I'm with you on that. Shannon's definition of informatiom as resolution of uncertainty doesn't go into meaning, in that it's deficient. — TheMadFool
To have gone into meaning would have made him another opining poet-philosopher — Zugzwang
There are always divergent vested interests at play. I'm sure mathematicians, physicists, and engineers would have found Shannon's quantification of information more useful. However, this has resulted in much confusion about what information is, and what role it plays in life. — Pop
but because of Shannon's meaningless definition of information, many people are clueless as to what information is. — Pop
Nevertheless I can't help but object to 'everything is information.' If everything is, then nothing is (a difference that makes no difference.) — Zugzwang
it's because info theory isn't sexy to those who aren't technically minded — Zugzwang
No that does not follow, imo. You will have to contend with a growing realization that everything is information. — Pop
To some extent that would be the case. But more specifically there is no way you can use Shannon info theory, to understand why information is such a valuable quantity today. How information shapes us. How it can be weaponized. How it can be used to control people, etc. — Pop
Before I do a deep dive, would you mind arguing for its practical relevance for me? Or for the species? — Zugzwang
My sense is that now you are talking about data and AI. This stuff has obvious practical-political relevance. — Zugzwang
Shannon, whose position eventually prevailed, defined information in terms of the transmission of the signal and was not concerned with the meaning. The problem with MacKay’s definition was that meaning could not be measured or quantified and as a result the Shannon definition won out and changed the development of information science". People that shared MacKay’s position
complained that Shannon’s definition of information did not fully describe communication. Shannon
did not disagree–he “frequently cautioned that the theory was meant to apply only to certain technical
situations, not to communication in general". — Pop
To me, 'all is information' is something like 'all is mind.' 'Matter' is an illusion or a misunderstanding or simply a concept in the system of concepts (and there is only concept-information-mind, something like that.) In general it's not testable, but it's not for digging ditches to begin with but rather (seems to me) for its pleasant psycho-active effects — Zugzwang
My question is: does it give us an afterlife we didn't have already? Will it usher in the age of Aquarius? Will we stop waging war, putting carbon in the air? Because we are enlightened finally with the final master word? — Zugzwang
Regardless of how you personally might relate to the idea that matter and energy and information are equivalent, there is a growing trend toward this understanding. I see it as a monism, where everything is made of matter, energy, and information. — Pop
That everything is information is easily falsifiable ( Popper ) by providing something that is not information? — Pop
Your challenge is akin to the idealist saying: just show me something that isn't mind. But that's actually a defect, but 'everything is X' is basically as good as 'nothing is X' as no sorting of entities is involved. The Absolute 'Information' is the night in which all cows are black. — Zugzwang
↪Pop You know if he did anything really interesting it might be classified. You know, black bag, black op. — Mark Nyquist
Ha, ha, I happen to be an idealist also, though now an enactivist. Information is fundamental. To know anything at all, you have to have information about it. That is the bottom line. This is how we are enacted / interacted in the world. — Pop
Radical enactivists often adopt a thoroughly non-representational, enactive account of basic cognition. Basic cognitive capacities mentioned by Hutto and Myin include perceiving, imagining and remembering.[16][17] They argue that those forms of basic cognition can be explained without positing mental representations. With regard to complex forms of cognition such as language, they think mental representations are needed, because there needs explanations of content. In human being's public practices, they claim that "such intersubjective practices and sensitivity to the relevant norms comes with the mastery of the use of public symbol systems" (2017, p. 120), and so "as it happens, this appears only to have occurred in full form with construction of sociocultural cognitive niches in the human lineage" (2017, p. 134).[16] They conclude that basic cognition as well as cognition in simple organisms such as bacteria are best characterized as non-representational.[18][16][17]
Enactivism also addresses the hard problem of consciousness, referred to by Thompson as part of the explanatory gap in explaining how consciousness and subjective experience are related to brain and body.[19] "The problem with the dualistic concepts of consciousness and life in standard formulations of the hard problem is that they exclude each other by construction".[20] Instead, according to Thompson's view of enactivism, the study of consciousness or phenomenology as exemplified by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty is to complement science and its objectification of the world. "The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression" (Merleau-Ponty, The phenomenology of perception as quoted by Thompson, p. 165). In this interpretation, enactivism asserts that science is formed or enacted as part of humankind's interactivity with its world, and by embracing phenomenology "science itself is properly situated in relation to the rest of human life and is thereby secured on a sounder footing."[21][22] — Wiki
↪Pop I dunno, I'm still on MacKay. He could have been in early matter to mind programs. Alan Turing, Marvin Minski AI stuff. — Mark Nyquist
But as far as I understood, the theory postulated a dependence of the material world on its information content. — Mersi
If matter was somehow equivalent to information, what is meant by the common saying: wrong information — Mersi
If matter was somehow equivalent to information, what is meant by the common saying: wrong information?
That shows, that even if it was true that the world is made up of information, the subject adds something to make information out of this mere perception. — Mersi
Some of Turing's work was covered by the Official Secrets Act so my speculation that MacKay's might be also is a good guess. — Mark Nyquist
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