RE: [Fis] Philosophers describe science - a side comment on experience

Michael, Rafael

A coda on the Popper debate.

Michael commented "I'm merely arguing from experience."

Can we also argue 'towards' experience?

It seems one possible way out of the 'two cultures' impasse is to
ground our notion of 'information' on a vastly expanded conception of
'experience' as 'Erlebnis' 'Erfahrung' and 'Experimentation' -
embracing aesthetic or religious experience, methodical 'trial and error',
our daily lived experiences as well as the adaptive incurrences of
molecular life

What if we take a 'third way' and avoid the route which leads either to
reductionist scientism ('the scientific rage to make everything objective
and verifiable' )
or to the speculative philosophising of our latter-day culture gurus?

What if we consider the Aristotle-Bacon-Hegel-Peirce-Dilthey-Merleau
Ponty-Gadamer line grounded on an historical notion of 'experience' of
which 'information' is the essential dynamic? Reactive and proactive
abduction rather than syllogistic induction/deduction becomes the source
from which both art and science spring (what Steven Ericsson has called
'the primitives of experience')?

In this scenario 'information' can be broadly defined as 'any experience
which runs counter to an expectation' and provides the Ariadne thread
linking apparently disparate concepts of 'information' discussed in this
forum over the years e.g.

Shannon entropy/surprise; Wiener's negentropy;

Gregory Bateson 'a difference that makes a difference' and his
Shakespearean 'nothing comes of nothing - speak again';

Gadamer 'negative dialectic of experience';

Keats' negative capability' ('when a man is capable of being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact
and reason')

Peirce: abductive hypothesis framing;

Varela/Maturana: autopoiesis

"Experience is, in a certain sense, irreducible. There is the need to put
human life back into science " Evan Thompson

Cybersemiotics: "My view is that certainly life and mind (first person
experiences)
emerge within the evolution of the universe." (Soren Brier)

To predicate 'information' on experience rather than on consciousness,
cognition or belief (philosophy), self (psychology/sociology), soul
(theology) matter/space/time (physics) or the cell (biochemistry) breaks
down the barrier between science and art
- 'information' is the catalyst of experience.

Ted Goranson commented recently

<I believe nearly all our precedents - our giant minds of the past - fail
us on this <score because they entangle the notions of knowledge and
insight with information.

This statement should really give us pause.

If there is no necessary connection between 'information' and cognition
(and the data/information/knowledge hierarchical pyramid is in fact a
telescoping Sierpinski Gasket) then there are interesting epistemological
corollaries for the 'information society' and the computing industry.

The corollaries of such a paradigm shift for contemporary 'Information Science'
(which is at best a tautology and at worst an oxymoron) are:

1. Shannon/Weaver's Mathematical Theory of Communication fired a shot for
the science of stochastics but may have missed the true nature of 'information'
or even 'communication'. Attempts over the last thirty years by philosophers
(Dretske et al)and reductionist science to graft Shannonist information
onto a theory of cognition ('semantic information') or a materialist
teleology (such as Stonier's infons , Wheeler's IT from BIT, Bohm's
implicate order or Floridi's infosphere) have not been conclusive. What,
for example, is 'natural information'? Can I touch it?
Is it like a 'natural number' or is it an actual physical entity?

2. Any Philosophy of Information is entangled with a Philosophy of Language (in
a broader sense than the study of signs or signals, as Gadamer has argued)
- Pedro,
maybe that debate should be a whole future FIS session in itself?

Both language and 'information' share the property of recursivity - with
grammar
and relevance as their respective boundary conditions. Without their
'noise' scientific communication loses its imagination, its grand analogies
and hypotheses by which it progresses. Scientific method proceeds not by
testing and replication alone but by abduction, by imaginative hypothesis
framing - not just getting the answer to a problem but getting at the real
problem. This is where the experiential dynamic of 'information' comes into
play.

At a forthcoming session we could revisit some of these 'philosophical'
issues as playfully as Socrates once toyed with the notion of 'techne'.

Recursive quote of the day: "Experience teaches us that all generalisations
are dangerous - even this one."

John H

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Received on Thu Jul 8 11:35:48 2004