[Fis] Causation is transfer of information
Guy A Hoelzer
hoelzer at unr.edu
Wed Mar 29 01:43:51 CEST 2017
Greetings all,
It seems that the indigestion from competing definitions of ‘information’ is hard to resolve, and I agree with Terry and others that a broad definition is preferable. I also think it is not a problem to allow multiple definitions that can be operationally adopted in appropriate contexts. In some respects, apparently competing definitions are actually reinforcing. For example, I prefer to use ‘information’ to describe any difference (a distinction or contrast), and it is also true that a subset of all differences are ones that ‘make a difference’ to an observer. When we restrict ‘information’ to differences that make a difference it becomes inherently subjective. That is certainly not a problem if you are interested in subjectivity, but it would eliminate the rationality of studying objective ‘information’, which I think holds great promise for understanding dynamical systems. I don’t see any conflict between ‘information’ as negentropy and ‘information’ as a basis for decision making. On the other hand, semantics and semiotics involve the attachment of meaning to information, which strikes me as a separate and complementary idea. Therefore, I think it is important to sustain this distinction explicitly in what we write. Maybe there is a context in which ‘information’ and ‘meaning’ are so intertwined that they cannot be isolated, but I can’t think of one. I’m sure there are plenty of contexts in which the important thing is ‘meaning’, and where the (more general, IMHO) term ‘information’ is used instead. I think it is fair to say that you can have information without meaning, but you can’t have meaning without information. Can anybody think of a way in which it might be misleading if this distinction was generally accepted?
Regards,
Guy
On Mar 28, 2017, at 3:26 PM, Sungchul Ji <sji at pharmacy.rutgers.edu<mailto:sji at pharmacy.rutgers.edu>> wrote:
Hi Fisers,
I agree with Terry that "information" has three irreducible aspects --- amount, meaning, and value. These somehow may be related to another triadic relation called the ITR as depicted below, although I don't know the exact rule of mapping between the two triads. Perhaps, 'amount' = f, 'meaning' = g, and 'value' = h ? .
f g
Object ---------------> Sign --------------> Interpretant
| ^
| |
| |
| |
|_________________________________|
h
Figure 1. The Irreducible Triadic Relation (ITR) of seimosis (also called sign process or communication) first clearly articulated by Peirce to the best of my knowledge. Warning: Peirce often replaces Sign with Representamen and represents the whole triad, i.e., Figure 1 itself (although he did not use such a figure in his writings) as the Sign. Not distinguishing between these two very different uses of the same word "Sign" can lead to semiotic confusions. The three processes are defined as follows: f = sign production, g = sign interpretation, h = information flow (other ways of labeling the arrows are not excluded). Each process or arrow reads "determines", "leads", "is presupposed by", etc., and the three arrows constitute a commutative triangle of category theory, i.e., f x g = h, meaning f followed by g ledes to the same result as h.
I started using the so-called ITR template, Figure 1, about 5 years ago, and the main reason I am bringing it up here is to ask your critical opinion on my suggestion published in 2012 (Molecular Theory of the Living Cell: Concepts, Molecular Mechanisms, and Biomedical Applications, Springer New York, p ~100 ?) that there are two kinds of causality -- (i) the energy-dependent causality (identified with Processes f and g in Figure 1) and (ii) the information (and hence code)-dependent causality (identified with Process h). For convenience, I coined the term 'codality' to refer to the latter to contrast it with the traditional term causality.
I wonder if we can view John's idea of the relation between 'information' and 'cause' as being an alternative way of expressing the same ideas as the "energy-dependent causality" or the "codality" defined in Figure 1.
All the best.
Sung
________________________________
From: Fis <fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es<mailto:fis-bounces at listas.unizar.es>> on behalf of Terrence W. DEACON <deacon at berkeley.edu<mailto:deacon at berkeley.edu>>
Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2017 4:23:14 PM
To: John Collier
Cc: fis
Subject: Re: [Fis] Causation is transfer of information
Corrected typos (in case the intrinsic redundancy didn't compensate for these minor corruptions of the text):
information-beqaring medium = information-bearing medium
appliction = application
conceptiont = conception
On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 10:14 PM, Terrence W. DEACON <deacon at berkeley.edu<mailto:deacon at berkeley.edu>> wrote:
Dear FIS colleagues,
I agree with John Collier that we should not assume to restrict the concept of information to only one subset of its potential applications. But to work with this breadth of usage we need to recognize that 'information' can refer to intrinsic statistical properties of a physical medium, extrinsic referential properties of that medium (i.e. content), and the significance or use value of that content, depending on the context. A problem arises when we demand that only one of these uses should be given legitimacy. As I have repeatedly suggested on this listserve, it will be a source of constant useless argument to make the assertion that someone is wrong in their understanding of information if they use it in one of these non-formal ways. But to fail to mark which conception of information is being considered, or worse, to use equivocal conceptions of the term in the same argument, will ultimately undermine our efforts to understand one another and develop a complete general theory of information.
This nominalization of 'inform' has been in use for hundreds of years in legal and literary contexts, in all of these variant forms. But there has been a slowly increasing tendency to use it to refer to the information-beqaring medium itself, in substantial terms. This reached its greatest extreme with the restricted technical usage formalized by Claude Shannon. Remember, however, that this was only introduced a little over a half century ago. When one of his mentors (Hartley) initially introduced a logarithmic measure of signal capacity he called it 'intelligence' — as in the gathering of intelligence by a spy organization. So had Shannon chose to stay with that usage the confusions could have been worse (think about how confusing it would have been to talk about the entropy of intelligence). Even so, Shannon himself was to later caution against assuming that his use of the term 'information' applied beyond its technical domain.
So despite the precision and breadth of appliction that was achieved by setting aside the extrinsic relational features that characterize the more colloquial uses of the term, this does not mean that these other uses are in some sense non-scientific. And I am not alone in the belief that these non-intrinsic properties can also (eventually) be strictly formalized and thereby contribute insights to such technical fields as molecular biology and cognitive neuroscience.
As a result I think that it is legitimate to argue that information (in the referential sense) is only in use among living forms, that an alert signal sent by the computer in an automobile engine is information (in both senses, depending on whether we include a human interpreter in the loop), or that information (in the intrinsic sense of a medium property) is lost within a black hole or that it can be used to provide a more precise conceptiont of physical cause (as in Collier's sense). These different uses aren't unrelated to each other. They are just asymmetrically dependent on one another, such that medium-intrinsic properties can be investigated without considering referential properties, but not vice versa.
It's time we move beyond terminological chauvenism so that we can further our dialogue about the entire domain in which the concept of information is important. To succeed at this, we only need to be clear about which conception of information we are using in any given context.
— Terry
On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 8:32 PM, John Collier <Collierj at ukzn.ac.za<mailto:Collierj at ukzn.ac.za>> wrote:
I wrote a paper some time ago arguing that causal processes are the transfer of information. Therefore I think that physical processes can and do convey information. Cause can be dispensed with.
* There is a copy at Causation is the Transfer of Information<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fweb.ncf.ca%2Fcollier%2Fpapers%2Fcausinf.pdf&data=01%7C01%7Choelzer%40unr.edu%7C2cfdcd34699449bb000c08d47629a4c0%7C523b4bfc0ebd4c03b2b96f6a17fd31d8%7C1&sdata=y5LYga7SnUhkgN8ZBtkSTW6%2F0PqRFrwvXXO%2FvMYdl%2Fc%3D&reserved=0> In Howard Sankey (ed) Causation, Natural Laws and Explanation (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999)
Information is a very powerful concept. It is a shame to restrict oneself to only a part of its possible applications.
John Collier
Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Associate
Philosophy, University of KwaZulu-Natal
http://web.ncf.ca/collier<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fweb.ncf.ca%2Fcollier&data=01%7C01%7Choelzer%40unr.edu%7C2cfdcd34699449bb000c08d47629a4c0%7C523b4bfc0ebd4c03b2b96f6a17fd31d8%7C1&sdata=%2Btv6lCO6ofLs245tO0VmMZlu%2Fw2GKrNEzbE8jZ%2F6DyA%3D&reserved=0>
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Professor Terrence W. Deacon
University of California, Berkeley
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Professor Terrence W. Deacon
University of California, Berkeley
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