Re: Information and Volition

[Judith Rosen <***>]

I've got two statements here; one by John K. and one by Tim. About the first-- I think perhaps I am seeing some aspect of this that John K. has been trying to convey that I have been missing up till now (correct me if I'm way off, John):

 

John K. wrote:
> > He could not be meaning that physicists themselfves need to consider
> > information about nature, which clearly they already do and even defined
> > most of scientific information. He is saying that their fundamental
> > concept of the physical is missing its natural information component.

He (my father) did NOT mean that physicists aren't considering information about nature (indeed, I'm sure he considered them awash in information of all sorts!), what he said was about a different issue entirely. In his criticism of contemporary physics (not physicists), what he was saying was that the idea that an organism has relationships with phenomena outside itself (environment) or within itself that could be characterized as "information" to IT... is what contemporary physics refuses to accept.  (And it is "contemporary" that is the operational word under criticism by him here, not "physics" and certainly not "physicists", as far as my father was  concerned-- that's an important point.)  Contemporary physics regards that as anthropomorphism, every bit as much as the notion that function plays any role in the organization or behavior of organisms is regarded as anthropomorphism.

 

Does that lay the concern to rest?

 

Then, the other issue is from Tim:

Tim Gwinn wrote:
> But unlike functions or states, "information" is a curious thing. From
> Rosen's view, something that can be an answer to a question can be
> information. To me, this means that our interactions with the world are
> pervasively infused with information in this sense. But this is a highly
> anthropocentric view of information, since it is defined here as performing
> some role in a certain context to a human. Fractionated from that context,
> the phenomena no longer perform the role of 'information'; in the same way
> that a fractionated organism no longer has a metabolism. Both function and
> information are context-dependent things - they do not persist in their role
> once the context is broken.
>
I agree that what Tim said about information and context was consistent with my father's view-- except for one aspect of the second sentence. What would  be more accurate would be to say "What I get from Rosen's view is that..." To say it the way it was written in Tim's post implies that "Rosen defines information..." as this one thing. I would have to disagree with that. It's too out of context. What my father said, in the passage Tim cited, was that "from this vantage point, we can say that information is something that answers an interrogative..." But that doesn't take the first part of the statement into account. In actual fact, my father would and did impute a larger definition to information, depending on the context and the model, etc. 

 

Judith