RE: Great Expecations

From: John Holgate <[email protected]>
Date: Thu 19 Dec 2002 - 07:27:37 CET

Karl,
 
You commented:
 
<A context I understand and have understood long ago does not have any thrill any more. The absence of thrill is more marked if I have had great expectations. But the two questions have nothing in common: how much am I no more surprised (to which extent am I blas�) and how practical is that which does no more surprise me. I may very well know the function of a compass and be no more surprised that it turns always towards North, and still I may find it extremely practical.>

 
You raise a very interesting point here by taking us back to fascination, expectation, surprise -
in short the abductive quizzicality of the organism discussed by John C and others earlier this year.
 
The informational is predicated not just on self-organisation (as Wolfgang has well articulated)
but on self-organised criticality. News is critical noise. If informational experience is a predicate of
'thrill' rather than cognition of contextualised facts then informational activity and context-bound
knowledge (like Carnap's separation of language from semantics) may have 'nothing in common'.
Maybe it is only when we throw knowledge and reason overboard that we can we have a truly intimate
encounter with information...

The informational quality of an utterance or event may depend (like love and passion) not on its
intrinsic truth or falsehood but on its degree of fit with our expectations - this is in contrast to
Luciano Florido's alethic rationality.
 
<So it shouldn't come as much of a surprise were we to discover that a successful formalization of information be almost useless from a practical point of view, yet equally profound from the standpoint of setting the foundations for a general theory of modelling relations. >
 
Isn't that the history of scientific discovery in a nutshell from Archimedes' bath to Newton's putative apple
and Rutherford's crooked stick?
 
<Let me propose for the New Year that we achieve ourselves a great experience of dis-illusionment.

Ein Gluckliches (oder vielmehr Enttauschendes) Neujahr!
 
John H
 
 

 
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Karl Javorszky [mailto:javorszky@eunet.at]
Sent: Wednesday, 18 December 2002 20:30[Jason Yeo] era
To: Multiple recipients of list FIS
Subject: Re: OPENING SESSION

(Below a mess. from Javorszky. There have been bugs in the list; I am trying to reintroduce the rejected messages --Pedro)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear colleagues,

Ted's overall comments have provoked me the following reflection:

We seem to be working collectively on a puzzle, namely what is information? We experience it as a specific carrier of tension. In general, when we are caught into a communication process, the tension generated by any news is solved as we understand that what has been in a deviation to our expectation. But what we are now trying to understand is precisely the nature of what we experience as 'news'.

There is a shift in perception as one experiences the lack of excitement while understanding something. A connex I understand and have understood long ago does not have any thrill any more. The absence of thrill is more marked if I have had great expectations. But the two questions have nothing in common: how much am I no more surprised (to which extent am I blas�) and how practical is that which does no more surprise me. I may very well know the function of a compass and be no more surprised that it turns always towards North, and still I may find it extremely practical.

The same holds true about a rational access to Information and Life in general. Once I have figured out how the two aspects are interlocked, then two things happen: a) the fascinating puzzle is neither a puzzle any more nor fascinating any more; b) I can use this insight for a lot of practical purposes.

So it shouldn't come as much of a surprise were we to discover that a successful formalization of information be almost useless from a practical point of view, yet equally profound from the standpoint of setting the foundations for a general theory of modelling relations.
  
I would be very happy if FIS discussions could contribute to grasp in a rational way our concepts about systems that change in time and show a nice interaction between cross-sectional and longitudinal ways of containing information. Let me propose for the New Year that we achieve ourselves a great experience of dis-illusionment.

best regards

Karl
 

Received on Thu Dec 19 07:27:18 2002

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