BothAndBlog Forum

QUANTA Article on Claude Shannon

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussi ... ent/483186


If the accepted "information theory" represents information in a way other than the way that we normally use the word "information", and cannot account for the existence of information, according to how we normally use the word, as that which is transmitted in a message, then surely we are justified in "raising philosophical objections to it". — Metaphysician Undercover

Charged with maximizing the flow of communication, Shannon was interested in measuring the carrying capacity of the system, not the meaningful content of each message. That's like a shipping company, which is more interested in the potential (carrying capacity) of its empty vessels, while the shippers are interested in the cash-value (meaning) of the actual cargo.

Toward that end, Shannon focused on the Syntax of Information (structure ; volume) instead of its Semantics (meaning ; content). Ironically, he measured Information capacity in terms of emptiness & negation (Entropy), instead of its fullness & positive aspects (Energy). Even more ironically, scientists have referred to those purposeful features as "negentropy" (negative negation). Likewise, scientists focus on the "uncertainty" of information, rather than its "novelty". But it's the unexpected that is most meaningful to humans. So, I agree that philosophers have good reasons to "raise objections".

"Information", as Shannon defined it, is akin to Fuzzy Logic, which is ambiguous & uncertain, but -- like the Enigma code -- capable of carrying almost infinite values : between 0 and 100%. By reducing Specificity, it maximizes Potential. Hence, each bit/byte, instead of carrying meaning, is an empty container capable of carrying multiple meanings. That kind of communication is good for computers -- where the translation code-key is built in -- but not for people, who can't handle uncertainty & ambiguity.

That's why neuroscientist & anthropologist Terrence Deacon said, "this is evidence that we are both woefully ignorant of a fundamental causal principle in the universe and in desperate need of such a theory". The Enformationism thesis is my contribution toward that end.


Negentropy : Negentropy is reverse entropy. It means things becoming more in order. By 'order' is meant organisation, structure and function: the opposite of randomness or chaos.
Note -- I give it a more positive name : "Enformy" -- meaning the power to enform, to create novelty.

Fuzzy Logic :
Fuzzy logic is a form of many-valued logic in which the truth values of variables may be any real number between 0 and 1. It is employed to handle the concept of partial truth, where the truth value may range between completely true and completely false.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic

Enformy :
In the Enformationism theory, Enformy is a hypothetical, holistic, metaphysical, natural trend, opposite to that of Entropy & Randomness, to produce Complexity & Progress. It is the mysterious tendency for aimless energy to occasionally create the stable, but temporary, patterns we call Matter, Life, and Mind.
http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page18.html

What is this "common usage" of "information" that you speak of? — TheMadFool

See my reply to ↪Metaphysician Undercover above.

Information : For humans, Information has the semantic quality of aboutness , that we interpret as meaning. In computer science though, Information is treated as meaningless, which makes its mathematical value more certain. It becomes meaningful only when a sentient Self interprets it as such.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html

I would say that you might have this backward. The computer can't handle uncertainty, that's why there must be a built-in code-key to eliminate any uncertainty. People, having free will choice have no such built-in code-key, and that capacity to choose regardless of uncertainty, allows them to live with and cope with ambiguity. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree with your version, but what I said was that "by reducing specificity" -- which increases generality -- Shannon's definition of Information "maximizes the Potential" carrying capacity (bandwidth) of a transmission. That was the point of his research. By using only an austere two digit code, instead of noisy redundant human languages, he was able to compress more information into the same pipes. Just as with Morse code though, the specific meaning is restored by translating the abstract code back into a concrete language. Only then, does it become Actual Information -- meaning in a mind; actionable knowledge.

In the shipping analogy, Shannon didn't make the ships bigger, he made the cargo smaller -- by reducing redundancy, as noted by TMF. Thus, increasing the carrying capacity at no extra cost to the shippers. But, in this thread, that's a minor point. What really matters is that by using an abstract code -- stripped of meaning -- he overcame a major technical hurdle : bandwidth. But in order for the code to be meaningful to humans, it must be decompressed and converted back into noisy redundant "natural" language. Unfortunately, his new terminology. equating "Information" with destructive Entropy, diverted attention away from the original constructive essence of Information : aboutness -- the relation between subject & object.

Natural Language : In neuropsychology, linguistics, and the philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languages can take different forms, such as speech or signing.

Aboutness : https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardc ... /aboutness

You might be interested in this academic. He sounds a bit fringe to me, but I have to admit, his electromagnetic theory of consciousness seems plausible (although I must confess to scepticism about anything authored by someone who calls themselves 'Johnjoe'. :worry: ) — Wayfarer

Unfortunately, that's his real name. And he is fringey, in the sense of revolutionary. I have read a Kindle copy of his book, Quantum Evolution, because it seemed have some parallels to my own edgey Enformationism thesis of how evolution works. He concluded that there seemed to a "force of will" behind biological evolution. And I have concluded that the Generic Form of Information -- that I call EnFormAction -- is poetically analogous to the Will-of-God in religious myths of creation. So, I find his combination of Quantum Theory and Biology to be interesting -- and provocative, if not provable. But of course, it doesn't fit neatly into the dominant scientific worldview of Materialism.

MeFadden's new theory of Electromagnetic Consciousness may also parallel some of my ideas of how Consciousness emerges from a biological brain. He "posits that consciousness is in fact the brain’s energy field". But I would go a step farther, to posit that Consciousness is an emergent quality of universal Information : a MindField, if you will. Physical Energy is merely a causal form of Generic Information. And the human Mind is a metaphysical effect, a Function, of information processing in the brain. By that, I mean Raw Energy is first transformed into active Life, and then into sensing Mind, and ultimately into knowing Consciousness.

"Quantum Evolution presents a revolutionary new scientific theory by asking: is there a force of will behind evolution?"
https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Evolutio ... mozilla-20

Generic Information : Information is Generic in the sense of generating all forms from a formless pool of possibility -- the Platonic Forms.
http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page29.html
Note -- this use of "Generic" is not based on the common dictionary definition, but on the root meaning : "to generate novelty" or "to produce offspring".

Shannon might have coined the term 'bit' for 'binary digit' - and transmitting them through a medium. Why it is now taken to have a profound meaning about the nature of reality baffles me a little. — Wayfarer

The profundity of Information Theory is only partly due to it's opening the door to the Information Age. But we have, since Shannon's re-definition of Mind Stuff, begun to go far beyond mere artificial computer brains, to glimpse an answer to the "hard question" of natural Consciousness. Shannon's narrow definition of "Information" is blossoming into a whole new worldview.


We live in the information age, which according to Wikipedia is a period in human history characterized by the shift from industrial production to one based on information and computerization. . . . So it is not entirely crazy to speculate about what might lie beyond the information age.
https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/06/ ... ation-age/

I don't see how you can describe that as a matter of reducing specificity for an increase in generality. It's the very opposite of that. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sorry for the confusion. As an amateur philosopher, I'm in over my head. But, if you have any interest in a deeper discussion of what I'm talking about, I can direct you to several books by physicist Paul Davies, and associates, who are exploring the concept of Information far beyond Shannon's novel use of the old word for personal-Knowledge-encoded-in-a-physical-brain to a new application of abstract-Values-encoded-in-the-meaningless-mathematics-of-Probability.

Paul Davies : https://www.amazon.com/s?k=paul+davies& ... mozilla-20

Thinking that this is an accurate representation of "information", is the problem of representation, or narrative, which Plato warned us about. We have three layers, the real natural thing, the artificial thing which goes by the same name, but is just a shallow reflection of the thing — Metaphysician Undercover

Apparently, I haven't clearly conveyed that my intention is to understand "the real natural thing" instead of "the artificial thing which goes by the same name". Don't worry about the "specificity" and "generality" of information. That's a tricky technical distinction for information specialists to gnaw on. For the rest of us, the important distinction is between statistical Probability and meaningful Aboutness.



Information :
* Claude Shannon quantified Information not as useful ideas, but as a mathematical ratio between meaningful order (1) and meaningless disorder (0); between knowledge (1) and ignorance (0). So, that meaningful mind-stuff exists in the limbo-land of statistics, producing effects on reality while having no sensory physical properties. We know it exists ideally, only by detecting its effects in the real world.
* For humans, Information has the semantic quality of aboutness , that we interpret as meaning. In computer science though, Information is treated as meaningless, which makes its mathematical value more certain. It becomes meaningful only when a sentient Self interprets it as such.
* When spelled with an “I”, Information is a noun, referring to data & things. When spelled with an “E”, Enformation is a verb, referring to energy and processes.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page11.html

I think that what happens is that at each distinct level there is an inversion of importance, from the particular to the general, and then back again when you cross the next level. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah! That's the ticket : "Inversion" -- a mental flip of the coin. When I said that Shannon's Information substituted "generality" for "specificity", I was referring to the meaning of communication. Shannon's technique was to eliminate the specific intended meaning of Words for enigmatic numerical Bytes. Digital information is conveyed in the abstract language of binary numbers that have the potential to encode any meaning. It's a sort of universal language. But Mathematics is divorced from concrete Reality, in that it is universal instead of specific. That's why String Theory makes sense to mathematicians, and not to laymen, but cannot be empirically tested in the real world.

Therefore, in order to be meaningful to non-computers, that general (one size fits all) language must be translated (inverted) back into a single human language with a narrowly-defined (specified) range of meanings for each word. In its encoded form, the message is scrambled into apparently random noise, that could mean anything (1) or nothing (0). Ironically though, even chaotic randomness contains some orderly potential. And Shannon found the key to unlock that hidden Meaning in Boolean Algebra, which boils Significance down to its essence : 1 = True (meaningful) or 0 = False (meaningless).

So, as you said, Shannon "inverted the importance" of Meaning in order to compress it down to its minimum volume. But the communication is not complete until it is converted back into verbose messy, often ambiguous, human language. Individually, the ones & zeros mean nothing more complex than the simple dichotomy of Either/Or. And that is also the ultimate goal of objective reductive physical Science. But subjective holistic metaphysical Philosophy's goal is to restore the personal meaning of knowledge.

Shannon's reductive method : By focusing relentlessly on the essential feature of a problem while ignoring all other aspects.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-clau ... -20201222/

Physics & Metaphysics :
Two sides of the same coin we call Reality. When we look for matters of fact, we see physics. But when we search for meaning, we find meta-physics. A mental flip is required to view the other side. And imagination is necessary to see both at the same time.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page14.html

Universal Language : https://www.bhp.com/sustainability/comm ... -language/

Raw Energy is first transformed into active Life, and then into sensing Mind, and ultimately into knowing Consciousness. — Gnomon
Transformed by what, and how? — Wayfarer

The world-creating Potential of the Big Bang Singularity was transformed (enformed) into Life, the Universe, and Everything by the power of EnFormAction. This is a novel notion, perhaps even radical. But it is being studied by serious scientists -- some of whom even entertain the taboo concept of Deity, or Panpsychism. I have simply translated that unconventional interpretation of Generic Information into a new myth of creation, that I call Enformationism. This is based on Einstein's theory of E = MC^2, and the current understanding of physicists that Information transforms into Energy, which transforms into Matter, and vice versa. See the Hypothesis below for the "how".

The mass-energy-information equivalence principle :
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5123794

Generic Information : Information is Generic in the sense of generating all forms from a formless pool of possibility -- the Platonic Forms.
https://enformationism.info/phpBB3/view ... p=837#p837

EnFormAction :
Ententional Causation. A proposed metaphysical law of the universe that causes random interactions between forces and particles to produce novel & stable arrangements of matter & energy. It’s the creative force of the axiomatic eternal deity that, for unknown reasons, programmed a Singularity to suddenly burst into our reality from an infinite source of possibility. AKA : The creative power of Evolution; the power to enform; Logos; Change.
http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html

The EnFormAction Hypothesis : http://bothandblog3.enformationism.info/page23.html

In Spinoza's philosophy, which I'll take to be paradigmatic for philosophy generally in this case, the only real substance ('substance' being nearer in meaning to 'subject' or to 'being' than the current conception of 'substance') is self-caused, it exists in itself and through itself. In other words, it is not derived from anything, whereas everything else is derived from that. (This is Spinoza's doctrine of God as nature.) — Wayfarer

Yes. My Enformationism thesis can be viewed as an update of Spinoza's worldview, in light of Quantum Physics, bottom-up Evolution, and Information Theory.

Spinoza's Universal Substance : Like Energy, Information is the universal active agent of the cosmos. Like Spinoza's God, Information appears to be the single substance of the whole World.
http://bothandblog2.enformationism.info/page29.html

Digital information is conveyed in the abstract language of binary numbers that have the potential to encode any meaning. — Gnomon
But do they? Or, do you really believe this? — Metaphysician Undercover

It's not just me. See the link to Universal Language in the previous post. I'm making a broad general statement, that you may be interpreting in a narrow sense. I'm merely repeating the opinions of serious scientists -- Wheeler, Tegmark, Fredkin, Lloyd, etc -- that the physical reality of our universe may be viewed as our sensory interpretation of abstract mathematical Information --- see Interface Reality below.

Of course, this is not a mainstream view, but I'm using it for personal philosophical purposes, not an academic technical thesis. These mathematical-minded scientists are implying that we are living in the Matrix, running a digital program. I don't take that metaphor too literally, but as an analogy, it fits neatly into my Enformationism worldview. So, yes, I believe it --- provisionally. :joke:

Digital Physics : In physics and cosmology, digital physics is a collection of theoretical perspectives based on the premise that the universe is describable by information. It is a form of digital ontology about the physical reality. According to this theory, the universe can be conceived of as either the output of a deterministic or probabilistic computer program, a vast, digital computation device, or a mathematical Isomorphism to such a device.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_physics

Interface Reality : http://bothandblog6.enformationism.info/page21.html

If that is your view, and belief, how do you account for all that meaning which is excluded as not meaningful, by that position, as I explained above? Do you believe that it is acceptable to exclude any meaning which cannot fit into the digital representation, as not meaningful? Isn't that contradictory? — Metaphysician Undercover

I assume that by "excluded", you are referring to "discarding, all that meaning which falls in between, as neither 0 nor 1". But that's not how I understand the digital compression process. Instead, it's similar to Quantum Superposition, in that all values between 0 and 1 are possible, but not actual, until the superposition is "collapsed" by a measurement. The original Intention is still in-there, but un-knowable until the meaning is "measured" by a mind that "resonates" with the intent. In other words, the receiver must already know something about the significance of the communication.

I'm not into all the technical details, but some Information theorists view the secret to compression as, not either/or, but as all-of-the-above. However, exactly what triggers the decompression is just as unclear as in Quantum Theory. It seems to have something to do with a Conscious Mind extracting Information as a Measurement of Meaning. That notion fits into my Enformationism thesis, even though I can't spell-out the exact mechanics of it. I simply liken it to a physical Phase Change, such as water to ice.

Besides there is no actual Meaning transmitted in a Shannon communication --- only abstract mathematical symbols, that can be used to define conventional relationships, which the receiving mind interprets as Meaning. Anything deeper than that vague summary is way over my pointy head. :

Superposition of meaning : Shannon's theory of information was built on the assumption that the information carriers were classical systems. Its quantum counterpart, quantum Shannon theory, explores the new possibilities arising when the information carriers are quantum systems.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/ ... .2018.0903

Phase Transition : Phase transitions occur when the thermodynamic free energy of a system is non-analytic for some choice of thermodynamic variables
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_transition
Note : I interpret "non-analytic" to mean that nobody knows what the intermediate steps are, between before & after the change. It's like magic.

Meaning Communication : In the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metasemantics, meaning "is a relationship between two sorts of things: signs and the kinds of things they intend, express, or signify"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning_(philosophy)
Note : it takes two to tango : sender & receiver must have something in common -- they must be on the same wavelength.