moin Andy,
On 2011-05-26 15:15, Andy Farnell wrote:
Another great quote, I apologise for reading it again, I am always bringing this one out because it's elegant, is Quine who restates Shannon and Weaver in a way:
"The notion of information is indeed clear enough... it is central to the theory of communication. It makes sense relative to one or another pre-assigned matrix of alternatives... You have to say in advance what features are going to count."
A good one indeed! Do you recall where it's from? Sounds to me like he's talking about (something like) Shannon's "message" as the necessary condition for information, but I'd have to dig into it some more to get a clearer picture....
No pre-conception, no conception. Otherwise its novel, and a confusing jumble until some ordering, naming and searching of existing patterns has taken place. The next time, maybe then it's okay for those sensible impressions to become worthy of a symbol, like the number 42. In that case there are necessary conditions for the perception of 42 trees falling, other than the physical fact itself.
As far as language (or symbols) are concerned: yes, of course. But if I'm reading it right, there's nothing which says that the "features" (which may or may not "count" as information content) rely for their ontological status only on their use (or non-use) in a Shannon-esque "message" (although I admit that just that kind of assertion would be consistent with Quine).
On Fri, 20 May 2011 13:01:54 +0800 Chris McCormick chris@mccormick.cx wrote:
chemicals and electricity inside the perceiver's physical head, models another part of the universe - what it calls the "42 trees falling".
To clarify (again): my emphasis was on the cardinal "42" (determiner of the subject NP), not on the whole subject NP ("42 trees"), the predicated state ("are falling"), or the non-constituent "trees are falling". Further, I'm talking about the semantic content of the cardinal we write "42", not about its syntactic or pragmatic properties. In particular, I mean the sense of "42" as a natural number, i.e. the same sense in which it is used in mathematical equations like "42=6*7". I used the koan-esque natural language example of falling trees because Chris was emphasizing the perception of physical phenomena, and it seemed appropriate.
Maybe you're taking issue with the (essentially arbitrary) lumping together of whatever physical processes we English speakers call "42 trees falling" into the constituents [42 trees] and [falling]. In particular, you might well take issue with the [42 trees] part: are what we call [42 trees] really in fact 42 distinct separate quasi-independent objects in their own right (a la Aristotelian `substance'), or are they just an arbitrary bundle of data/matter/processes which we happen to call [tree] of which the number of instances for which the predicate [falling] holds happens to be 42? If so, I think the objection is entirely justified: I don't particularly care for the notion of Aristotelian substance and I suspect there isn't anything physically realized at all which is in fact a quasi-independent object in its own right.
My point being (again) that the 42' part is independent of how we happen to carve up physical reality / perceptual data / physical processes intoobjects', and also of how (or whether) our language
happens to divvy that up into nouns, verbs, adjectives, and what have
you (although I think many of the interesting abstracta tend to wind up
as function words' --the', is',42', etc.). In this sense, if you
take our conventional semantics for [42], [tree], and [falling], even if
no one is around to construct or interpret the utterance, the associated
semantic proposition still holds. A less complicated example is the
equation: "42=6*7" holds whether or not there is anyone around to
evaluate it.
marmosets, Bryan