Hi Christophe - I enjoyed your response - full of meaningful information - :-) Your point is well taken. I agree what might be meaningful information for one agent might be meaningless for another. I can add another example to your list of examples which I encountered some time ago. An author whose name I forget pointed out that a book written in Urdu is information for a literate Urdu speaker but perhaps not for those that cannot read Urdu. According to the definitions of Doug MacKay in 1969 and Gregory Bateson in 1973 'information is a distinction that makes a difference' and 'information is a difference that makes a difference' respectively. Meaningless information does not cut it by their definitions as it does not make a difference. Of course one could define information as a distinction or a difference that has the potential to make a difference for some agent. It seems to me that defining what is information is no easy task. My conclusion from our discussion is that depending on how you define information context can be an important part of what is information. The notion of information is extremely nuanced with multiple meanings and we seem to have only one word for it as pointed out by Shannon himself. In the abstract to his paper, The Lattice Theory of Information Shannon (1953) wrote, "The word "information" has been given many different meanings by various writers in the general field of information theory. It is likely that at least a number of these will prove sufficiently useful in certain applications to deserve further study and permanent recognition. It is hardly to be expected that a single concept of information would satisfactorily account for the numerous possible applications of this general field. The present note outlines a new approach to information theory, which is aimed specifically at the analysis of certain communication problems in which there exist a number of information sources simultaneously in operation."
MacKay made a distinction between 'selective information' as defined by Shannon's formula and 'structural information', which indicates how 'selective information' is to be interpreted. "Structural information must involve semantics and meaning if it is to succeed in its role of interpreting selective or Shannon information. Structural information is concerned with the effect and impact of the information on the mind of the receiver and hence is reflexive. Structural information has a relationship to pragmatics as well as semantics where pragmatics tries to bridge the explanatory gap between the literal meaning of a sentence and the meaning that the speaker or writer intended. Shannon information has no particular relation to either semantics or pragmatics. It is only concerned with the text of a message and not the intentions of the sender or the possible interpretations of the receiver (Logan 2014)." The above material is from my book What is Information? to be published simultaneously as a printed book and an e-book by DEMO press in Toronto. I would be happy to share this with you as a PDF, Christophe or any other reader that finds the above information meaningful and interesting. Thank you Christophe for providing me with the opportunity to muse so more about the meaning of information especially 'meaningless information'. I quite enjoy going down the rabbit hole. all the best Bob ______________________ Robert K. Logan Prof. Emeritus - Physics - U. of Toronto Chief Scientist - sLab at OCAD http://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertKLogan www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan On 2014-01-16, at 5:52 AM, Christophe wrote: > Dear Bob, > Thanks for your answer. > So for you, information is always meaningful. > Such a statement is surprising when many examples can display cases of > meaningless information. > The well known Chinese Room Argument: a sentence written in Chinese is > meaningless to a non Chinese speaking reader. > A vervet monkey alarm is meaningful information for other vervet monkeys but > is meaningless for a passing by dog. > Cyphered information is meaningful or meaningless depending if the receiver > has the cyphering key or not. > We can agree that the meaning of information does not exist by itself but is > a result of an interpretation by a system. The interpretations of given > information can deliver different meanings and "no meaning" is a possible > outcome. Looking at downgrading to signals the intrerpretation of > information is surprising. > Now, regarding information theory, I still understand it in a scientific > background as it is part of mathematics and computing. Things can be > different indeed if you look at applications of IT (to linguistics, > psychology, …). > But the key point may be that disregarding the possibility for meaningless > information shuts a road in analyzing the possibilities for computers to > understand us. A lot is still to be done in this area and my take is that > using the notion of meaningless information can shed some light on the > possibilities for meanings in artificial agents. See my paper on that subject > in the APA Newsletter > http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.apaonline.org/resource/collection/EADE8D52-8D02-4136-9A2A-729368501E43/ComputersV13n1.pdf > > (more readable as attached) > Sorry to bring you again down that rabbit hole…. > Christophe
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