(no subject)

I am having some trouble posting while travelling. Here is another try:

Soren said:

>Now this discussion goes deeper into the relation between meaning and information,

and Andrei and I seem to be more on the same track, that information - in

Shannon's sense - can me seen as the quantitative aspect of meaningful messages.

But does it make it less meaningful talking about information without meaning

in the physio-chemical world as one aspects of the description of the organization

processes of life? Such a use seems to be the general way to use it also for

the Wienerians. But they then forget to talk about meaning.

The dictionary meaning of "information" is ambiguous between meaningful information

(interpreted) and mere data. Data does suggest a user, or at least a receiver.

Shannon's information concerns channel capacities (an average information per

message). His brilliance is in showing that there is a best coding for each

message to achieve maximum channel capacity. I don't really think it has much

to do with meaning, though his work does imply the existence of "messages",

but it seem to me that anything that has the right mathematical properties fits

his theory equally well.

In any case, there are many interpretations of what Shannon was doing around,

and of his place in lareger view of information theory as well. Each of these

views, inasmuch as they are coherent, has some place in the canon of information

theory no matter what Shannon's real views were (I understand that he kept them

pretty close tom his chest).

>I feel more and more that one of our purpose could be to classify all the different

approaches, definitions of information and their consequenses to make the positions

more clear. Part of that could be a working towards the minimum requirement

for defining a concept of information. Both Wiener and Shannon reflected too

little on the metaphysical backgrounds for their conceptualizations and that

has created a lot of misunderstandings about the subject area of different conceptions

of information.

I agree with this completely. On the ontology, I think Donald Mackay had the

most minimal definition: information is a distinction that makes a difference.

Everything else is more elaborate. For example, to add the user aspect, we get

. makes a difference to the state of some receiver. For meaning, we need to

make the receiver a mind, and so on.

John
John Collier email: ag659@ncf.ca
Box 209, Carp, ON K0A 1L0
http://www.newcastle.edu.au/department/pl/Staff/JohnCollier
Received on Thu Dec 20 07:08:33 2001