[Fis] Fwd: Some ideas on the multidimensionality of information.

[Bob Logan]

Dear FIS colleagues - here is an exchange between Terry Deacon and me that I thought would be of interest to you. When I sent this email to Terry and the Pirates it was stopped at the border of FIS listserv because I had copied too many people. So I am sending it to you separately. Perhaps you should read Terry's email to me first which is a response to my Jan 25 email to him, the Pirates and copied to FIS. I am not sure if my Jan 25 posting made it onto the FIS listserv. If you have not seen it it is just after Terry's response to me also on Jan 25 - warm regards to all - Bob

Terry - there was no thesis other than the word information is a descriptor for so many different situations and that it is a part of a semantic web - no roadmap only a jaunt through the countryside of associations - a leisurely preamble. The post was meant to stimulate new ways to think about information and to provoke new thoughts like the one in your post below. You response is valuable so I have shared it with the rest of the T&P team and our FIS friends. It provides another context for the triad you introduced a few days ago of significance, reference and medium which inspired my mind map. By the way you also seemed to have made an association of that fourth element you mentioned, namely that interpretation is required to turn data into facts.

I called my musings a mind map because it mapped out all the associations with information that your triad plus interpretation provoked. It started out by my recording different associations that popped into my head which included some poetry. Being a somewhat uninhibited kind of guy I thought it was worth sharing and I am glad I did because of your significant association of the triad of significance, reference and medium with wisdom, knowledge and Shannon information and the notion that data aren't facts unless interpreted.

One more thought about wisdom from the Talmud: 
Ethical Teachings - Selections from Pirkei Avot
4:1 Ben Zoma said, "Who is wise? The one who learns from everyone, as it is said, 'From all who would teach me, have I gained understanding.' [Psalms 119:99] 


warm regards to all - Bob


On 2015-01-25, at 9:24 PM, Terrence W. DEACON wrote:

> “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
> Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
> – TS Eliot
> 
> His hierarchical prescinding is the essence of the significance
> (wisdom) - reference (knowledge) - medium (Shannon information) nested
> hierarchy.
> 
> Data aren't "facts" until interpreted and their reference is determined.
> 
> Bob, I'm afraid I don't quite get a clear sense of your intended
> thesis. So before I go online please provide a road map. — Terry


>> On 1/25/15, Bob Logan <logan at physics.utoronto.ca> wrote:
>>> Dear FISers -I have been following the FIS conversation re Terry's paper. I
>>> have let Terry and Jeremy carry the burden of the dialogue with FIS. As an
>>> FISer and a Pirate I have been neutral and did not want to enter the fray
>>> but I now have something worth sharing - some of it stimulated by the FIS
>>> dialogue and some by internal Terry and the Pirates conversations within our
>>> research group. I have a rather long post to make up for my absence in the
>>> conversation to date. I hope that I will have the benefit of your comments.
>>> I have just shared this paper with my T&P colleagues through our normal
>>> email channel.
>>> 
>>> The Many Dimensions of Information; No Word is an Island  – A Mind Map
>>> 
>>> Bob Logan
>>> 
>>> Prolegma and an Abstract: The concept of information has many dimensions and
>>> is described in many different ways. It has many different associations. It
>>> has many different definitions. It has many different interpretations. It
>>> has many different interpreters. This is an attempt to identify all of these
>>> associations, definitions, interpretations, and interpreters. It is in a
>>> certain sense a mind map but it is the map of my mind, my definitions, my
>>> associations, my interpretations, what is significant for me about
>>> information, what information means for me, the thoughts that thinking about
>>> information inspire and the thinkers that I believe have and can provide
>>> insights into the nature of information. It is a catalogue. It is a
>>> hypothesis. It has been compiled by induction, deduction and abduction. For
>>> you the reader it is to communicate the complexity and many dimensions of
>>> information. For me it is a starting point to rethink every thing I ever
>>> thought about information including
>>> 
>>> 1.     My reading of Incomplete Nature by Terrence Deacon
>>> 
>>> 2.     The discussions I have had with Terry and the Pirates (Terry is
>>> Terrence Deacon, and the Pirates are the group that meets with Terry more or
>>> less once a week in his home in Berkeley California with others like me
>>> joining by Skype. The group continues those weekly discussions by email).
>>> 
>>> 3.     My FIS (Foundations of Information Science) listserv discussions.
>>> 
>>> 4.     The paper I co-authored with Stuart Kauffman and others entitled “The
>>> Propagation of Information: An Enquiry” where we posited that “the
>>> constraints that allow autonomous agents to channel free energy into work
>>> are connected to information: in fact, simply put, the constraints are the
>>> information, are partially causal in the diversity of what occurs in cells,
>>> and are part of the organization that is propagated.”
>>> 
>>> 5.     My book What is Information? - Propagating Organization in the
>>> Biosphere, the Symbolosphere, the Technosphere and the Econosphere (Logan
>>> 2014)
>>> 
>>> Acknowlegement: This mind map project is inspired by Terry Deacon’s remarks
>>> during our Jan 21 T&P session and by an email he sent the following day,
>>> where he wrote,
>>> 
>>> Maxwell formulated the laws of electromagnetism not as one equation but as
>>> four interrelated equations, each defining a fundamental relation, i.e.
>>> formalizing the findings of Gauss, Faraday, and Ampere. Perhaps to formalize
>>> information we will need at least three: corresponding to medium properties,
>>> referential properties, and significance properties— and possibly a fourth
>>> defining interpretation (though this may be what the
>>> three together define)
>>> 
>>> I. Words
>>> 
>>> The Semantic Web: Words are interconnected –they form a Semantic Web. Their
>>> meaning arises in association with all the other words in their language
>>> and, as is the case with the word information, in association with its Latin
>>> and French origins. Words are entangled, networked, interdependent,
>>> interconnected, interwoven, elements of a web, contextualized.
>>> 
>>> No word is an island entire of itself; every word is a piece of the language
>>> from which it emerges, a part of the language; the death of any association
>>> with a word diminishes it because every word is involved with every other
>>> word. Never ask what is the exact meaning of a word or for whom that word
>>> has meaning; depending on all your experiences that word tolls for thee and
>>> has a particular meaning for thee. (A riff on John Donne’s 'No Man is an
>>> Island'):
>>> 
>>> No man is an island entire of itself; every man
>>> is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
>>> if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
>>> is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
>>> well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
>>> own were; any man's death diminishes me,
>>> because I am involved in mankind.
>>> And therefore never send to know for whom
>>> the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
>>> 
>>> That no word is an island is especially true of the following words:
>>> 
>>> Information, Inform, Form, Formal, Formal Cause, Formality, Formation (in
>>> English this word has the meaning of a form of organization whereas in
>>> French it has the meaning of training).  And these associations are just the
>>> beginning.
>>> 
>>> Formal cause links to efficient cause, material cause and final cause ala
>>> Aristotle.
>>> 
>>> Origin of the word information as forming the mind:
>>> 
>>> “The English word information according to the Oxford English Dictionary
>>> (OED) first appears in the written record in 1386 by Chaucer: “Whanne
>>> Melibee hadde herd the grete skiles and resons of Dame Prudence, and hire
>>> wise informacions and techynges.” The word is derived from Latin through
>>> French by combining the word inform meaning giving a form to the mind with
>>> the ending “ation” denoting a noun of action. This earliest definition
>>> refers to an item of training or molding of the mind (Logan 2014).”
>>> 
>>> Other words associated with information:
>>> 
>>> Interpretation, interpret, clarify, construe, decipher, depict, elucidate,
>>> explicate, connotation, exegetics
>>> 
>>> Sign: significance, signify, signification, significant, sign, designate,
>>> specify, identify
>>> 
>>> Reference, refer, referee, referential, infer, indicate, indicative, index,
>>> point out,
>>> 
>>> Represent, stand for
>>> 
>>> Semiotics: icon, index, symbol
>>> 
>>> Language, concept, conceive, percept, perceive
>>> 
>>> Language, semantics, syntax, pragmatics, grammar, langue, parole (as defined
>>> by de Saussure)
>>> 
>>> Inspire; Inspiration;
>>> 
>>> Meaning, the mean, the means
>>> 
>>> Sentience
>>> 
>>> Cybernetics – Wiener - feedback
>>> 
>>> Medium; The medium is the message; The two messages of a medium: its content
>>> and its effect independent of its content - McLuhan.
>>> 
>>> Message
>>> 
>>> Communicate, communication, commune
>>> 
>>> Rhetoric; Context; The context of information helps define the meaning of a
>>> communication or utterance; Feedforward – I. A. Richards, pragmatics
>>> 
>>> Figure/ground: The meaning, significance or the interpretation of a figure
>>> depends on the ground. environment or surroundings it operates in - McLuhan
>>> 
>>> Umwelt innenwelt umgebung – Euxkull
>>> 
>>> One can apply the notion of umwelt to humans and each individual has their
>>> own unique umwelt or context in which they percieve the world and conceive
>>> their thoughts. Their innenwelt or self-oriented features shape their
>>> umgebung or world-oriented features. Translating this into McLuhan speak the
>>> innenwelt is the ground and the umgebung is the figure from which I conclude
>>> it is the innenwelt that detrmines the interpretation of what is perceived
>>> to form the umgebung, or world-oriented features.
>>> Shannon information, sender, channel, receiver
>>> 
>>> Selective information versus structural information: “Mackay’s first move
>>> was to rescue information that affected the receiver’s mindset from the
>>> ‘subjective’ label. He proposed that both Shannon and Bavelas were concerned
>>> with what he called Selective information, that is information calculated by
>>> considering the selection of message elements from a set. But selective
>>> information alone is not enough; also required is another kind of
>>> information that he called ‘structural.’ Structural information indicates
>>> how selective information is to be understood; it is a message about how to
>>> interpret a message—that is, it is a metacommunication (Hayles 1999a, pp.
>>> 54-55 cited by Logan 2014).” [bolding mine]
>>> 
>>> Shannon was not shannonian {He did not overdo the interpretation of
>>> Shannonian entropy as did many advocates of information theory.
>>> Understand, comprehend, apprehend, appreciate,
>>> 
>>> Respond, reply
>>> 
>>> Deixis (deictic) words that point, words and phrases that cannot be fully
>>> understood without additional contextual information; a word whose meaning
>>> is dependent on context
>>> 
>>> Words are woven together to form a text just as threads are woven to form a
>>> textile, which usually refers to written communication. There is also the
>>> notion that one spins a yarn, which describes oral communication.
>>> 
>>> Letters, literacy, literal
>>> 
>>> Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom: The relationship of data, information,
>>> knowledge and wisdom
>>> 
>>> “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
>>> 
>>> Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” ­– TS Eliot
>>> 
>>> “Where is the meaning we have lost in information?” ­– RK Logan
>>> 
>>> “• Data are the pure and simple facts without any particular structure or
>>> organization, the
>>> 
>>>  basic atoms of information,
>>> 
>>> • Information is structured data, which adds meaning to the data and gives
>>> it context and
>>> 
>>>  significance,
>>> 
>>> • Knowledge is the ability to use information strategically to achieve one's
>>> objectives, and
>>> 
>>> • Wisdom is the capacity to choose objectives consistent with one's values
>>> and within a larger social context (Logan 2014).”
>>> 
>>> ______________________
>>> 
>>> 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
>>> www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Logan5/publications
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> Professor Terrence W. Deacon
>> University of California, Berkeley
> 

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