[Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 33, Issue 41: On the relation betweeninformation and meaning

Sat Dec 24 12:06:02 CET 2016

Dear all, 

Merry Christmas to all of you. 

I tend to associate Christmas with cinema - there's always been something good to go and see with family and friends'. This year like last year, we have a new Star Wars film - which entertained  three generations of my family last year. This year, I'd be intrigued to know whether this good vs evil story feels the same in the light of recent events. I suspect it won't. 

If anyone hasn't seen it, I highly recommend a more intelligent SciFi movie, 'Arrival' - which carries a lot of resonance with our recent discussions. 

Have a restful time, and best wishes for the 2017 - it is just possible it might not be as bad as we fear...

Best wishes,

Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: "Karl Javorszky" <karl.javorszky at gmail.com>
Sent: ‎24/‎12/‎2016 10:49
To: "fis" <fis at listas.unizar.es>
Cc: "bindeman1 at verizon.net" <bindeman1 at verizon.net>
Subject: Re: [Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 33, Issue 41: On the relation betweeninformation and meaning

Information and Wittgenstein

We should keep the self-evident in focus and refrain from descending into a philosophical nihilism. We are, after all, reasonable people, who are able to use our intelligence while communicating, and usually we understand each other quite well. The idea, that information is just a mental creation, evades the point: conceding that information is only a mental image, then what is that which determines, which amino acid comes to which place and is apparently contained in the sequence of the DNA triplets? If information is just an erroneous concept, then what is that what we receive as we ask at the airport, which gate to go for boarding?
No, information does exist and we do use it day by day. Shannon has developed a method of repeatedly bifurcating a portion of N until finding that n of N that corresponds to the same n of which the sender encoded the search pattern for the receiver. The task lies not in negating the existence of the phaenomenon, but in proposing a more elegant and for biology useful explanation of the phaenomenon. The object of the game is still the same: identifying an n of N.
The same situation is here with gravitation. We have a name for it, can measure it and integrate the concept - more or less seamlessly – into a general explanation. We just do not know, in an epistemological sense, what gravitation is. We have to take the normative power of the factual seriously and admit that we may have problems in the naming of an observed fact. This does not absolve us from the task of philosophers, that is, to try to understand and find good explanations for the facts that we perceive and to our thoughts about the perceptions and the facts.
Adorno summarised the critique on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, by saying, that W. apparently had not read the job description of a philosopher carefully enough: the task is not to investigate that what can be said exactly about a subject that is well known to all, but the task is to chisel away the border separating that what can be only felt and that what can be expressed understandably. This is the envy speaking of someone who suffered an Oedipus tragedy. Socrates said that the perpetrator of a crime suffers more than the victim, and post-war German philosophy understandably had no time to be interested in rules of exact speech. The grammar of the logical language, as a subject for serious study, was swept aside by historical cataclysms, although Wittgenstein begot Frege and Carnap who begot von Neumann and Boole who begot Shannon and Chomsky. That he in his later life put aside his epoch-generating work is completely in the consequence of what he had said. It is not disowning the ladder one has built to climb up a level of abstraction while doing a cartography of what exact talking really means, but a wise and truthful modesty of an artist who had fabricated a tool for a specific project. No self-respecting artist would want to be remembered for a practical tool he had assembled for a specific task. Roughly citing, he says so much: those who have understood what is written here, may throw [this book] away, like one has no need for a ladder after one has climbed a level. Having found out how the technical people speak (or should speak), he withdraws from that field, having clarified the rules of exact thinking, closing the subject in a conclusive fashion for about 4 generations, and acts in later life as if precognisant of Adorno’s words.
Information is a connection of a symbol with a different symbol, if this state of the world can have a background and alternatives. If something can be otherwise, then the information is contained in the enumeration of the cases of being otherwise. 
By the use of computers, we can now create a whole topography and dramaturgy of exact speech. Had we the creativity of the Greeks, we would write a comedy, performed in public, by actors and narrators. The title could be: “All acting dutifully, striving their right place, catharsia are inevitable”. The best youth of Sparta, Athens etc. would compete for prominent places in diverse disciplines, but the results are not satisfactory, as the debate emerges, which of the disciplines are above the others. The wise people of Attica have come up with a perpetual compromise, its main points repeatedly summarised by the chorus, ruling that being constantly underway between both correct positions: p1 in discipline d1 and position p2 in discipline d2, is the divine sign of a noble character. If every athlete follows the same rule, imagine the traffic jams on the stage of the amphitheatre! The Greeks would have built an elaborate system of philosophy about the predictable collisions among actors representing athletes who have attended many of the concourses. They could have come up with specific names for typical results and would have named the agglomerations “elements” and “isotopes” that differ among each other on how many of the actors are glued together for lack of space to pass through, where too many paths cross, and on the form of the squeeze they constitute. They would no doubt have categorised and sub-classified and tabulated the inevitable melee that comes from having competing requirements to serve, a subject not far from their preoccupations with logic and predictable, consistent, rule observing behaviour by all, that by its very nature creates cooperation and conflict, destruction and growth.
As long as the background and the alternatives to the statements, that describe what is the case, are conceptually discouraged or disallowed, it appears not very easy to use the term “information” in a consistent fashion. Information describes that what is not the case. (The DNA eliminates all the alternatives to that specific amino acid on that specific place; we have received information by knowing all those gates where we will not board the plane.)

Thank you for this enjoyable year.
Karl

2016-12-24 2:39 GMT+01:00 Louis H Kauffman <kauffman at uic.edu>:

Dear Steve,
You write
"But in later years he eventually recognized that the possibility of relating propositions in language to facts concerning the world could not in itself be proved. Without proof, the house of cards collapses. Once the validity of using language to describe the world ini a rigorous and unambiguous way is questioned, not much is left.”

I do not think that the issue of proof was foremost for Wittgenstein. Rather, he later understood that a pure mirroring of language and world was untenable and worked directly with language and its use to show how complex was the actuality. The result is that one can still read the Tractatus meaningfully, knowing that it states and discusses an ideal of (formal) language and a view of the world so created that is necessarily limited. Indeed the later Wittgenstein and the Tractatus come together at the point of the Tractatus showing how meagre is that ‘that can be said’ from its mirrored and logical point of view.
The Tractatus indicates its own incompleteness, and in do doing invalidates its use by the logical positivists as a model for the performance of science. It was in this background that (through Goedel) the Incompleteness Theorem arose in the midst of the Vienna Circle. And here we are in a world generated by formal computer languages, facing the uncertainties of models that are sensitive enough (as in economics and social science) to cross the boundary and affect what is to be modeled.
Best,
Lou Kauffman

On Dec 23, 2016, at 11:27 AM, steven bindeman <bindeman1 at verizon.net> wrote:

I would like to contribute to the current ongoing discussion regarding the relation between information and meaning. I agree with Dai Griffiths and others that the term information is a problematic construction. Since it is often used as an example of fitting the details of a specific worldly situation into a linguistic  form that can be processed by a computer, this fact in itself introduces various distortions from the reality that is being represented.  The degree of distortion might even be an example of the degree of uncertainty.

I believe that reference to the early work of Wittgenstein might be of use in this context, especially since his work in his Tractatus text on problems related to logical atomism influenced the design of the von Neumann computer, led to the creation of the Vienna Circle group and later inspired the philosophical movement of logical positivism. Alan Turing was also one of his students.

In this early work Wittgenstein had believed that a formal theory of language could be developed, capable of showing how propositions can succeed in representing real states of affairs and in serving the purposes of real life. He believed that language is like a picture which is laid against reality like a measuring rod and reaches right out to it. But in later years he eventually recognized that the possibility of relating propositions in language to facts concerning the world could not in itself be proved. Without proof, the house of cards collapses. Once the validity of using language to describe the world ini a rigorous and unambiguous way is questioned, not much is left. Although propositions are indeed capable of modeling and describing the world with a rigor not unlike that of mathematical representations of physical phenomena, they cannot themselves describe how they represent this world without becoming self-referential. Propositions are consequently essentially meaningless, since their meaning consists precisely in their ability to connect with the world outside of language. A perfect language mirrors a  perfect world, but  since the latter is nothing more than a chimera so is the former.

Here are some quotes (taken out of their original contexts) from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus that I believe are relevant to the discussion on information and meaning:

The facts in logical space are the world. What is the case — a fact— is the existence of states of affairs.  A state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects (things). It is essential to things that they should be possible constituents of states of affairs. If I know an object I also know all its possible occurrences in states of affairs.  Objects contain the possibility of all situations. The configuration of objects produces states of affairs. The totality of existing states of affairs is the world. The existence and non-existence of states of affairs is reality. States of affairs are independent of one another.  A picture is a model of reality. A picture is a fact.  Logical pictures can depict the world. A picture depicts reality by representing a possibility of existence and non-existence of states of affairs. Situations can be described but not given names. (Names are like points; propositions like arrows — they have sense.)  Only propositions have sense; only in the nexus of a proposition does  a name have meaning.

Finally, with regards to the problems about information, I would add that Alfred Korzybski (and later Marshall McLuhan) once wrote that “the map is not the territory.” The map is merely a picture of something that it represents. Increasing the amount of information may reduce the granularity of the picture, but it remains a picture. This means that accumulation greater and greater amounts of information can never completely replace or represent the infinite complexity of any real-lilfe situation — and this is an insight that Wittgenstein realized only in his later philosophical work.

Steve Bindeman

On Dec 22, 2016, at 7:37 AM, fis-request at listas.unizar.es wrote:

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Today's Topics:

  1. Re: What is information? and What is life? (Dai Griffiths)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2016 12:44:59 +0000
From: Dai Griffiths <dai.griffiths.1 at gmail.com>
To: fis at listas.unizar.es
Subject: Re: [Fis] What is information? and What is life?
Message-ID: <dbbfa511-b4e1-79b5-f800-bad1c231b65a at gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"; Format="flowed"

Information is not ?something out there? which ?exists? otherwise 

than as our construct.

I agree with this. And I wonder to what extent our problems in 
discussing information come from our desire to shoe-horn many different 
phenomena into the same construct. It would be possible to disaggregate 
the construct. It be possible to discuss the topics which we address on 
this list without using the word 'information'. We could discuss 
redundancy, variety, constraint, meaning, structural coupling, 
coordination, expectation, language, etc.

In what ways would our explanations be weakened?

In what ways might we gain in clarity?

If we were to go down this road, we would face the danger that our 
discussions might become (even more) remote from everyday human 
experience. But many scientific discussions are remote from everyday 
human experience.

Dai

On 20/12/16 08:26, Loet Leydesdorff wrote:

Dear colleagues,

A distribution contains uncertainty that can be measured in terms of 
bits of information.

Alternatively: the expected information content /H /of a probability 
distribution is .

/H/is further defined as probabilistic entropy using Gibb?s 
formulation of the entropy .

This definition of information is an operational definition. In my 
opinion, we do not need an essentialistic definition by answering the 
question of ?what is information?? As the discussion on this list 
demonstrates, one does not easily agree on an essential answer; one 
can answer the question ?how is information defined?? Information is 
not ?something out there? which ?exists? otherwise than as our construct.

Using essentialistic definitions, the discussion tends not to move 
forward. For example, Stuart Kauffman?s and Bob Logan?s (2007) 
definition of information ?as natural selection assembling the very 
constraints on the release of energy that then constitutes work and 
the propagation of organization.? I asked several times what this 
means and how one can measure this information. Hitherto, I only 
obtained the answer that colleagues who disagree with me will be 
cited. JAnother answer was that ?counting? may lead to populism. J

Best,

Loet

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Loet Leydesdorff

Professor, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)

loet at leydesdorff.net <mailto:loet at leydesdorff.net>; 
http://www.leydesdorff.net/
Associate Faculty, SPRU, <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/>University of 
Sussex;

Guest Professor Zhejiang Univ. <http://www.zju.edu.cn/english/>, 
Hangzhou; Visiting Professor, I

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