Data and meaning

From: John Holgate <[email protected]>
Date: Fri 20 Sep 2002 - 06:52:14 CEST

Dear Luciano,

Your two recent review articles on the Philosophy of Information are both timely and thought-proving.
[http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~floridi/pdf/wipi.pdf and http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/~floridi/pdf/oppi.pdf]

For me one of the key issues raised was: How does data (or information) acquire meaning?

I was particularly interested in P5 Semantics and your Evans quote:

'Information is conveyed by perception, and retained by memory, though also transmitted by means of language. One needs to concentrate on that concept before one approaches that of knowledge in the proper sense. Information is acquired for example, without one's necessarily having a grasp of the proposition which embodies it; the flow of information operates at a much more basic level than the acquisition and transmission of knowledge.'

If we focus on the information-language-perception triad (rather than on say data-information-knowledge or
matter-energy-information) how do we arrive at an epistemology of information which is knowledge-independent (or
matter-independent) without running the gauntlet of panpsychism? In short how is information grounded
in language consciousness and experience?

What is it like for a being or 'thing' to have an observable informational experience?

This is where PI meets Philosophy of Language. The separation of meaning from
grammar (Carnap, Chomsky et al) and from communication theory (Shannon and Weaver) has pretty well thrown out
the baby information with the bathwater of semantics. Hopefully PI will revisit some of these abandoned agendas.

Connectionists like David Chalmers have conveniently created the notion of 'information spaces and states' -

'Physics requires information states but cares only about their relations, not their intrinsic nature;
phenomenology requires information states but cares only about their intrinsic nature..
Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside.'
(The Conscious Mind p. 305).

I think this might explain some of the misunderstandings found in our current forum but is not very
far removed from the Standard Definition of Information.

What is Evans' 'much more basic level'? Do you have an idea?

What evidence is there for a 'flow of information'? Does it move from point A to point B (as in the
Shannon-Dretske model) as a transmittable digital commodity? Or is it some omnipresent force
which informs the universe (as in Wheeler's 'It from Bit' ). Is the 'flow of information' quantitatively directional
(like the putative 'arrow of time') or qualitative (like language fluency)?

I look forward to your comments.

Regards

John H

Received on Fri Sep 20 06:52:37 2002

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