Re: info & physics

At 12:31 AM 14/05/02, Gyuri wrote:
>Dear John,
>
>Thanks for your clarification.
>I incline to reject subjective interpretations of information.

I would also reject subjective notions of information. However, a subject
relative interpretation is not necessarily subjective. In general I would
say that the fact that someone judges something to be informative to them
is not a reliable indicator, however the information conveyed to a subject
will typically be subject dependent. I suppose that we agree about this.

>Accepting your position, I could reinterpret the following two notions:
>Information capacity could be associated with potential information, i.e.,
>the manifold of all possible information, what we may gain from an object.
>Information can - in this sense - be reduced to the actual information,
>what we de facto have gained from that object.

I'm happy with this way of putting it. I am inclined to say that the
potential information is a type of information (since information theory
applies to it, etc.), but that it is manifested only in interactions. Most
of the discussion on the list recently has been about what sort of
interactions count towards the manifestation of information. In the
simplest case, any interaction could count. This is pretty close to the "it
from bit" view. Any stronger restrictions require some sort of motivation,
as well as a demonstration that the motivation is actually satisfied by the
proposed restriction and not by other things outside the distinction, e.g.,
to biological systems, but not organic chemistry, or to intentional
perception of light, but not to mere photosensitivity. The problem is not
just to have principles about what is information, but to show that they
apply unambiguously and effectively. A purely physical version of
information at least has the virtue that it has an unambiguous
interpretation in terms of negentropy. I think that anyone who wants to
move the boundary inwards towards function and or intentionality should be
able to come up with a similarly rigorous criterion, and show that their
boundary satisfies that criterion.

John

----------
Dr John Collier john.collier@kla.univie.ac.at
Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research
Adolf Lorenz Gasse 2 +432-242-32390-19
A-3422 Altenberg Austria Fax: 242-32390-4
http://www.kli.ac.at/research.html?personal/collier
Received on Thu May 23 11:31:52 2002