Dear John,
> Michael, Rafael A coda on the Popper debate.
Michael commented "I'm merely arguing from experience." Can we also argue
'towards' experience?
>
Yes, we can, but we can also argue about what we mean when we argue "form"
or "towards" or... experience. In this case our "faith" positions (and
everybody has a "faith" as Ortega y Gasset clearly saw when he made the
difference between "ideas" and "beliefs" (ideas/creeencias): "ideas" being
the necessary expression of a situation in which our "beliefs" are coming
into a crisis (and they are always in a potential trouble...). This is the
case of "paradigm shifts" (Kuhn) and of "no absolute knowledge" (or
tentative knowledge) in the case of Popper. When we talk about our beliefs
we do not do science but also not metaphysics (i.e. we do not make
declarations of faith even not on the theses of "tentative knowledge" or
whatever, but we are moving in an open field we use to call philosophy in
our Western tradition...
> 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
>
I think that the "two cultures" debate is a naive simplification of the
complexity of human experience(s) and language(s), on the basis of the no
less complex biological system that "supports" such complexity.
> 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?
>
If we give up the "two ways" then we don't need a "third" one. Scientific
(and philosophic) reductionisms are the heritage of religious dogmatism...
> 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')?
>
Yes, I agree with you that the notion of experience is a historical one in a
double sense of the word: it is historical as it is a product of natural AND
social evolution. In this sense, also religious experience as well as art
and science belong to the richness of human experience (as stated also by
Einstein and many other natural sicentists, as you know
> 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.
>
yes, I think that the connection between experience and expectation (if we
take this concept in a broad sense including also structures of material
processes as well as biological processes, and, of course, social processes)
is a key issue. I use Luhmann's difference between "sense offer" and
"information" in order to distinguish different kinds of selections that
take place in the process(es) of communication. A "meaning offer" (or "sense
offer") is given through the presentation of a message, out of which the
receiver selects one possible meaning, this last process being called
information. The integration of this meaning within the background of the
system is called "understanding" and the unity of these three moments is
called "communication". What I try to stress is the difference between
"message" and "information". While we have (in the social sciences and
humanities) many theories concerning the selection of meaning out of a given
(!) text, which we call "hermeneutics" (or theory of interpretation) and
although we also have "media theories" concerning the (material) support for
messages, we do not have a well developped theory of messages. Calling back
the Greek word for message which is "angelia" I created a neologism (similar
to logos/logic), and I call this message theory "angeletics" which is not a
"theory of angels" (no less than chemistry is identical to alchemy...)
> 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
>
in some way these authors point to the fact that it is not possible to
determine which will be the choice/interpretation of the "receiver" out of a
given message. But also the sender of a message has to make herself a
choice. The "mystery" is (at the social level) why we "believe" (!!) in this
message less than in that other one. Which are the conditions of possibility
for the credibility of messages (to put it in a Kantian terminology). For
instance for empirical science this could be a certain concept of
experience...
> "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)
>
yes, this is a "credo"... and a "message" at the same time...
> 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.
>
in some way the concept of message is what unifies in some way the different
experiences and their communication. Probably we are too "modern" not to
perceive that we are messagers (well this could be a "re-definition of what
it means to be human..., but not a very clear and definite one) because we
are capable of getting a special kind of message concerning our own
being/existence. This is called in the classical philosophical terminology:
selfawareness, where "self" is not the "ego" but the vey situation of
being-in-the-world...
> 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.
>
maybe because they were aware of this unique capacity not only to be a
messanger but also to be aware of it...
> 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.
>
there is indeed, I believe, a connection beteen information and
understanding in the sense of selecting out of a message some possibilities
of meaning and "integrating" them into our background knowledge (and
selecting againg from this, sending a new message, concerning what we mean
out of the message and so on...)
> 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?
>
I think that we (in the social sciences) not only need a media theory and an
interpretation theory but also a theory of messages (which is empirical,
historical and... philosophical)
> 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?
>
and with a philosophy of messages, which is different from philosophy as a
message...
> 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.
>
which presupposes, again, the recursivity of messages (not only of
media/language and information/selection)
> At a forthcoming session we could revisit some of these 'philosophical'
issues as playfully as Socrates once toyed with the notion of 'techne'.
>
a different 'affair' I believe, since techne is the knowledge of how to
produce (material) things, this process itself being called "poiesis".
Aristotle distinguished techne/poiesis from phronesis/praxis, the last ones
concerning not the level of material production but of human action (praxis)
and its specic knowledge (phronesis/prudentia: the capacity of choosing
means with regards to a good (!) end)
sorry for the long comments and also for my English
Rafael
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Received on Thu Jul 8 19:27:16 2004
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