[Fis] Fwd: What is life?

[Mark Johnson]

Thank you Bob!

The medium is a very restricted form of communication on the internet, of course...

Are our circular deliberations about information victims of the so-called "information technology" which enables them? Is this a variety of Wittgenstein's realisation that the problems of philosophy were problems of language? Perhaps we cannot see the constraints that communications technology itself has on our discourse. How might we try to see them? 

Maybe this goes some way towards accounting for the strange political situation we find ourselves in at the moment!

Best wishes,

Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: "Bob Logan" <logan at physics.utoronto.ca>
Sent: ‎18/‎12/‎2016 15:14
To: "Loet Leydesdorff" <loet at leydesdorff.net>; "Robert Ulanowicz" <ulan at umces.edu>; "Alex Hankey" <alexhankey at gmail.com>
Cc: "fis" <fis at listas.unizar.es>
Subject: Re: [Fis] Fwd:  What is life?

Hello Loet, Bob U, Alex et alia - I agree with Bob U when he wrote "The problem is that information is not an absolute.”  As I have stated before on this list  information is relative and depends on the context.


And I agree with Loet when he wrote, "Different systems of reference, of course, can attribute different meanings to the same information.”
   In fact McLuhan expressed Loet's thought long ago with the one-liner: "The user is the content” Applying this idea to Shannon’s original paper might explain why we have so many definitions of information as each reader of his original paper has their own interpretation of Shannon because as McLuhan said "the user is the content”. 




For this user, Shannon information theory should be called Shannon signal theory as Shannon himself said his theory was not concerned with meaning only the accuracy of sending a signal from point A to point B. What does information without meaning mean anyway? 


I enjoy these conversations about the meaning of information and even wrote a book on the subject entitled What Is Information? (Available for free at demopublishing.com) but I get the feeling we are like the dog chasing its own tail.  I agreed with Bob U’s point that information is not an absolute and then I agreed with Loet’s disagreement with Bob U’s point. Talk about a dog chasing its tail. 


And if this is not enough consider another McLuhan one-liner: "The medium is the message” in which he suggests that there is additional information in the medium that carries the signals from point A to point B independent of those signals. 


cheers - Bob L





______________________


Robert K. Logan
Prof. Emeritus - Physics - U. of Toronto 
Fellow University of St. Michael's College
Chief Scientist - sLab at OCAD
http://utoronto.academia.edu/RobertKLogan
www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan
www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Logan5/publications







On Dec 18, 2016, at 2:16 AM, Loet Leydesdorff <loet at leydesdorff.net> wrote:


The problem is that information is not an absolute. The same code when measured against different references (English vs. Spanish in this case) will yield different measures. It's the obverse of the Third Law of Thermodynamics. See <http://people.clas.ufl.edu/ulan/files/FISPAP.pdf>
 
Dear Bob, 
 
It seems to me that you confuse information with what information means for a system of reference. Different systems of reference, of course, can attribute different meanings to the same information.
 
@Alex: this confusion is unfortunately pervasive. Unlike Shannon-type information, “information” is often defined (following Bateson and McKay) as “a difference which makes a difference”, without articulation that the second difference presumes the specification of a system of reference. 
 
A series of differences of the first type can be considered as a probability distribution that contains uncertainty. “A difference which makes a difference”, however, can be considered as “meaningful information”. In my opinion, this “meaningful information” should not be equated with information because one then uses the same word for two different things and thus generates confusion.
 
Best,
Loet
 

[The entire original message is not included.]
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listas.unizar.es/pipermail/fis/attachments/20161218/6f643d33/attachment.html>