currently averaging over 30,000 new confirmed cases/day — 180 Proof

Jfc.

Yes. Information is to be distinguished from noise, which can be understood as infidelity, or better, randomness (=equiprobability). This is why it's a question of probabilities, which is why, as I said in my first post here, information is deviation from equiprobability: one can receive any message, but successful communication is a matter of receiving just this one, and not any other (it is not equally probable that you send, and I receive, any message whatsoever). It's a quantitative, syntactical matter through and through - no qualitative, semantic, or intensional element whatsoever.

I guess communication is the transmission of information from one point to another. As Shannon wrote - the next sentence after the one I quoted - the problem of communication "is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point... The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design".

What is transmitted is information insofar as it is univocal from one end to the other: that it is the same message that gets from A to B, regardless if that message is total junk.

More on the terribleness of the American bailouts and the shape of the economy to come. By Mark Blyth, who is an economic GOAT.

What you wrote is beneath serious engagement - the same non-engagement you gave to the subject you're writing on.

To begin with, I must confess my poor understanding of his concept of language games and his belief that meaning is use is still unclear to me. — TheMadFool

Hey you said it buddy. Everything else you wrote is simply this, delaborated.

Nicely illustrating the fact that the boundary between ‘information’ and ‘meaning’ is a rather porous one. — Wayfarer

I don't know why you bother with philosophy or science when you just make stuff up like this.

No by all means, talk about information without talking about information, but maybe just call it 'Wayfarer's understanding of information for which the technical concept is apparently entirely irrelevant' or something.

The engineering of information transfer is irrelevant to the question of the place that ‘information’ now occupies in speculative philosophy and biology. — Wayfarer

So you want to employ information without reference to any of its specificity? Just a rhetorical crutch? Par for Wayfarer course.

Please kindly read and educate yourself on Wittgenstein before offering these half-baked made-up critiques, thanks.

Ha, good catch!

But one can be mistaken about the meaning of a word: this speaks to someone's lack of knowledge - it is a comment on the person using the word, not the institution of meaning.

Moreover, nothing is stopping you from employing 'dog' to mean 'block of ice with a straw': but you'd better be consistent about it, and you'd better be clear that this use has nothing to do with what anyone else refers to as 'dog'.

"Correct" and "incorrect" are "language-game relative": 'inside' a language-game, one can use or not use a word correctly: but those terms lose applicability once you start comparing across different language-games. The rules of chess don't apply to checkers - but this doesn't mean that one can move one's King in any which way. Neither does it mean that checkers is 'wrong' in any sense.

Yes, and? What does that have to do with Wittgenstein?

they're both true in the particular language game they're a part of. — TheMadFool

No, this has nothing to do with truth.

Forget 'correct' meaning. There is meaning, or there isn't meaning (something is meaningful, or meaningless), that's it.

Me murdering someone also has a built-in element of success or failure. It's quite the fun game.

As does me cooking fried rice of course. Delicious game.

One possible source of confusion among posts here is the conflation of information with meaning. The two are not the same. Shannon was quite clear the information is an entirely syntactical issue, and has nothing to do with semantics:

"The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages" (my emphasis).

Information can be entirely meaningless, utterly devoid of significance, sheer gibberish - it would nonetheless be information. The OP is no doubt trying to milk semantics from information. But it's a mostly dead end.

Wittgenstein's core assumption - that all uses of a word are correct - is false. — TheMadFool

This is not a 'core assumption of Wittgenstein', which you would know if you actually had even a passing familiarity of the view you are trying to 'critique'.

It's one of the reasons Witty qualifies use as use in a language game, and not just use as such - one of the unfortunate elements which is lost when people shorten the quote to "meaning is use", which in turn leads to completely nonsense threads like the OP.

It's a fair point. There is indeed a difference between Biden and Trump. Trump is a piece of shit and everyone knows it, and Biden is a piece of shit but he's managed to fool some people into thinking he isn't. The latter being more dangerous, really.

It's amazing what pieces of shit people will turn into when defending their favourite rapists.

Does "information" at all solve anything related to the hard question of consciousness? — schopenhauer1

Not in any straightforward way. There have been efforts to use information theory in order to shore up a theory of consciousness that accounts for the hard problem ("integrated information theory") but no one seems to understand what its authors are on about.

On review, I ought to have said that this:



Has the least information of all. :up:

“Pinning” a clothed woman to a wall and managing to “penetrate her” with your fingers…EVEN WITH THE WOMAN’S TOTAL COOPERATION…is one hell of a feat...goddam near impossible — Frank Apisa

Given it a go, have you?

What is a person voting for if they back Biden on Election Day 2020?

The humiliation of courageous women like Anita Hill who confronted her abuser. You vote for the architects of endless war. You vote for the apartheid state in Israel. Biden supports those things. With Biden you are voting for wholesale surveillance by the government, including the abolition of due process and habeas corpus. You vote for austerity programs. You vote for the destruction of welfare. That was Biden. You vote for cuts to Social Security, which he has repeatedly called for cutting, along with Medicaid. You vote for NAFTA, you vote for "free trade" deals. If you vote for Biden, you are voting for a real decline in wages and the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs.

With Biden you are also voting for the assault on public education and the transfer of federal funds to Christian "charter schools." With Biden you are voting for more than a doubling of the prison population. With Biden you are voting for the militarized police and against the Green New Deal. You are also voting to limit a woman's right to abortion and reproductive rights. You are voting for a segregated public school system. With Biden you are voting for punitive levels of student debt and the inability of people to free themselves of that debt through bankruptcy. A vote for Biden is a vote for deregulating banking and finance. Biden also supports for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical corporations.

A vote for Biden is also a vote against the possibility of universal health care. You vote for Biden and you are supporting huge, wasteful and bloated defense budgets. Biden also supports unlimited oligarchic and corporate money to buy the elections.

That's what you're voting for. A vote for Joe Biden is a vote for more of the same. The ruling elites would prefer Joe Biden, just like they preferred Hillary Clinton.

:flower:

. A disordered system contains more information than an ordered one. — unenlightened

Yep. In the below, the second, asymmetric ('disordered') organization of dots contains much more information than the first ('ordered') arrangement of dots.



While on the other hand this:



Contains the least information of all (hence commonly known as white noise!)

(One of the reasons why 'order' and 'disorder' can be misleading).

It would of course be stupid to say that deviation from equiprobability 'is' matter. That wouldn't make grammatical sense. But to try and squeeze blood from an ungrammatical stone to say 'ha, so materialism can't be true' is as stupid as saying that because we haven't found any flying pigs, the very idea of flying pigs cannot be made sense of. As usual, all religious and spiritual implications are grammar mistakes.

To be even fairer, scratch "give", too. Admittedly, how (if) relation-words like verbs refer is where things get tricky, and mixed up in how (if) sentences refer, or correspond or picture or what have you. — bongo fury

None of those words - the ones you pointed out - have referents either though.

Shamaning incoming!

I feel like someone should make a Wittypedia.

EDIT: Although of course it exists as an encyclopedia of Witticisms and not Wittgensteinsms :(

Nah it's all bloody chaos. Although no doubt some shaman will mythologize that too.

But it's OK because this rapist is OUR rapist.

Glad to be in agreement :smile:

Frank was reduced to babbling insults and this guy reduced to, well, the same.

It's like people who support Biden are totally incapable of coherent argumentation.

Which makes sense. There's no there there.

has changed the DNC — Xtrix

Yes I can see how the DNC changed mightily by literally nominating the next in line from the Obama administration. The discontinuity is jarring! Change galore.

God they must love people like you.

Wonderful. It worked well last time, didn't it? — Xtrix

Yes, much like how the mobilization of hunderds and thousands of people worked so well to gain Bernie the nomination hey? This is what you don't get: the game is rigged, and the DNC don't give a shit about your activism, and never have and never will, because you'll vote for them anyway. You're a sucker and everyone but you knows it.

We're talking about actually voting, not rolling over to the DNC. — Xtrix

Ah yes, not rolling over to the DNC by ... doing exactly what the DNC wants. I suppose this is much like how voting is not a matter of accountability. Did you know the color black is actually the color white? Nah, you're probably too dense to acknowledge this simple fact.

You offer literal contradictions and expect to be taken seriously. What a joke.

Information is ... deviation from equiprobability (noise). In that sense it can never really be a 'simple', insofar as it is premised on that-which-is-or-is-not-equiprobable (leaving aside the thorny question of how to individuate a 'that-which'...). It is however, substrate-neutral, in the sense that both DNA and electrical pulses (and many other things beside) can both play the role of the physical carrier of information. It's hard to say in what sense information might be considered 'fundamental' - everything turns on what one might mean by 'fundamental'.

Perhaps one generous way of looking at it is that all information attests to certain asymmetries (physical or otherwise), and that asymmetries are the basis of all generativity; e.g. if you had equal amounts of matter and anti-matter at the birth of the universe, it would have all fizzled out: you need an asymmetry, an imbalance, to start the process of cosmogony, otherwise it all cancels each other out and you get no universe. That asymmetry can be understood in informational terms, and is generalizable across all sorts of domains, not just cosmogony. Is that 'fundamental' enough? Depends what you want out of fundamentality I guess.

Edit: I suppose one could accede to a kind of Platonism of information where there 'is' information (disembodied, ethereal) which gets instantiated/emboided in particular bio/physical arrangements, but that would be - like all Platonism - to put the cart before the horse.

"Give" us "an" "example" "of" "a" "word" "being" "used" "without" "a" "referent".

I think to do philosophy in the 21st century is to be a Wittgensteinian in some way; The PI laid out and made explicit the conditions under which all good philosophy is to be conducted, even if its author did not recognise it as such. But like all important philosophers, his is a toolbox: it ought to be used when appropriate, and moved-on from when not.

God making Wittgenstein fanbois mad by not titling him THE BEST PHILOSOPHER EVER is fun.

Dude was pretty good. Coulda used a dose of metaphysics to make him better. Shame about the Tractatus. Terrible little pamphlet.

Just curious if you could name 15 more important philosophers than Wittgenstein in the 20th C. — jacksonsprat22

Yes but my God imagine wasting that kind of time lol.