The NY Times Book Review contains an interesting review by Geoffrey Nunberg of James Gleick's new book "The Information". See: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/books/review/book-review-the-information-by-james-gleick.html?_r=1&nl=books&emc=booksupdateema2&pagewanted=all or http://tinyurl.com/revgleickinformation
I haven't read the book but the review indicates that it's Gleick's attempt to try to show how fundamental the concept of "information" is to understanding the nature of reality, society, and even the human mind. By "information" the reviewer says that Gleick is relying upon Claude Shannon's conception as represented in his famous 1948 article in the Bell Systems Technical Journal "A Mathematical Theory of Communication". Shannon had been working on methods that would allow one to quantify the amount of information that could be transmitted through a communications channel, a problem that other engineers and mathematicians at Bell Laboratories (the basic research arm of the telephone company monopoly AT&T) had worked on (e.g., Hartley, R.V.L. 1928. "Transmission of Information," in the same journal). The reviewer notes that Norbert Wiener's 1948 book "Cybernetics" also provided a version of Shannon famous equation and in the context of complex system which were self-organizing and self-maintaining. I don't know how Gleick handles Wiener's contributions which one can trace back to ideas presented at the "Macy Conferences" (no, not the department store Macy) which started in 1946 and included participants like Warren McCulloch (of McCulloch & Pitts artificial neurons fame), John con Neumann, Kurt Lewin, Margaret Mead, and others. For a list of attendees of the Macy, see: http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/foundations/history/MacySummary.htm#Part1 For more background on the Macy conferences, see: http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/foundations/history/MacySummary.htm#Part1 But though some psychologists were exposed to Wiener's ideas about information, control, and cybernetics, academic U.S. psychology would not pay much attention to it until later, after Claude Shannon's concepts and ideas would first make their mark on psychology. Shannon's concept of information would be used in a variety of ways, from measuring the degree of structure in a pattern to information processing, especially in form of performing transformations that converted one type of energy into another form while maintaining the "information" invariant under transformation (e.g., talking into a telephone takes sound pressure waves, convert them into electrical signals which today are quantized or digital in nature instead of analog and then converted back into sound pressure waves at the receiver's end). Shannon's information theory would have a dramatic impact on psychological theory and research in the first half of the 1950s (e.g., see Quastler's 1955 "Information Theory in Psychology" http://tinyurl.com/quastlerinfopsych ) . However, by 1956, it was clear to many workers in the field that Shannon's theory, though useful, was inadequate to capture the basis of what was thought of as the human mind, at least in the U.S. A conference at MIT which contained famous presentations by George Miller (on what would become his "Magic Number Seven" paper), Noam Chomsky (on distinguishing models of syntax and why associative accounts like Skinner's failed), Newell and Simon (on the computer simulation the "Logic Theorist"), Swets (on signal detection theory, the problem of detecting a signal in a noisy channel) and so on would serve as the transition point in American psychological theorizing. It is from this point on that information theory would be secondary to information processing theory in psychology, representing the triumph of automata theory over communications theory, so to speak. Issues of the control of the flow of information and related issues which would involve cybernetic concepts, were famously presented in Miller, Galanter & Pribram's "Plans and the Structure of Behavior" (see: http://tinyurl.com/millergalanterpribram ). So, it will be interesting to see Gleick's history and what he says. It should also be of some interest to psychologists. -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=9475 or send a blank email to leave-9475-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
