Dear Stan and Gordana
When you talk information here are you thinking of Shannon or Wiener information? Or some logical
measure of structure and organization? Or do you include meaning?
Luhmann says that a message is consisting of meaning, information and the form of expression.
It makes sense to me that information is the quantitative and structural aspect of meaning and
intention.
But I see no way of measuring meaning. Luhmann talks of a surplus of possibilities of choice and
action, which, I do not find sufficient for instance to describe the meaning of a religious og
philosophical message about the meaning of suffering and love.
Søren
-----Oprindelig meddelelse-----
Fra: fis-bounces@listas.unizar.es [mailto:fis-bounces@listas.unizar.es] P� vegne af Stanley
N. Salthe
Sendt: 18. februar 2006 23:51
Til: fis@listas.unizar.es
Emne: Re: Fw: [Fis] art and meaning
Gordana --
> Thank you Stan, that was precisely what I meant by my question.
>
> Exactly how to define informational content of things that can not be
>verbalized? (Maybe only because, as you say, our linguistics communities
>have not conquered those rare territories such as dreams or music or
arts.)
This includes as well poetry, which IS linguistic, but relies not so
much on denotation, but on numerous properties like rythm, aliteration,
rhyme, dissonance, assonance, and so on. As far as I can see, information
in language products refers only to denotation. I do suppose that changes
in rythm, the use of dissonance where one expects rhyme, and other breaks
in expectation might be treated as informational in the standard sense, but
this seems pretty weak.
Those spheres of personal experiences we may hope will be explored in the
future, so that at least we may learn how the brain processes those things.
>
> You said:
> Now, technically, I think information is just any constraint on our
>activity. So, do dreams, and those scents and music that have not been
>harnessed by society, constrain our actions? If not, are they
>informational? Some information is associated to meaning by semiosis.
>But if dreams, fragrances and music are not information, we know
>nevertheless that they are meaningful to us personally. So, can meaning
>exist aside from information?
>
> My feeling is that in dreams informational content of our brains gets
>re-structured, or re-connected in different ways. Dreams contain elements
>from real life memories, but they are differently related, distorted,
>intensified, etc. So I guess dreams have definitely informational content.
In that sense of breaking the expected, perhaps so. However, I am
particularly intrigued by these feelings that are entirely unique, never
being experienced in the waking world, and never repeated (and so only
barely remembered) in the dream world either. These must arise from unique
configurations of neuronal propagations. It has been noted that unique
configurations confront us all the time every day. Every situation is to
some degree different from any other, but, of course, we do not focus upon
this, rather on what is common between instances, and so, by way of
classifying, we feel we understand what is happening. And this approach is
fundamental to science. Here meaningfulness seems to associate with
commonality.
> One more interesting aspect of the problem is the approximate thinking.
>We have a feeling if something is OK or not. Very often experts have a
> feeling . Their expertise can be verbalized up to the point, but after
>that, there is a feeling what is just the right amount of
>something, the right measure, the right thing to do in certain situation.
>Those feelings also have informative content, as they definitely
>constrain our activity.
Yes, this -- intuition -- is very important in daily life. And,
indeed, it does constrain our actions. But I think that we cannot
necessarily assign conventional meanings to intuitions, and so this raises
the problem of what is 'meaning' in semiotics. As a pansemiotician, I
think that if an intuition constrains our action, then it must be
meaningful. I am sure those strange dream feelings, if I felt them in some
waking context, would definitely influence my action, and so they would
have to be classified as potentially having meaning. But then their
meaning might be assigned by way of which action they invited. But that
would completely lose the importance they appear to have experientially.
> In any event, I do have a feeling :-) that meaning and information are
>so tightly bound that anything having meaning must be possible to express
>in terms of information.
OK. But note the last example I just gave. Here a rich experience
might impell me to step to the right instead of to the left, and so may
save my life from a falling object. If we express its meaning in terms of
this important result, I think we would miss the greater part of its
richness, which, then would be meaningless!
STAN
>
> Best,
> Gordana
>
> Stanley N. Salthe wrote:
>
> Replying to Gordana --
>She said:
>
>
> It might be a pure feeling of sheer beauty or harmony (whatever it might
>be). I wonder is there any meaning in >that feeling of being one with
>music in the same flow, just dissolving in a moment? Not the externalist
>meaning >that you can ascribe to a music-loving listener in an instant
of
>exaltation, but the subjective meaning for me as an >individual. Is
there
>meaning in a feeling? May I say that music in that case is information
>that impacts my >physical body, my receptors, my brain, and changes its
>structure so that in the next moment in my life I will >experience
things
>differently?
>May I say that meaning of music for me as a subject is the result of
>the difference that made the difference in my physical structures,
somehow?
>
>
>
>This raises what has been for me an issue of some interest. I associate
>some kinds of meaning with emotion. Our culture invites only a certain
>limited range of emotions. We can get an idea of how small a range this is
>by paying attention to the emotional content of dreams -- actually more
>interesting that the images. Here we experience emotions that are never
>elicited in everyday life, and that are, indeed, indescribable and unique.
>They are as indescribable as the scents of many of the various essential
>oils taken from plants. Some of these associate with numinous feelings, as
>with encense (frankincense, olibanum) or Peru balsam, which have been
>smudged in (at least) churches and synagogues for centuries. But many (for
>us) float free of any particular association, as they have not been
>harnessed by our society. Are these 'untamed' fragrances -- and those
>dream emotions -- meaningless? This brings me to music. I now listen
>largely to Romantic keyboard music -- Schubert (the father of musical
>Romanticism), Chopin (The soul of Romantic music) and Schumann (the spirit
>of Romantic music). It seems clear to me that these artists have INVENTED
>certain emotions that literally did not exist prior to their discovery on
>the keyboard in the Nineteenth Century. Now, these emotions are also
>indescribable, but in this case it is clear that they can be (have been)
>shared by many persons in the experience of art. But, do we all agree as
>to the 'meanings' of these passages? We don't really know, do we? It
>seems likely that neurologists might be able to discover some general
>shared responses to them elicited in us during experiments, but would
these
>be 'describable' (translatable to language)?
> Now, technically, I think information is just any constraint on our
>activity. So, do dreams, and those scents and music that have not been
>harnessed by society, constrain our actions? If not, are they
>informational? Some information is associated to meaning by semiosis. But
>if dreams, fragrances and music are not information, we know nevertheless
>that they are meaningful to us personally. So, can meaning exist aside
>from information?
>STAN
>
>
>
>
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Received on Sun Feb 19 13:13:26 2006
