Is biology the only or correct source for answering the question 'What is the Human?' ? Ask these Dudes...

@drcfleming Dr Ronai on concepts of species... Looks relevant to 101010.3 What is the Human. Perhaps the answer is not in biology for what the human is? https://t.co/LTsQEEVyQW

— Bruce Long (梅龙） (@brucerlong) August 27, 2018

Powerpoint slides for my WSU 101010.3 3rd Year 'What is the Human' Scholars...

Here are the Powerpoint slides for all of my Tuesday 101010.3 What is the Human tutorials so far online:

https://tinyurl.com/y94xe484

Wolfgang Iser's 'Secret' Source for Repertoire and the Interdisciplinarity of The Philosophy of Information

Philosophers of information are used to the ready interdisciplinarity that the subdiscipline both avails, and demands, of the researcher. This is due to many factors including the polysemous content of the term 'information' itself, the general intuitive and practical importance of information (on a par with such things as knowledge and structure, and related intimately to both) and the general recognition of the validity and salience of pluralist conceptions of information.

I intend to make this short post one in a series of 'who knows' how many on interdisciplinarity in the philosophy of information.

When I first embarked upon my Master of Philosophy in English at The University of Sydney, I had only recently completed an Honours First Class in Philosophy and been admitted to a PhD in philosophy. A flight of literary fancy took me and I decided to try a lateral and interdisciplinary move to English. Dr Peter Marks suggested that I use the topic of my Honours thesis as a jumping-off point. I was surprised at this suggestion, since the Honours thesis was significantly orientated towards the philosophy of information and probability: more philosophy of science and analytic philosophy in the Anglo-American vein.

I should have realised that Professor Marks knew what was afoot. I had only just met him and was not aware that I was talking to an eminent Orwell scholar from Oxford with a famous thesis about Orwell.

It transpires that Shannon's appeal in his editorial address in the 1956 edition of IEEE Transactions was a response to a trend of literary theorists and social scientists to embrace - metaphorically, analogically, and otherwise - the ideas of Shannon's very much applied scientific and statistical Mathematical Theory of Communication:

The Bandwagon Article can be found here and at this nice blogopedia Wiki based article from which I learned that the Sokal hoax article in fact draws parodically upon Shannon's article.

In Shannon's 1948 applied statistical theory, there are causal information sources (Shannon's physical stochastic processes and in-model representations of the same) and then there are complex polysemantic combined information sources which include the properties of Shannon sources, but also include dynamical situations and data structures that have pre-encoded epistemic and cognitive, linguistic, then political and ideological semantic information/content. Sounds overly fixated upon information theory and somewhat over-analytical or 'scientistic' - right?

Perhaps not. Wolfgang Iser's reader reception theory was built upon the foundation of the idea of repertoire. Repertoires are the sets of texts (using literary theoretic parlance) that influence the reader's  partial construction of parsed and interpreted texts and their associated narratives (where a narrative can be construed broadly as semantic and epistemic context and content). As is the case with most theories - especially those in the arts and humanities - the core idea came from elsewhere. It came from a little known French analytic philosopher and polymath by the name of Abram Moles. Moles' primary interest was in what is sometimes called computational aesthetics. He attempted to use Claude E. Shannon's conception of information sources and transmission in an analysis of texts and textual transmission (a not uncommon trend in the mid to late 20th century).

Abraham Moles

Moles

This influence of Shannon upon the work of structuralist literary theorists, grammarians, and social scientists is also revealed in the work of structuralists John Lyons and Zellig S. Harris. Harris was a true informationist interdisciplinarian, producing works analysing the information content of specific scientific language, formulating one of the first semantic theories of information, and even producing  an informational analysis of scientific structures in molecular bioscience/immunlogy (11 and 12 below.)

That information theory influences late structuralist and early poststructuralist and postmodern theory by way of Iser's work is borne out by those theorists investments in effort to apply information theory to grammar, linguistics, and literary theory:

From an interview with Wolfgang Iser

Notice that the references to instructions (and the execution thereof), codes, information, and feed-back all draw heavily upon the discourses of Wienerian cybernetics and Shannonian information theory as well as the emerging computer sciences of the time. Those readers familiar with the science of computer architecture will recognise that instruction processing and microcodes are the stuff of earlier microcode based CPU architectures.

More recently in history, new efforts have also arisen in the other scholarly direction - from critical theory to information theory with the former applied to the implications and effects of the latter. Fuchs work clearly reflects the style and discourse of lat 20th century neo-marxist continental philosophers.

Again the discursive admixture of very continental (and in this case neomarxist) and literary theoretic modes with that of the information sciences is striking, if not unexpected. The proposed meta-theoretic critical discipline is a natural, yet clever and inventive, evolution of the tool set of critical theory.

The philosophy of information lends itself to and requires a breathtaking interdisciplinary breadth that is also constrained by a science-humanities conceptual nexus rooted in applied science as significant as The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Professor Peter Marks had seen the influence of information theory on structuralism and poststructuralism first hand, and had a ready repertoire for a beginner to apply himself too.

Bibliography

1. Allmer, T. (2012). Towards a Critical Theory of Surveillance in Informational Capitalism. Frankfurt: Lang, Peter, GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften. 
2. Baddeley, R., & Attewell, D. (2009). The Relationship Between Language and the Environment: Information Theory Shows Why We Have Only Three Lightness Terms. Psychological Science, 20(9), 1100–1107. 
3. Bar-Hillel, Y. (1964). Language and information: selected essays on their theory and application. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley. 
4. Cooper, W. S. (1978). Foundations of logico-linguistics: a unified theory of information, language, and logic (Vol. 2). Dordrecht, Holland;Boston; D. Reidel Pub. Co. 
5. De Bruyn, B. (2012). Wolfgang Iser: A Companion (Vol. 1). Berlin ;Boston: De Gruyter. 
6. Fuchs, C. (2009). Towards a critical theory of information. TripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 7(2). https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v7i2.91
7. Harris, Z. S. (1951). Structural linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 
8. Harris, Z. S. (1962). String analysis of sentence structure (Vol. no. 1). The Hague: Mouton. 
9. Harris, Z. S. (1982). A grammar of English on mathematical principles. New York: Wiley. 
10. Harris, Z. S. (1988). Language and information (Vol. no. 28). New York: Columbia University Press. 
11. Harris, Z. S. (1989). The Form of information in science: analysis of an immunology sublanguage (Vol. 104). Dordrecht [Netherlands];Boston; Kluwer Academic Publishers. 
12. Harris, Z. S. (1991). A theory of language and information: a mathematical approach. Oxford [England];New York; Clarendon Press. 
13. Harris, Z. S. (2002). The structure of science information. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 35(4), 215–221. 
14. Iser, W. (1974). The implied reader: patterns of communication in prose fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 
15. Iser, W. (1978). The act of reading: a theory of aesthetic response. London [etc.]: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 
16. Jauss, H. R., & De Man, P. (1982). Toward an aesthetic of reception (Vol. 2). Brighton: Harvester. 
17. LEE, R. (2010). The use of information theory to determine the language character type of Pictish symbols. Scottish Archaeological Journal, 32(2), 137–176. 
18. Lodwick, W. A., & Thipwiwatpotjana, P. (2017). Generalized uncertainty theory: A language for information deficiency. Studies in Computational Intelligence, 696, 37–69. 
19. Lyons, J., Newman, S., Sapir, P., Swiggers, P., & Zellig, S. H. (2008). General Linguistics (Vol. I). Berlin ;Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. 
20. Montemurro, M. A., & Zanette, D. (2009). Towards the quantification of the semantic information encoded in written language. 
21. Pereira, F. (2000). Formal grammar and information theory: together again? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 358(1769), 1239–1253. 
22. PLOTKIN, J. B., & NOWAK, M. A. (2000). Language Evolution and Information Theory. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 205(1), 147–159. 
23. Shannon, C. (1956). The bandwagon (Edtl.). IRE Transactions on Information Theory, 2(1), 3–3. 
24. Whitworth, A. (2006). Communicative competence in the information age: Towards a critical theory of information literacy education. Innovation in Teaching and Learning in Information and Computer Sciences, 5(1), 1–13.

The NZAP Conference, and Lesser Known and Rising Stars of The Philosophy of Information...

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.

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.

Professor Wu Kun Bibliography

Kun, Wu, and Joseph E. Brenner. 2015. “An Informational Ontology and Epistemology of Cognition.” Foundations of Science 20 (3): 249–279.

My New Tilt at Floridi's ISR ontology is on the way (I love Floridi's work...). Proofs done!

I love Luciano Floridi's work. He has done more for the philosophy of information than any other philosopher. I disagree with his Kantian Transcendentalist stance about the nature of information (which is not an uncommon position), and in this forthcoming paper I say why I think it is still essentially a digital ontology of a different kind than that which Floridi himself rejects. It's not 'It from Bit' per Wheeler's lexical-instrumental orientated approach (whereby science asks binary yes no questions of the material universe via experimentation and instrumental theory.)

It matters that ISR is still a digital (based upon binary-discretised physical representations of binary values of relations or options-differences) ontology of a different kind because the binary component is what is supposed to be supplanted by the alternatively conceived informational component in informational structural realism. Another striking hint at the problem can be found in the fact that the concept of a minimal binary de re (and in re) difference which forms the basis of information in informational structural realism also forms the basis of the concept of data in Floridi's Strongly Semantic Theory of Information. Look at the treatment this gets when Floridi develops the theory of truth associated with the semantic theory of information (keep Wheeler's concept of 'It From Bit' in mind):

My Proofs Done!

It From Bit Bibliography

Aguirre, Anthony, Brendan Foster, and Zeeya Merali. 2015. It From Bit or Bit From It?: On Physics and Information. Cham: Springer International Publishing. 

Barbour, Julian. 2015. “Bit from It.” In It From Bit or Bit From It?, 197–211. Springer.

Cristinel Stoica, Ovidiu. 2015. “The Tao of It and Bit.” In It From Bit or Bit From It?, 51–64. Springer.

D’Ariano, Giacomo Mauro. 2015. “It from Qubit.” In It From Bit or Bit From It?, 25–35. Springer.

Leifer, MS. 2015. “‘It from Bit’ and the Quantum Probability Rule.” In It From Bit or Bit From It?, 5–23. Springer.

McHarris, Wm C. 2015. “It from Bit from It from Bit... Nature and Nonlinear Logic.” In It From Bit or Bit From It?, 225–234. Springer.

Planat, Michel. 2014. “It from Qubit: How to Draw Quantum Contextuality.” Information 5 (2): 209–18.

Rovelli, Carlo. 2015. “Relative Information at the Foundation of Physics.” In It From Bit or Bit From It?, 79–86. Springer.

Shikano, Yutaka. 2015. “These from Bits.” In It From Bit or Bit From It?, 113–118. Springer.

Floridi Bibliography

Adams, Fred, and João A. de Moraes. 2016. “Is There a Philosophy of Information?” Topoi 35 (1): 161–171.

Adriaans, Pieter. 2010. “A Critical Analysis of Floridi’s Theory of Semantic Information.” Knowledge, Technology & Policy, 1–16.

Allo, Patrick. 2010. Putting Information First: Luciano Floridi and the Philosophy of Information. Malden, MA; Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. 

———. 2011. “The Logic of ‘being Informed’ Revisited and Revised.” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 153 (3): 417–434.

Baumgaertner, Bert, and Luciano Floridi. 2016. “Introduction: The Philosophy of Information.” Topoi 35 (1): 157–159.

Beni, Majid D. 2016. “Epistemic Informational Structural Realism.” Minds and Machines 26 (4): 323–339.

Berto, F., and J. Tagliabue. 2014. “The World Is Either Digital or Analogue.” Synthese 191 (3): 481–497.

Black, Elizabeth, Luciano Floridi, and Allan Third. 2010. “Introduction to the Special Issue on the Nature and Scope of Information.” Synthese 175 (S1): 1–3.

Bringsjord, Selmer. 2015. “The Symbol Grounding Problem . Remains Unsolved.” Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 27 (1): 63–72.

Bueno, Otávio. 2010. “Structuralism and Information.” Metaphilosophy 41 (3): 365–379.

Bynum, Terrell W. 2014. “On the Possibility of Quantum Informational Structural Realism.” Minds and Machines 24 (1): 123–139.

Caticha, Ariel. 2014. “Towards an Informational Pragmatic Realism.” Minds and Machines 24 (1): 37–70.

Chen, Min, and Luciano Floridi. 2013. “An Analysis of Information Visualisation.” Synthese 190 (16): 3421–38.

D’Agostino, Marcello, and Luciano Floridi. 2009. “The Enduring Scandal of Deduction: Is Propositional Logic Really Uninformative?” 167 (2): 271–315.

D’Alfonso, Simon. 2011. “On Quantifying Semantic Information.” Information 2 (4): 61–101.

Ferguson, Thomas M. 2015. “Two Paradoxes of Semantic Information.” Synthese 192 (11): 3719–3730.

Floridi, Luciano. 1999. Philosophy and Computing: An Introduction. New York; London: Routledge.

———. 2003a. “From Data to Semantic Information.” Entropy 5 (2): 125–45.

———. 2003b. “Two Approaches to the Philosophy of Information.” Minds and Machines 13 (4): 459–469.

———. 2004a. “Afterword LIS as Applied Philosophy of Information: A Reappraisal.” Library Trends 52 (3): 658–67.

———. 2004b. “Open Problems in the Philosophy of Information.” Metaphilosophy 35 (4): 554–582.

———. 2004c. “Outline of a Theory of Strongly Semantic Information.” Minds and Machines 14 (2): 197–221.

———. 2004d. The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.

———. 2005a. “Is Semantic Information Meaningful Data?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70 (2): 351–70.

———. 2005b. Semantic Conceptions of Information. Stanfrod Univeristy CSLI.

———. 2008a. “A Defence of Informational Structural Realism.” Synthese 161 (2): 219–53.

———. 2008b. “Artificial Intelligence’s New Frontier: Artificial Companions and the Fourth Revolution.” Metaphilosophy 39 (4–5): 651–655.

———. 2008c. “The Method of Levels of Abstraction.” Minds and Machines 18 (3): 303–29.

———. 2008d. “Trends in the Philosophy of Information.” In , 113–131.

———. 2009a. “A Distributed Model of Truth for Semantic Information.” In . 

———. 2009b. “Against Digital Ontology.” Synthese 168 (1): 151–78.

———. 2009c. “Philosophical Conceptions of Information.” In Formal Theories of Information: From Shannon to Semantic Information Theory and General Concepts of Information, 5363:13–53.

———. 2009d. “The Information Society and Its Philosophy: Introduction to the Special Issue on ‘The Philosophy of Information, Its Nature, and Future Developments.’” The Information Society 25 (3): 153–158.

———. 2010a. “How to Account for Information.” In , 1–15.

———. 2010b. Information: A Very Short Introduction. Vol. 225. Oxford;New York; Oxford University Press.

———. 2010c. “Information, Possible Worlds and the Cooptation of Scepticism.” Synthese 175 (S1): 63–88.

———. 2010d. “The Philosophy of Information as a Conceptual Framework,” 1–29.

———. 2011a. “Children of the Fourth Revolution.” Philosophy & Technology 24 (3): 227–232.

———. 2011b. “Semantic Information and the Correctness Theory of Truth.” Erkenntnis (1975-) 74 (2): 147–175.

———. 2011c. “The Informational Nature of Personal Identity.” Minds and Machines 21 (4): 549–566.

———. 2011d. The Philosophy of Information. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 2011e. “The Philosophy of Information: Ten Years Later.” In , 153–170.

———. 2012a. “Semantic Information and the Network Theory of Account.” Synthese 184 (3): 431–454.

———. 2012b. “Turing’s Three Philosophical Lessons and the Philosophy of Information.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 370 (1971): 3536–42.

———. 2013a. “Information Quality.” Philosophy & Technology 26 (1): 1–6.

———. 2013b. “Things.” Philosophy & Technology 26 (4): 349–52.

———. 2014a. “Information Closure and the Sceptical Objection.” Synthese 191 (6): 1037–1050.

———. 2014b. The Ethics of Information. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 2014c. “The Latent Nature of Global Information Warfare” 27 (3): 317–319.

———. 2017. “The Logic of Design as a Conceptual Logic of Information.” Minds and Machines 27 (3): 495–519.

Floridi, Luciano, and Mariarosaria Taddeo. 2005. “Solving the Symbol Grounding Problem: A Critical Review of Fifteen Years of Research.” Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 17 (4): 419–445.

Floridi, Luciano, Mariarosaria Taddeo, and Matteo Turilli. 2009. “Turing’s Imitation Game: Still an Impossible Challenge for All Machines and Some Judges––An Evaluation of the 2008 Loebner Contest” 19 (1): 145–150.

Fyffe, R. 2015. “The Value of Information: Normativity, Epistemology, and LIS in Luciano Floridi.” PORTAL-LIBRARIES AND THE ACADEMY 15 (2): 267–286.

Ganascia, Jean-Gabriel. 2015. “Abstraction of Levels of Abstraction.” Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 27 (1): 23–35.

Greco, Gian M., Gianluca Paronitti, Matteo Turilli, and Luciano Floridi. 2005a. “How to Do Philosophy Informationally.” In , 3782:623–634.

———. 2005b. “The Philosophy of Information a Methodological Point of View.” CEUR Workshop Proceedings 130.

Long, Bruce R. 2014. “Information Is Intrinsically Semantic but Alethically Neutral.” Synthese 191 (14): 3447–67.

Ratti, Emanuele. 2015. “Levels of Abstraction, Emergentism and Artificial Life.” Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 27 (1): 51–61.

Sdrolia, Chryssa, and J. M. Bishop. 2014. “Rethinking Construction: On Luciano Floridi’s ‘Against Digital Ontology.’” Minds and Machines: Journal for Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy and Cognitive Science 24 (1): 89.

Taddeo, Mariarosaria, and Luciano Floridi. 2007. “A Praxical Solution of the Symbol Grounding Problem.” Minds and Machines 17 (4): 369–389.

Van Leeuwen, Jan. 2014. “On Floridi’s Method of Levels of Abstraction.” Minds and Machines 24 (1): 5.