamlessly – into a general 
explanation. We just do not know, in an epistemological sense, what gravitation 
is. We have to take the normative power of the factual seriously and admit that 
we may have problems in the naming of an observed fact. This does not absolve 
us from the task of philosophers, that is, to try to understand and find good 
explanations for the facts that we perceive and to our thoughts about the 
perceptions and the facts.
Adorno summarised the critique on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, by saying, that W. 
apparently had not read the job description of a philosopher carefully enough: 
the task is not to investigate that what can be said exactly about a subject 
that is well known to all, but the task is to chisel away the border separating 
that what can be only felt and that what can be expressed understandably. This 
is the envy speaking of someone who suffered an Oedipus tragedy. Socrates said 
that the perpetrator of a crime suffers more than the victim, and post-war 
German philosophy understandably had no time to be interested in rules of exact 
speech. The grammar of the logical language, as a subject for serious study, 
was swept aside by historical cataclysms, although Wittgenstein begot Frege and 
Carnap who begot von Neumann and Boole who begot Shannon and Chomsky. That he 
in his later life put aside his epoch-generating work is completely in the 
consequence of what he had said. It is not disowning the ladder one has built 
to climb up a level of abstraction while doing a cartography of what exact 
talking really means, but a wise and truthful modesty of an artist who had 
fabricated a tool for a specific project. No self-respecting artist would want 
to be remembered for a practical tool he had assembled for a specific task. 
Roughly citing, he says so much: those who have understood what is written 
here, may throw [this book] away, like one has no need for a ladder after one 
has climbed a level. Having found out how the technical people speak (or should 
speak), he withdraws from that field, having clarified the rules of exact 
thinking, closing the subject in a conclusive fashion for about 4 generations, 
and acts in later life as if precognisant of Adorno’s words.
Information is a connection of a symbol with a different symbol, if this state 
of the world can have a background and alternatives. If something can be 
otherwise, then the information is contained in the enumeration of the cases of 
being otherwise. 
By the use of computers, we can now create a whole topography and dramaturgy of 
exact speech. Had we the creativity of the Greeks, we would write a comedy, 
performed in public, by actors and narrators. The title could be: “All acting 
dutifully, striving their right place, catharsia are inevitable”. Th

Re: [Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 33, Issue 41: On the relation between information and meaning

[Alex Hankey]

RE: "The same situation is here with gravitation. We have a name for
it, can measure it and integrate the concept - more or less seamlessly
– into a general explanation. We just do not know, in an
epistemological sense, what gravitation is. We have to take the
normative power of the factual seriously and admit that we may have
problems in the naming of an observed fact. This does not absolve us
from the task of philosophers, that is, to try to understand and find
good explanations for the facts that we perceive and to our thoughts
about the perceptions and the facts.

Dear Karl,

I do not quite see how the point you are making here differs from the
very simple statement that 'we do not know what anything in the
physical world is' (where the word 'is' is being used in some loosely
defined Absolute sense). We only know how it interacts and how it
behaves in given experimental / experiential situations.

Of course in the case of sugar (sucrose, for example) we know what it
is as crystals we see, as something we taste, use to sweeten our
desserts, and our tea / coffee etc., and its chemical structure. I am
then comfortable with the feeling that I 'know what sugar is'. The
same applies to a superconductor or a Josephson junction between two
superconductors.

In the case of elementary particles, we say that 'a free electron is a
spin 1/2 representation of the Poincare Group', and this gives it a
meaning of a slightly more precise kind than sugar. It becomes a
precisely stated element of mathematics, that I personally equate with
a kind of 'Platonic Form'.

Equally in my heart, I feel that I have quite a good idea of what
'goodness' is, and I am equally clear that the IS - Daesh members who
murder innocent victims in Iraq / Syria etc. do not.

We communicate on a day to day basis taking these things for granted.
Am I missing something?

I would sincerely like to know if I am, because I am about to write up
an account of cognition of gestalts from the perspective of the
ancient Vedic science of Shiksha concerning the memorization and
understanding of texts, and I would like to get it as water-tight as
possible.

PLEASE comment!!

Best wishes for Christmas, New Year and the Holiday season,

Alex

P.S. You say that 'Wittgenstein begot Frege', but surely Frege was
completing his work just when Russell discovered his paradox at the
end of writing the Principia with Whitehead, which Wiki say was
published, 1910, 1912 and 1913, whereas Wittgenstein wrote his
Tractatus while a prisoner of war in Italy in 1917-18.

On 24/12/2016, Karl Javorszky  wrote:
> Information and Wittgenstein
>
>
>
> We should keep the self-evident in focus and refrain from descending into a
> philosophical nihilism. We are, after all, reasonable people, who are able
> to use our intelligence while communicating, and usually we understand each
> other quite well. The idea, that information is just a mental creation,
> evades the point: conceding that information is only a mental image, then
> what is that which determines, which amino acid comes to which place and is
> apparently contained in the sequence of the DNA triplets? If information is
> just an erroneous concept, then what is that what we receive as we ask at
> the airport, which gate to go for boarding?
>
> No, information does exist and we do use it day by day. Shannon has
> developed a method of repeatedly bifurcating a portion of N until finding
> that n of N that corresponds to the same n of which the sender encoded the
> search pattern for the receiver. The task lies not in negating the
> existence of the phaenomenon, but in proposing a more elegant and for
> biology useful explanation of the phaenomenon. The object of the game is
> still the same: identifying an n of N.
>
> The same situation is here with gravitation. We have a name for it, can
> measure it and integrate the concept - more or less seamlessly – into a
> general explanation. We just do not know, in an epistemological sense, what
> gravitation is. We have to take the normative power of the factual
> seriously and admit that we may have problems in the naming of an observed
> fact. This does not absolve us from the task of philosophers, that is, to
> try to understand and find good explanations for the facts that we perceive
> and to our thoughts about the perceptions and the facts.
>
> Adorno summarised the critique on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, by saying, that
> W. apparently had not read the job description of a philosopher carefully
> enough: the task is not to investigate that what can be said exactly about
> a subject that is well known to all, but the task is to chisel away the
> border separating that what can be only felt and that what can be expressed
> understandably. This is the envy speaking of someone who suffered an
> Oedipus tragedy. Socrates said that the perpetrator of a crime suffers more
> than the victim, and post-war German philosophy understandably had no time
> to be interested in rules of exact s

Re: [Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 33, Issue 41: On the relation between information and meaning

[Alex Hankey]

On 24/12/2016, Karl Javorszky  wrote:
> Information and Wittgenstein
>
>
>
> We should keep the self-evident in focus and refrain from descending into a
> philosophical nihilism. We are, after all, reasonable people, who are able
> to use our intelligence while communicating, and usually we understand each
> other quite well. The idea, that information is just a mental creation,
> evades the point: conceding that information is only a mental image, then
> what is that which determines, which amino acid comes to which place and is
> apparently contained in the sequence of the DNA triplets? If information is
> just an erroneous concept, then what is that what we receive as we ask at
> the airport, which gate to go for boarding?
>
> No, information does exist and we do use it day by day. Shannon has
> developed a method of repeatedly bifurcating a portion of N until finding
> that n of N that corresponds to the same n of which the sender encoded the
> search pattern for the receiver. The task lies not in negating the
> existence of the phaenomenon, but in proposing a more elegant and for
> biology useful explanation of the phaenomenon. The object of the game is
> still the same: identifying an n of N.
>
> The same situation is here with gravitation. We have a name for it, can
> measure it and integrate the concept - more or less seamlessly – into a
> general explanation. We just do not know, in an epistemological sense, what
> gravitation is. We have to take the normative power of the factual
> seriously and admit that we may have problems in the naming of an observed
> fact. This does not absolve us from the task of philosophers, that is, to
> try to understand and find good explanations for the facts that we perceive
> and to our thoughts about the perceptions and the facts.
>
> Adorno summarised the critique on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, by saying, that
> W. apparently had not read the job description of a philosopher carefully
> enough: the task is not to investigate that what can be said exactly about
> a subject that is well known to all, but the task is to chisel away the
> border separating that what can be only felt and that what can be expressed
> understandably. This is the envy speaking of someone who suffered an
> Oedipus tragedy. Socrates said that the perpetrator of a crime suffers more
> than the victim, and post-war German philosophy understandably had no time
> to be interested in rules of exact speech. The grammar of the logical
> language, as a subject for serious study, was swept aside by historical
> cataclysms, although Wittgenstein begot Frege and Carnap who begot von
> Neumann and Boole who begot Shannon and Chomsky. That he in his later life
> put aside his epoch-generating work is completely in the consequence of
> what he had said. It is not disowning the ladder one has built to climb up
> a level of abstraction while doing a cartography of what exact talking
> really means, but a wise and truthful modesty of an artist who had
> fabricated a tool for a specific project. No self-respecting artist would
> want to be remembered for a practical tool he had assembled for a specific
> task. Roughly citing, he says so much: those who have understood what is
> written here, may throw [this book] away, like one has no need for a ladder
> after one has climbed a level. Having found out how the technical people
> speak (or should speak), he withdraws from that field, having clarified the
> rules of exact thinking, closing the subject in a conclusive fashion for
> about 4 generations, and acts in later life as if precognisant of Adorno’s
> words.
>
> Information is a connection of a symbol with a different symbol, if this
> state of the world can have a background and alternatives. If something can
> be otherwise, then the information is contained in the enumeration of the
> cases of being otherwise.
>
> By the use of computers, we can now create a whole topography and
> dramaturgy of exact speech. Had we the creativity of the Greeks, we would
> write a comedy, performed in public, by actors and narrators. The title
> could be: “All acting dutifully, striving their right place, catharsia are
> inevitable”. The best youth of Sparta, Athens etc. would compete for
> prominent places in diverse disciplines, but the results are not
> satisfactory, as the debate emerges, which of the disciplines are above the
> others. The wise people of Attica have come up with a perpetual compromise,
> its main points repeatedly summarised by the chorus, ruling that being
> constantly underway between both correct positions: p1 in discipline d1 and
> position p2 in discipline d2, is the divine sign of a noble character. If
> every athlete follows the same rule, imagine the traffic jams on the stage
> of the amphitheatre! The Greeks would have built an elaborate system of
> philosophy about the predictable collisions among actors representing
> athletes who have attended many of the concourses. They could have come 

[Fis] On the relationship between Information and Meaning

[Dick Stoute]

I am on the same page as Steve Bindernan, but I start from a different
perspective.  The neuroscience model of perception limit us to becoming
conscious of representations of our environment.  Direct perception is not
possible and so we do not become conscious of material objects and instead
become conscious of forms of material objects (created by neural activity)
that represent material objects. This is all we are able to do given the
way our perceptual system works.

This limits us to Alfred Korzybski's maps, or as I refer to them,
representations.  These are forms that our neural system constructs using
information gathered through perception. We often treat these forms
(representations) as if they "are" identical to the material objects they
represent. This works well when the representations are clear and
unambiguous.  But when, for example, our vision is blurred it is quite
apparent that we become conscious of  "blurred images" (representations).
 The simplest explanation is that we always become conscious of images
(maps) that are forms, but when these are clear and unambiguous we treat
them as being identical to what they represent.

In this model information provides what is needed to construct images or
forms and the term "in-formation" is descriptive of the informing process.

To explain the connection between information and meaning we need to
recognise that our language must, in the first instance refer to the forms
we become conscious of.  For example, the word "tree" must refer in the
first instance to the form "tree" that our brain constructs. (This form can
be vague enough to represent any tree.) The word "tree"  can then also
refer to what this form often represents - a material tree.  In this model
we can think of language as a coding system in which we have learnt
associations between words and mental forms, so that the word "tree" calls
to mind the form "tree" (its meaning).  This gives language the flexibility
to refer to any mental form that we have associated with a word and when we
speak of the meaning of a sentence we are referring to the mental forms
created when we read/hear that sentence.

So, according to this model, we are informed of our environment through
perception and use the information to create mental models (meanings). We
then use these models to represent material entities/scenes that can be
thought of as the meanings of the models - so a 2 stage process of
meanings, rather than the usual linguistic model in which language refers
directly to the material world and various abstract objects (propositions,
possible worlds etc.) have to be created to account for the meanings of
sentences.

This representational approach leads to a radically different linguistic
theory, but is consistent with neuroscience,  information and information
theory.

To me, the key is being able to reject what I term the direct perception
intuition that makes us believe that we are capable of direct perception.
Once this is done we can create a set of integrated models that link neural
activity to information theory and a new representational language theory
that is very similar to Shannon information theory.

Dick Stoute
___
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Re: [Fis] What is information? and What is life?

[Terrence W. DEACON]

Dear colleagues,


I am entirely in agreement with the sentiments about mutual respect that
Loet recommends and the "harmony of knowledge" that Francesco promotes. But
I believe that this must also include a willingness to recognize that there
isn't a most basic theory; only what we might characterize as a currently
most thoroughly worked out analysis. But this is an analysis at the most
stripped down level—and which therefore necessarily ignores much that is
essential to a fuller analysis of information.


In this respect Loet comments:


"In my opinion, the status of Shannon’s mathematical theory of information
is different  from special theories of information (e.g., biological ones)
since the formal theory enables us to translate between these latter
theories."


We are essentially in agreement, and yet I would invert any perspective
that prioritizes the approach pioneered by Shannon. This analysis of the
signal properties that are necessary for conveying information does not
attempt to address the "higher order" properties that we pay attention to
in domains where reference and functional value are relevant (e.g. biology,
neuroscience, sociology, art). It necessarily brackets these aspects from
consideration. It thereby provides a common necessary but not sufficient tool
of analysis. More than a half century of development along these lines has
demonstrated that there are critical features of the information
relationship that cannot be reduced to intrinsic signal properties.


I have argued that there are basically two higher-order general properties
that constitute information: the referential relation and the
normative/functional value relation (with the term 'meaning' often used
somewhat ambiguously to refer to one or both of these properties). I do not
assume that these completely characterize all higher-order properties, and
so I would be open to discussing additional general attributes that fall
outside these domains, and which we need to also consider.


So I am not a fan of prioritizing the statistical conception of information
and considering all others to be "special" theories.


My hope for the field is that we will continue to work toward formalization
of these higher-order properties with the aim of embedding our current
"signal property analysis" within this larger theory. In this respect, I
would argue that the "mathematical theory" as currently developed is in
fact a "special theory," restricted to analyses where reference and
functional significance can be set aside (as in engineering applications),
and that the "general theory" remains to be formulated.


Since its inception, it has been recognized that the "mathematical theory
of communication" has used the term 'information' in a highly atypical
sense. I think that we would do well to keep this historical "accident" in
mind in order to avoid "information fundamentalism." This demands a sort of
humility in the face of the enormity of the challenge before us, not merely
a tolerance of "special" domains of application that don't completely
reduce to statistical analysis.


My proposal is that agreeing on terminological distinctions that support
such a paradigm inversion might provide a first step toward theoretical
convergence toward a "general theory" of information. I would welcome such
a discussion in the new year.


Happy holidays to all, Terry

On Sat, Dec 24, 2016 at 2:22 AM, Francesco Rizzo <
13francesco.ri...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Cari Tutti,
> ho scritto più volte le stesse cose per cui sono d'accordo con Voi,
> specialmente con gli ultimi intervenuti. E dato che sono un forestiero
> rispetto alle Vostre discipline, ma non uno straniero dell'armonia del
> sapere o del sapere dell'armonia, questo è una bella cosa. Auguri di buon
> Natale e per il nuovo anno.
> Francesco
>
> 2016-12-24 7:45 GMT+01:00 Loet Leydesdorff :
>
>> Dear Terrence and colleagues,
>>
>>
>>
>> I agree that we should not be fundamentalistic about “information”. For
>> example, one can also use “uncertainty” as an alternative word to
>> Shannon-type “information”. One can also make distinctions other than
>> semantic/syntactic/pragmatic, such as biological information, etc.
>>
>>
>>
>> Nevertheless, what makes this list to a common platform, in my opinion,
>> is our interest in the differences and similarities in the background of
>> these different notions of information. In my opinion, the status of
>> Shannon’s mathematical theory of information is different  from special
>> theories of information (e.g., biological ones) since the formal theory
>> enables us to translate between these latter theories. The translations are
>> heuristically important: they enable us to import metaphors from other
>> backgrounds (e.g., auto-catalysis).
>>
>>
>>
>> For example, one of us communicated with me why I was completely wrong,
>> and made the argument with reference to Kullback-Leibler divergence between
>> two probability distributions. Since we probably will not ha