USYD Philosophy Postgraduate Work-In-Progress Seminar Monday 31st of May, 3:30-5:00pm, Philosophy Common Room (Main Quad, University of Sydney)
Bruce Long - "Information Measures: A Measure of What? Applicability of the Shannon schema across diverse disciplines, and various measures of information, and what it says about the metaphysics of information." "With the exception of Rolf Landauer, who regarded information as fundamentally physical, most conceptions of information in the sciences are constructive and involve definitions grounded in statistical measures of stochastic processes and systems. The latter approach involves a conceptual and definitional circularity. What do putative measures of information such as those of Shannon, Kolmogorov and Fisher tell us about what information is? Shannon’s schema has been applied broadly in the sciences, but neither scientists nor philosophers have achieved a coherent or consistent metaphysical conception of information. Shannon emphasised that great caution was required in exporting the information principles of his Mathematical Theory of Communication to other fields. Philosopher Fred Dretske heeded this warning in his 1981 Knowledge and the Flow of Information, wherein he adjusts aspects of Shannon’s formulae and theory in an attempt to develop a semantics of information and an informational epistemology. I suggest that Dretske’s adjustments – although salient and correct - were not aggressive enough, and that his application of the Shannon schema to sense-perception was too rigid. I will compare measures of information by Shannon, Fisher, Brukner and Zeilnger and Kahre." Everyone is welcome to attend. If you would like to present or require further information, please contact Nick Malpas at [email protected] The format is 30 minutes for presentations followed by 1 hour of discussion. Since the primary aim of this seminar is to generate discussion, presentations need not be particularly polished or formal.
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