Re: info & physics

(from: capurro@hdm-stuttgart.de)

Gyuri

your write: "what WE may gain from the
object". Who/what is this mysterious
WE that makes so much trouble to
objectivist science? of course the subject...
The problem is that objectivist science
confuses this necessary condition of
objectivity (as Kant showed...) with
some kind of 'anything goes'... As war
as I understood, quantum physics has
showed the 'part' of the 'subject' in the
constitution of the (physical) 'object'.
Trying to eliminate notions such as
meaning, surprise, intention, expectations...,
as John proposed, can only lead to a
new kind of 'newphysicalism' that is no
more ontologically questionable than
'newpansychism'. Information has indeed
samething to do with selection. At the
semantic level we speak of selection
(between different meanings of a
linguistic utterance) AS interpretation.
This is indeed 'objective' possible because
language allows (us) this kind of 'play'.
Instead of loosing 'objectivity' we gain a
wider (!) range of possibilities. Of course,
when a cell receives a message brought by,
say, a DNA-messenger, this is not of the
same kind of selection we call interpretation
in the case of (human) language. But we may
call this 'posting' a message an 'information
for the cell' (that may 'consider' it to be
adressed to it or not, according to the structure
or 'address' of the message).
kind regards
Rafael

>Dear John,

Thanks for your clarification.
I incline to reject subjective interpretations of information.
Accepting your position, I could reinterpret the following two notions:
Information capacity could be associated with potential information, i.e.,
the manifold of all possible information, what we may gain from an object.
Information can - in this sense - be reduced to the actual information,
what we de facto have gained from that object.

Gyuri

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Received on Tue May 14 13:34:27 2002