NZAP 2018
I recently attended, and enjoyed speaking at, the NZAP conference at Victoria University of Wellington in wonderful Wellington, New Zealand.
The organisers of the event did a stellar job:
Aside from somehow managing to be sick for the first two days, sleeping 10 hours a day, I had a great experience there. I met Dr Doug Campbell of Canterbury University in Christchurch, who presented a talk on the shortcomings of Frank Jackson's conception of physicalism, and showed how to reconcile it with the Chalmers-Papineau 'totalist' conception to arrive at a superior restatement of the latter. I am currently reviewing the paper for his talk and preparing a similar paper of my own based upon an informational restatement of Jackson's conception as presented in my PhD thesis last year.
I was also pleased to again run into Dr Martin Leckey and Professor John Bigelow, who presented a very interesting notation for hierarchical categorical ontology, which I have adduced is apt to be used for my own virtual-concrete information source ontology:
I am looking forward to completing a joint project with Dr Leckey.
Philosophers of Information in Ascension
I also had the pleasure of meeting the first of three very talented lesser known and/or upcoming philosophers of information whose work I would like to introduce:
Dr Anton Sukhoverkhov
Anton is interested in biosemiotics and Natural Signs and The Origins of Language. I have joined Dr Sukhoverkhov in contributing to a joint working group paper on different perspectives on the nature of information. He specialises also in ontology of memory and the role of non-genetic inheritance in biological and social evolution.
Dr Sukhoverkhov is particularly interested in the nature of information in natural phenomena and what makes such information semantic. He is currently situated at Macquarie University on a six month fellowship coming off the back of a Fullbright Scholarship to the US.
Sukhoverkhov Bibliography
Sukhoverkhov, Anton. 2010. “Memory, Sign Systems, and Self-Reproductive Processes.” Biological Theory 5 (2): 161–66.
———. 2012. “Natural Signs and the Origin of Language.” Biosemiotics 5 (2): 153–59.
Sukhoverkhov, Anton V., and Carol A. Fowler. 2015. “Why Language Evolution Needs Memory: Systems and Ecological Approaches.” Biosemiotics 8 (1): 47–65.
See more here.
My co-author on a current working paper about social mindreading, the small network model and the extended mind, Simon has produced an important logical analysis of Fred Dretske's classically derived and adapted conception of information flow. Dretske's model involves an adaptation of the classical Shannonian model of The Mathematical Theory of Communication that is designed to facilitate a proposal for a reliabilist epistemology based upon a naturalised conception of information. Dretske's adaptation involves singling out the information measure - according to the Shannonian probabilistic conception - of the information content of a single signal. It removes the averaging over sequences of symbols and messages that is necessary in Shannon's system and for Shannon's averaging measure of entropy of a sequence.
In particular the analysis reveals the problematic nature of Dretske's 'k' factor: or the 'knowledge' that the receiver has about the possible states of the source or the possibilities at the source. It's this factor that I have variously identified as being what makes Dretske's otherwise naturalised objectivist conception of information into a subjectivist conception. However, it does so when Dretske deploys the initial objective conception from the perspective of a receiver in order to develop a conception of semantic information.
D'Alfonso identifies that the 'k' factor complicates the proposal of a logic of objective information flow by disrupting minimal algebraic properties required for such to be useful: complementarity for example.
———. 2014. “The Logic of Knowledge and the Flow of Information.” Minds and Machines 24 (3): 307–25.
———. 2016. “Belief Merging with the Aim of Truthlikeness.” Synthese 193 (7): 2013–2034.
Sukhoverkhov, Anton. 2010. “Memory, Sign Systems, and Self-Reproductive Processes.” Biological Theory 5 (2): 161–66.
———. 2012. “Natural Signs and the Origin of Language.” Biosemiotics 5 (2): 153–59.
Sukhoverkhov, Anton V., and Carol A. Fowler. 2015. “Why Language Evolution Needs Memory: Systems and Ecological Approaches.” Biosemiotics 8 (1): 47–65.
See more here.
Dr Simon D'Alfonso
My co-author on a current working paper about social mindreading, the small network model and the extended mind, Simon has produced an important logical analysis of Fred Dretske's classically derived and adapted conception of information flow. Dretske's model involves an adaptation of the classical Shannonian model of The Mathematical Theory of Communication that is designed to facilitate a proposal for a reliabilist epistemology based upon a naturalised conception of information. Dretske's adaptation involves singling out the information measure - according to the Shannonian probabilistic conception - of the information content of a single signal. It removes the averaging over sequences of symbols and messages that is necessary in Shannon's system and for Shannon's averaging measure of entropy of a sequence.
In particular the analysis reveals the problematic nature of Dretske's 'k' factor: or the 'knowledge' that the receiver has about the possible states of the source or the possibilities at the source. It's this factor that I have variously identified as being what makes Dretske's otherwise naturalised objectivist conception of information into a subjectivist conception. However, it does so when Dretske deploys the initial objective conception from the perspective of a receiver in order to develop a conception of semantic information.
D'Alfonso identifies that the 'k' factor complicates the proposal of a logic of objective information flow by disrupting minimal algebraic properties required for such to be useful: complementarity for example.
D'Alfonso Bibliography
D’Alfonso, Simon. 2011. “On Quantifying Semantic Information.” Information 2 (4): 61–101.———. 2014. “The Logic of Knowledge and the Flow of Information.” Minds and Machines 24 (3): 307–25.
———. 2016. “Belief Merging with the Aim of Truthlikeness.” Synthese 193 (7): 2013–2034.
Professor Wu Kun
Professor Wu Kun warrants mention because he is perhaps the only Chinese interdisciplinary and comparative philosopher working in the field of the philosophy of information who has been doing so since the 1980s. In fact I am writing a commentary and paper in support of and response to a number of the professor's views.