Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 6

[Soupie]

@Soupie

Google:

"ken wilber integral maps"

The bit that I've read so far has been helpful.

An Overview of Integral Theory

 

[Pharoah]

I'm halfway through this, The Concept of Information
i highly recommend it.
esp. @Soupie

 

[Pharoah]

Eliot's (1969, p. 147) famous quotation:

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

 

[Constance]

I'm halfway through this, The Concept of Information
i highly recommend it.

Excellent resource, Pharoah. I'm just getting into it now. Thanks so much for linking it.

 

[Constance]

Oak Leaves are Hands
by Wallace Stevens

In Hydaspia, by Howzen
Lived a lady, Lady Lowzen,
For whom what is was other things.

Flora she was once. She was florid
A bachelor of feen masquerie,
Evasive and metamorphorid.

Mac Mort she had been, ago,
Twelve-legged in her ancestral hells,
Weaving and weaving many arms.

Even now, the centre of something else,
Merely by putting hand to brow,
Brooding on centuries like shells.

As the acorn broods on former oaks
In memorials of Northern sound,
Skims the real for its unreal,

So she in Hydaspia created
Out of the movement of few words,
Flora Lowzen invigorated

Archaic and future happenings,
In glittering seven-colored changes,
By Howzen, the chromatic Lowzen.

 

[Pharoah]

Peters:
"True knowledge is not to possess information, but to throw it away. It is to run up against the borders of one’s own ignorance, to recognize one’s mortality and finitude."
@Constance I have a hunch you will like Peters' "Information: Notes Toward a Critical History"
I am enjoying it immensely. Found a pdf after a bit of a search.

 

[smcder]

@Constance I have a hunch you will like Peters' "Information: Notes Toward a Critical History"
I am enjoying it immensely. Found a pdf after a bit of a search.[/QUOTE]

Writing

 

[Constance]

Peters:
"True knowledge is not to possess information, but to throw it away. It is to run up against the borders of one’s own ignorance, to recognize one’s mortality and finitude."
@Constance I have a hunch you will like Peters' "Information: Notes Toward a Critical History"
I am enjoying it immensely. Found a pdf after a bit of a search.

Thanks. I will read it. I found the direct link, copied below, in that wonderful bibliography Steve just posted.

information hx.pdf

 

[Constance]

So is the 90-pp. paper you linked before that by Capurro and Hjorland, increasingly read since its publication as shown in this graph:

The concept of information
R Capurro, B Hjørland - Annual review of information science and technology, 2003
Cited by 544 - Related articles - All 16 versions

 

[Pharoah]

So is the 90-pp. paper you linked before that by Capurro and Hjorland, increasingly read since its publication as shown in this graph:

The concept of information
R Capurro, B Hjørland - Annual review of information science and technology, 2003
Cited by 544 - Related articles - All 16 versions

I think it's the same article.

 

[Constance]

Here's a page about one of Peters's books, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (University of Chicago Press), which provides several reviewer comments and the table of contents. The ToC includes four chapter titles concerning para-normal types of communication.

Speaking into the Air

 

[Constance]

I think it's the same article.

Same as ?what article? Steve linked Peters's whole bibliography. I must be missing something here. Help.

 

[Pharoah]

Same as ?what article? Steve linked Peters's whole bibliography. I must be missing something here. Help.

I don't know what the question is either... I just like being helpful, so I took a stab at it

 

[smcder]

I don't know what the question is either... I just like being helpful, so I took a stab at it

Is the article that I linked to the same as the one you found?

Information: Notes Toward a Critical History

You said you found a PDF after a bit of a search, but you didn't post the link.

 

[Pharoah]

Is the article that I linked to the same as the one you found?

Information: Notes Toward a Critical History

You said you found a PDF after a bit of a search, but you didn't post the link.

The one you linked (that I did not link by Peters) is one and the same.

 

[Constance]

I think we are all on the same page --

information hx.pdf --

and I think it's a brilliant paper. How do you guys respond to it?

After reading the paper last night I browsed Peters's most recent book at amazon, which I've purchased for my Kindle app for $10.

The Marvelous Clouds

Here Peters goes beyond his critique of the reductivism of 'information theory into the meaning of media in deep philosophical terms. Here are a few reviewer comments:

“Wide-ranging, playful, erudite, and delightfully diverse,The Marvelous Clouds redefines media in the largest possible terms, as anything that communicates meaning, including bodies, the environment, and the world itself. Although this may seem to rob media of its specificity and therefore of its theoretical purchase, in Peters’s hands it becomes the occasion for making surprising and insightful connections. A treat for academics and general readers alike, this is a book not to be missed.” -- N. Katherine Hayles, author of How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis


“Peters’s dazzlingly intelligent and elegantly written book has the potential of marking a long-anticipated threshold in the world of media studies. Conversant with the philosophical traditions and with the ongoing debates in Germany, where this emerging discipline took its origin, his epistemological realism overcomes the conventional positions of the ‘linguistic turn’ and of ‘constructivism’ with a fresh and truly inspired unfolding of intuitions ranging from Martin Heidegger's ‘fourfold’ to the Emersonian philosophy of nature. Between earth and sky, Peters understands and analyzes media as the energy behind our environment’s permanent transformations. The Marvelous Clouds, I believe, is the foundational media epistemology that we have been awaiting for decades.” -- Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, author of Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature


The introductory pages in the amazon sample are well worth reading.

 

[Constance]

Early in the introduction, identifying an insight of McLuhen’s, Peters writes that "each medium has a grammar, an underlying language-like set of protocols for arranging the world and the organs of sensation into a distinct ratio, and that new media can both extend and do violence to (‘amputate’ was his term) the bodies of those coupled with them.” He expands the meaning of media/mediums to everything in nature and culture that informs what MP calls “the style” of being and expression of each living organism.

“If most mainstream media studies see media as objects or institutions, the tradition I represent takes media as modes of being.” (pg. 17)

 

[Pharoah]

The closest view I have read on information to my stance is Vigo:
Ronaldo Vigo (2013) Complexity over Uncertainty in Generalized Representational Information Theory (GRIT): A Structure-Sensitive General Theory of Information Information 4, 1-30; doi:10.3390/info4010001
A key to his RIT is that information is dependent on the construct. It is not a commodity out there in the environment, but relates to the construct that is interacting with the world...
I don't get much of what he writes, so I can't be too sure. His RIT is quite one-dimensional i.e. it lacks the hierarchy of constructs, speaking only of 'conceptual' constructs (as he defines it)

 

[Soupie]

The closest view I have read on information to my stance is Vigo:
Ronaldo Vigo (2013) Complexity over Uncertainty in Generalized Representational Information Theory (GRIT): A Structure-Sensitive General Theory of Information Information 4, 1-30; doi:10.3390/info4010001
A key to his RIT is that information is dependent on the construct. It is not a commodity out there in the environment, but relates to the construct that is interacting with the world...
I don't get much of what he writes, so I can't be too sure. His RIT is quite one-dimensional i.e. it lacks the hierarchy of constructs, speaking only of 'conceptual' constructs (as he defines it)

Here's the full article: http://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/4/1/1/pdf

"Abstract: What is information? Although researchers have used the construct of information liberally to refer to pertinent forms of domain-specific knowledge, relatively few have attempted to generalize and standardize the construct. Shannon and Weaver (1949) offered the best known attempt at a quantitative generalization in terms of the number of discriminable symbols required to communicate the state of an uncertain event. This idea, although useful, does not capture the role that structural context and complexity play in the process of understanding an event as being informative. In what follows, we discuss the limitations and futility of any generalization (and particularly, Shannon’s) that is not based on the way that agents extract patterns from their environment. More specifically, we shall argue that agent concept acquisition, and not the communication of states of uncertainty, lie at the heart of generalized information, and that the best way of characterizing information is via the relative gain or loss in concept complexity that is experienced when a set of known entities (regardless of their nature or domain of origin) changes. We show that Representational Information Theory perfectly captures this crucial aspect of information and conclude with the first generalization of Representational Information Theory (RIT) to continuous domains."

 

[Pharoah]

Here's the full article: http://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/4/1/1/pdf

"Abstract: What is information? Although researchers have used the construct of information liberally to refer to pertinent forms of domain-specific knowledge, relatively few have attempted to generalize and standardize the construct. Shannon and Weaver (1949) offered the best known attempt at a quantitative generalization in terms of the number of discriminable symbols required to communicate the state of an uncertain event. This idea, although useful, does not capture the role that structural context and complexity play in the process of understanding an event as being informative. In what follows, we discuss the limitations and futility of any generalization (and particularly, Shannon’s) that is not based on the way that agents extract patterns from their environment. More specifically, we shall argue that agent concept acquisition, and not the communication of states of uncertainty, lie at the heart of generalized information, and that the best way of characterizing information is via the relative gain or loss in concept complexity that is experienced when a set of known entities (regardless of their nature or domain of origin) changes. We show that Representational Information Theory perfectly captures this crucial aspect of information and conclude with the first generalization of Representational Information Theory (RIT) to continuous domains."

This passage below is more my way of thinking too, but I can't find good texts on internet:
"Oeser (1976) remarks that the objectivity of scientific knowledge is not attained through the elimination of the knower, but on the basis of the intersubjective information process. Information is a "system-relative concept" (Oeser, 1976, II, p. 86). Some classical theories of information define it with regard to the change on the receiver's model of reality; that is, as a pragmatic concept (MacKay, 1969; Morris, 1955). This is particularly the case with definitions based on system theory, second-order cybernetics and semiotics (Qvortrup, 1993). Kornwachs (1996) defines pragmatic information as an impinging entity, one that is able to change the structure and the behavior of systems. According to biologists like Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1980), as well as cyberneticians like Heinz von Foerster (1980, 1984) information is the observer's construction or a mental difference that makes and/or finds a difference in the external world. For Flückiger (1999), information is an individual's brain construct. According to Qvortrup (1993, p. 12), the conception of information as a mental difference "doesn't necessarily imply that the difference in reality that triggered the mental difference called information is a mental construction." [Capurro]