Re: [Fis] Info Science Comments
Dear Jacob: your choice is certainly well-stated; further, on my view, building after the called 'conjugational mathematics' is not a frequent exercise. And perhaps the reason is under the assumption that a scientific theory of the rational behavior that incorporates the intuitive inclination facing the uncertainty is necessary. But the methods of detection of errors and evaluation of opportunities, on the basis of numerical measures, have demonstrated not to be satisfactory at the time of describing the behavior. Then when considering the communication, the credentials relative to the logic are not strictly rigourous. So, why to continue exploring where there is no answer? Regards, Enrique Wulff Marine Sciences Institute of Andalusia (CSIC) C/ República Saharaui nº 2 (Campus Universitario) 11519 Puerto Real, Cádiz. Spain. Phone 956 832 612, ext. 325 Fax 956 834 701 E-mail: enrique.wu...@icman.csic.es At 05:11 04/12/2009, you wrote: Dear All: I have remained mostly a lurker on this fascinating listserv for some time. The diversity of the different participants' backgrounds makes for interesting discussions, though I am not sure I always understand everything. That said, having spent the last year or more familiarizing myself with situation semantics, situation theory, and infomorphic channel theory (i.e. the work of Jon Barwise, Jerry Seligman, David Israel, John Perry, Keith Devlin, and many others) for my thesis work, I am struck by the general, if not universal, absence of engagement with this work in this list's discussions. Situation semantics is an explicitly information oriented semantics (rather than say a truth oriented semantics), based on partial worlds called situations. Propositional sentence meaning is a relation between some discourse situation and a described situation. A propositional sentence asserts that a described situation support various states of affairs (items of information). Jerry Seligman gives a reasonable first pass formalization of the notion of a situation in his paper /Physical Situations and Information Flow./ Situation theory was further developed in Barwise and Seligman's channel theory. Channel theory identifies information flow as arising from regularities between the components of distributed systems. The decomposition of a system determines what information flows in the system; hence the information available to a cognitive agent depends on the particular decomposition used. Allwein, Moskowitz, and Chang have attempted to integrate Shannon's information theory into Barwise and Seligman's channel theory (see refs below). More recent work of interest is contained in the recent collection /Philosophy of Information/ edited by Pieter Adriaans and Johan Van Benthem. This work is relatively well known and seems highly relevant to our discussions on this list, so I am puzzled. Am I missing something? Jacob REFS Adriaans, Pieter, and Johan Van Benthem. Philosophy of Information. Elsevier, 2008. Allwein, Gerard. A qualitative framework for Shannon information theories. In Proceedings of the 2004 workshop on New security paradigms, 23-31. Nova Scotia, Canada: ACM, 2004. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1065907.1066030coll=Portaldl=GUIDECFID=22417089CFTOKEN=87154842 (accessed February 17, 2009). Moskowitz, I. S., L. W. Chang, and G. T. Allwein. A new framework for Shannon information theory. Storming Media, 2004. Seligman, Jerry Physical situations and information flow. in Situation theory and its applications, vol. 2 1991. Regards, Jacob ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
Re: [Fis] Info Science Comments
Robin said: To me this issue is very simple: the meaning of information to a receiving system is the effect on the system of the reception of the information. This makes meaning relative, but I believe that's both as it should be, and quite easily understood: I've very recently been studying Millikan's biosemantics, in which proper function is determined genetically: it is the function of the heart to pump blood because that's what its predecessors were selected to do. The concept of function is required in order to allow for a representation or meaning to be false, or misleading: in that case, the function fails to do what it is supposed to. It occurred to me, that is good as far as it goes, but too restrictive: functionality should be seen as relative to a given context. In the context of biology, Millikan's proper function is appropriate, but in most contexts that people are concerned with, the context is human aims and aspirations. Within that category there are different levels, notably that of the individual and of the society, but that's just another aspect of context. In any case, the context determines the meaning of information. How that does that relate to my first statement? The context will determine, for instance, whether the system we look at to determine the effect of the information is an individual or a population. But of course there are many other complexities to consider! S: I agree that meaning is generated within an interpreting system (and so is not 'objective'), as well as through contextuality. That is, if a system acts as a system of interpretance, then it is contextualizing an event impinging upon it or an opportunity appearing before it. Steven said: I much prefer a more general definition(of meaning) derived from the Peircian pragmaticist definition (and internally consistent in my model). Meaning is a term concerning signs, it is the difference that a sign makes in the world. A meaning is a reference to the information that a sign provides. It is a meta concept allowing us to reason about information. S: The difference between a mere 'event' (e.g., two items colliding) and a meaningful interaction is that in the latter context affects the result. That context is provided by a system of interpretance if it is party to the event/interaction. Jacob said: Dear All: I have remained mostly a lurker on this fascinating listserv for some time. The diversity of the different participants' backgrounds makes for interesting discussions, though I am not sure I always understand everything. That said, having spent the last year or more familiarizing myself with situation semantics, situation theory, and infomorphic channel theory (i.e. the work of Jon Barwise, Jerry Seligman, David Israel, John Perry, Keith Devlin, and many others) for my thesis work, I am struck by the general, if not universal, absence of engagement with this work in this list's discussions. Situation semantics is an explicitly information oriented semantics (rather than say a truth oriented semantics), based on partial worlds called situations. Propositional sentence meaning is a relation between some discourse situation and a described situation. A propositional sentence asserts that a described situation support various states of affairs (items of information). Jerry Seligman gives a reasonable first pass formalization of the notion of a situation in his paper /Physical Situations and Information Flow./ Situation theory was further developed in Barwise and Seligman's channel theory. Channel theory identifies information flow as arising from regularities between the components of distributed systems. The decomposition of a system determines what information flows in the system; hence the information available to a cognitive agent depends on the particular decomposition used. Allwein, Moskowitz, and Chang have attempted to integrate Shannon's information theory into Barwise and Seligman's channel theory (see refs below). More recent work of interest is contained in the recent collection /Philosophy of Information/ edited by Pieter Adriaans and Johan Van Benthem. This work is relatively well known and seems highly relevant to our discussions on this list, so I am puzzled. Am I missing something? S: How would your points here relate to the general idea that information is contextual? That is, that it varies with the system of interpretance engaging it. STAN ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
[Fis] Info Science Comments
DearFISers, I am athome, incubating a flu, and during a week or so I will be out of touch –justwith Morpheus. About the comments received, not having the messages here, Iwill try to remember the initial bunch of contents. In Rafael’squestion on the info status of our concepts, I would take them as signals,sophisticate ones exchanged as mandated along our life cycles. My preference isfor Fuster “cognits” which try to approach language and thought under the basicprocessual unit of the nervous system: the action/perception cycle... We shouldnot go beyond the main science involved, in this case neuroscience, as forinstance a theory of consciousness is missing yet. So at the time being I wouldbe reluctant at trying to answer the great conceptual questions of classicalphilosophy. Johncomment on information physics is completely endorsed. Both quantum computingand cosmology are advancing informational approaches in very elegant ways. AsBob commented days ago, Heisenberg and Pauli principles contain that “absence”side which makes them susceptible of being expressed in info terms; perhaps themeasurement problem too (not to forget “ecosystems” within the catalog of infoentities). Stan is right when criticizes the truncateddecalog of “principles”. Let me put them as basic “propositions” temporarilyfielding the field... Jerry isalso right when demands a more fine tuned and less overlapping version. Aboutthe power law with exponential cutoff in the summands of natural numbers partitions,it is explained in a paper of Garcia Olivares and me: doi:10.1016/j.biosystems.2004.02.005 (“Emergence of power laws from partitional dynamics”). Loet’s preference forShannon (and only Shannon) is fine, but this was the status quo during last 60years... Joseph makes a well-addressed comment on the new knowledge needed forsustainability issues. This is timely, as complexity theorists have left thecommunication theme aside in their mathematical and computer centered vision,and an enlarged approach to information (absences, needs, signals, meaning,value, knowledge, recombination networking, and so on) makes a lot ofsense in todays society. I think the whole Info Sci. enterprise is mature for a conjoint conference with avariety of scholarly and scientific organizations --eg, symmetry. And that was all. Pedro ___ fis mailing list fis@listas.unizar.es https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
