[Fis] Fis Digest, Vol 32, Issue 13

[Bruno Marchal]

Hi Malcolm Dean and colleagues,


On 12 Nov 2016, at 22:11, Malcolm Dean wrote:

> To an animal about to be attacked and eaten, the meaning of an  
> approaching predator is quite clear.
>
> Obviously, meaning is produced by, within, and among Observers, and  
> not by language.
>
> Meaning may be produced *through* language, not *in* language, as a  
> medium of interaction (aka communication).
>
> I wish scientific specialists had more awareness of the effects of  
> their specialization.

I wish people knew a bit more about mathematical logic, which is  
partially the study of the semantics (aka meaning) of formal  
expression. Meaning refer to a notion of reality, "modeled" by models  
(a bad term as physicists used "model" for what logicians call a  
theory). A model is a mathematical structure making a sentence  
(proposition) true or false, and this, in my opinion applies to  
meaning in the natural language, where usually some notion of reality  
is involved:  the proposition "there is two beers in the fridge" is  
judged meaningful because we believe in a reality with fridge  
containing, or not, beers.

The term "information", like the term "infinite" admits many technical  
(and incompatible) definitions, and also some intuitive every day  
meaning. In the case of information, many people are unclear if they  
talk about something third person describable, like with Shannon, or  
quantum information, or if they talk about the first person  
interpretation of the information, which requires a subject (at least  
a universal machine or number) and a reality (supposed to support the  
subject and what he is talking about). Despite logicians work on  
rather simple systems, most results on models and meaning are  
negative. No machine can build a complete unequivocal study of its own  
semantics. It has to be elusive, and that elusiveness plays an  
important role in the unavoidable evolution of machines and collective  
of machines.

Bruno Marchal




>
> Malcolm Dean
>
>
> Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2016 20:29:21 +0100
> From: "Loet Leydesdorff" <loet at leydesdorff.net>
> To: "'Alex Hankey'" <alexhankey at gmail.com>, "'FIS Webinar'"
>         <Fis at listas.unizar.es>
> Subject: Re: [Fis] Is quantum information the basis of spacetime?
>
> Dear Alex and colleagues,
>
> Thank you for the reference; but my argument was about meaning.  
> Meaning can only be considered as constructed in language. Other  
> uses of the word are metaphorical. For example, the citation to  
> Maturana.
>
> Information, in my opinion, can be defined content-free (a la  
> Shannon, etc.) and then be provided with meaning in (scholarly)  
> discourses. I consider physics as one among other scholarly  
> discourses. Specific about physics is perhaps the universalistic  
> character of the knowledge claims. For example: "Frieden's points  
> apply to quantum physics as well as classical physics." So what?  
> This seems to me a debate within physics without much relevance for  
> non-physicists (e.g., economists or linguists).
>
> Loet Leydesdorff
> Professor, University of Amsterdam
> Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR)
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http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



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