agrippa1

Restated: Does a book contain information? (Also, does information need to be true to qualify as information?) It's more fundamental that that. Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen tried to refute QM with the so-called EPR paradox. Bell came back with an answer that seems to shut their objections up, if it turns out that Bell is correct. The experimental data is still incomplete (as far as I know) but if Bell is right, it means we have to look deeper into the issue to find the truth. I'm with Einstein on this, but Bell's inequality is a tough one to reason through. (How does one photon "know" that the other photon was measured a certain way?) The ramifications lead to much more weirdness than the smearing of velocity by position and vice versa.

The broadening of concepts is as important as the narrowing of concepts, so in and of itself, it's no sin to call both information, so long as the concept referred to by "information" encompasses both examples. (though it would be nice to have one, static meaning stuck to each term) But how in heaven's name would we know that the radio waves originated from an extraterrestrial intelligence?

It's not what you think... http://online.wsj.com/public/page/8_0004.h...ctid=1352499662

Okay, I'll accept that, but if Kant provided the "theory," QM provided the "proof." Until we can recast the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM as a theoretical model and not a fact, and reason our way through Bell's inequalities, there will be rational, intelligent people out there who believe that the cat in the box is both dead and alive until they open the box, and that we are each living in our own universe consisting of the superposition of an infinite number of possible universes, whose specific nature is not determined until we observe it. That is the reality that modern physics gives us.

Sorry, I took that meaning from this comment: Would you say that one of the requirements of "information" is prior bi-directional flow, that is, verification of a conscious source? This is clearly required for languages (to synchronize the users), but is absent from the DNA and the million monkeys examples.

I agree with what you say here about information, but what David is saying (or what I understand) is that information is not contained in the medium used to communicate knowledge from one consciousness to another, it only exists in the consciousness, and what is in the message, or what have you, is something else, but not "information." I think what is trying to be avoided here is the possibility that we'll have to, at some point, determine whether something encoded in a message is, in fact, "information," i.e., that it was originated from a conscious being. DNA is one example of this, but it is clear enough from our limited knowledge of evolution that the stuff encoded in DNA strands is not "information." An ID'er, however, if allowed to use "information" in this sense, could argue that DNA is "God's language, manifested through the process of genetic evolution" (or some such rubbish), and claim that it is, in fact, information. Another example that comes to mind is the automated story generators written by programmers a few years ago, or the million monkeys with typewriters. I think that the parallel between DNA and the million monkeys is a valid one, allowing that the monkeys' product was passed through an editor, and each draft was created through random changes, with the editor selecting the best drafts for redraft, and trashing the rest. (The editor being natural selection) This all brings us back to the interesting parallel between our conscious thought and the automatic "logic" of Darwinism, which Rand alludes to in PWNI (I'm listening on iPod, and just heard an exploration of the "value" system of plants and animals and how it relates and differs from our rational conscious, not sure exactly where it is in the book). There seems to be (just to drive David a little more nuts) an intelligence of sorts at work in evolution guiding the survival and development of species on Earth. This parallel appears to be recognized by some as a differentiator integrating conscious rational intelligence with the natural evolutionary process, a misintegration which causes confusion in a lot of people's minds.

I'm not getting your meaning here. I thought I could at least get you to agree that "information" in the medium of communication is still information. "Information" is not identical in meaning to "knowledge." The examples you give above are all examples of objects of reality subject to perception, not the encoding, in any meaningful measure, of "information" about them that is not tied to direct observation, which DNA is. I'm not arguing that God made DNA. I'm an atheist, from a philosophical and scientific viewpoint, and I think it's important to delve into the areas where objectivism (which I consider to be "truth" rather than "a philosophy") might reveal contradictions. This is off-topic a bit, but the attacks on Kant by objectivists seem misdirected to me. The biggest threat to objectivism in my view is the interpretation of quantum mechanics, which rejects physical reality beyond the observable and opens it to the possibility of "random" (i.e., non-causal, non-rational) effects. The combination of QM with chaos theory allows for macro effects from non-deterministic causation, which in effect opens the door to mysticism. I look at the Kantian effects of QM on reality and I understand why Einstein objected that "God does not play dice with the universe."

Thanks for the post on information. Adam Reed's definition is what I have in mind when I use the term. I don't accept that the usage is an anti-concept. I distinguish information from perception-based knowledge (which is what I think you define above), in that information is knowledge gained from or given to another consciousness. Information implies action, of encoding knowledge into language and transmitting the encoded language across a physical medium to another consciousness. To say that the thing being transmitted - whether it be pressure waves in air, symbols on paper or patterns of photons in a glass fiber - is not (or does not contain) information is, in my opinion, an incomplete view of the concept. What term would you give the "information" in transit? Certainly not "knowledge" since the air, paper and fiber are not conscious of it. Certainly not "arbitrary, not meaningful" data? Now, if I get you correctly, what you really object to is using the term for "information" which is not relayed from or to a consciousness, such as genetic "information" encoded in DNA. That would be a fair objection, and a definition of information would stipulate the "to or from consciousness." But then we find a trap, for what happens when man decodes the genome and is able to gain, from only its DNA code, useful knowledge about a species or individual, without direct perception? I can see how the concept of information in that context might make one uncomfortable.

I think you mean: "Does that object "have" knowledge about resisting the flow of water?" I would argue that the object contains, in its form, information about resisting the flow of water. A rational mind would be required to use that information to discover the concepts required to understand resistance, etc. There is a similarity between information of this sort and proper knowledge, but it seems that there is always a clear delineation between the two. There is also a similarity between our conscious differentiation and integration, and the processes that govern evolution. Your example of memes leads me to questions that I was pondering when I awoke this morning. I'm not an expert on the origins of religion, but I would guess that it has something to do with perceiving things we can't explain, like the big white disc that rises at night, and elk wandering randomly into hunting grounds. I believe these have to do with causality, or their failure to obey the principle of causality. So the questions are: How does man come to the conclusion of an unseen causer? This isn't just a long-held meme, I believe its virtually universal in human cultures, and there's good evidence that man will develop a God-concept independently. Once it has been conceptualized, any random event reinforces the concept, but how was it conceptualized in the first place? Is there an evolutionary reason for the concept of God? Was it developed to give man a place holder for reason so he wouldn't be paralyzed in the face of a random catastrophe, wondering, for instance, what's causing that mountain to spew fire and smoke (rather than getting the hell out of there screaming supplications)? If it's not an innate concept planted in our brains by our DNA, then it must derive from some other concepts. An argument could go that we see causality in things within our physical grasp, and therefore we assume causality in things outside of direct grasp, but wouldn't differentiation of events in terms of proximity provide a rational "explanation" absent causality? There seems to me to be an innate understanding of the universality of causality that leads us to form the concept "God." Is universal causality an organizing tool (that happens to provide us with a grasp of a fact of reality), or is it knowledge? Causality seems to be perceivable in the interactions of objects of reality, but how do we go from that to a universality of causality? So, it appears not to be universality of causality, since causality can be discerned through the differentiation and integration of the action of objects. Perhaps it's universality itself. Universality appears to be a good organizing tool - I believe it is the basis for our ability to recognize conceptual contradictions and to correct them. Is universality, non-contradiction, consistency, whatever you want to call it - is it "knowledge?" And, is it innate?

I'll buy that... The definition of terms is where existentialists seem to get lost - like Kant saying that "all bodies are heavy" represents innate knowledge, when, in fact, it merely defines the consciously created concept "body."

I don't know... Man is born with two eyes (for depth/distance perception) and orbitally articulated eyeballs with a sensor matrix (for directionality) at the (adjustable) focal point of their lenses. One could infer that these constitute a "knowledge" of the positional nature of reality, and that our ability to detect distance and direction informs our spatial conceptualization of reality. Further, our visual cortex seems to have evolved with the "knowledge" that entities can be detected through light/color discontinuities and boundary detection, reflecting what we hold as a basic quality of entities in reality. Our visual sense has evolved over millions of generations of mutations (or so the theory goes), by the process of Darwinian survival, which, in effect, eliminates contradictions between awareness and reality to increase the efficiency of behavior, much as reason eliminates contradiction through real-time differentiation and integration. Tabula rasa is an interesting principle because it rejects the possibility that some sort of knowledge is relayed to us through our DNA. It is clear that information about us is relayed through DNA, and that information about the nature of reality on Earth is implicit in our consequent physical structure, so can one really eliminate the possibility that knowledge is "planted" in our brains prior to independent perception? Of course, this possibility begs the question as to the origin of such knowledge, since it could not (by our current understanding) have originated from conscious perception, but only by the randomly-generated process of elimination of contradictions. One could argue away the contradiction by pointing out that the information is not properly "knowledge" because it is not relayed to us by perception, but instead is a part of us, i.e. that what we are is the tabula which is rasa. This seems to be a narrowing of the definition of "knowledge" to match the preconceived notion of tabula rasa. Kant took the argument of spatial awareness to argue for an a priori "knowledge" of the spatial nature of reality, which he then projected into the notion that space (and time) are merely organizational concepts used to process our perceptions, and not necessarily actual qualities of reality. From there he questioned reality itself, and thus reopened the door to God, soul, spirits, and the other hobgoblins of mysticism (which apparently was his original intent). It seems to me that even taking the foregoing evolutionary take on development of our tools of perception as including information about reality, there is a rational argument at hand that an evolutionary process of non-contradiction would provide us with an ever-increasingly "true" perception of reality, which we extend and define through rational thought.

Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, makes four.

I think infinite regress is avoided by our natural limitation of context. Speaking for myself, if I try to think of John looking at Mary looking at Joe looking at Sue, I can create this chain of perception on paper, or as a sequence of remembered relationships, but I can't conceptualize the entire progression at one time, except by a higher level abstract, which might be a sequence of three segments in a geometrical shape. For a consciousness regarding itself, I can conceptualize that, but to imagine a one regarding itself regarding itself, I find that each segment of the chain is identical and indistinguishable, and thus the same entity. A consciousness can't regard itself, and regard itself at the same time, in other words an entity can't have two identities. (Except by in two different consciousnesses contexts.) What Sartre is doing is like walking through a room with a table, circling around and entering the room again and saying, "see - two tables!" He circles around again and again, counting tables, as if they are different entities. In the "looking at" example above, if John looked at Mary looking at Joe looking at Sue looking at John, there appears to be an infinite progression of "looking at" in which John is looking at Mary an infinite number of times. This is imaginary and the product of context-switching, in reality, he is looking at her once. I don't think we are conscious of both our consciousness and the object of our perception at the same time, except as a higher, single conceptual abstract of ourselves being conscious of an object. Any more regressions is simply a mathematical measurement of a regression using "being conscious of" as the unit of measurement, and not a perceptual grasping of the regression. (typos)

Thought you all might get a chuckle from this... http://www.tonyrobbins.com/12tenets # 11 is the jaw-dropper

There is no such thing as a "collective right." There is no such thing as "the people," except as an abstract concept. A group of individuals might agree to pool their resources for their own benefit in some venture, but by doing so, they forfeit those resources to their actors (gov't), in hope that the result of the effort will benefit them individually. A government consists of the collected rights, power, and wealth forfeited by the individuals of a state. We certainly (in America) don't have the "right" to decide who gets to visit, work or settle here. (You might agree with the gov't on those issues, but that's a different thing) As for our right to live here, that "right" is contingent upon our acquiescence (not consent) to the enforced expropriation of the results of our life's efforts. That is not a "right," it's a ransom.

I agree. I think we are on the same page wrt this... I quibble with this, slightly. I think the fact that entities are independent of consciousness requires the concept of "consciousness," which is not required to perceive an existent thing and apply its implicit concept "entity." Rand refers to three stages of awareness: The sensory stage (an infant's "undifferentiated chaos"); the perceptual stage, in which "a group of sensations [is] automatically retained and integrated by the brain"; and the conceptual stage, in which "the (implicit) concept 'existent' undergoes three stages of development in man's mind," from undifferentiated "entity," to differentiated "identity," to integrated "unit." Without reading ahead, it seems that a fourth stage (or phase of the conceptual) should be made for the point at which man recognizes concepts as concepts. Until that point is reached, I would think that man is unaware of consciousness as a concept, and unable to reach a logical conclusion that reality is independent of his consciousness, or that there is a reason to consider such a possibility.

According to his wiki-blurb, he was a contributor to something called the "Copenhagen Consensus." So it looks like you're spot on.

(WARNING: I just started reading ITOE, and have been hammering chapter one against my skull the last couple of nights.) I pondered this issue in my sleep last night and woke up with a conclusion similar to Thomas': Reality is the absolute. "Entity" and "attribute" are concepts implicit in our percepts of reality. So while the thing that an entity is and the aspects of that thing, which we conceptualize as attributes, exist in reality, it takes a consciousness to ascribe the concepts "entity" and "attribute" to them (with "action" being another existent associated with a thing). The problem I see here is mainly semantics. Before I even knew who Ayn Rand was (about a year ago), I was working on a multi-layered awareness stack (from "reality" to "truth"), trying to explore the entire process of situational awareness (application being command and control common operating pictures). I quickly ran out of terms and/or ascribed new, specific meanings to existing words. Similarly, I think we've run out of words before we've fully differentiated the relevant concepts here. In this case we are using the words "attribute" and "entity" to describe two separate concepts (each): Entity is used to mean the concept of "entity" implicitly ascribed by a consciousness to an existent thing. It is also used to mean the existent thing itself. To claim that they are one and the same is to simply smear the meaning of the word across two concepts. That's not to say that the "entity" in our conceptual framework doesn't correspond to the "entity" in reality, only that there is a distinction that the conceptual "entity" requires a consciousness, while the existent "entity" does not. [edit] Also, I believe, the conceptual "entity" is not limited to a specific thing existent in reality, while the existent "entity" is.[\edit] The same can be said for the dual meanings of "attribute," as Thomas points out above. I think my own confusion with this led to a lot of bad logic and conclusions on my part, and this new understanding has allowed me to finally see that entities are the primary concept, implicit in the child's perception of an existent thing. Attributes follow, allowing identities to be ascribed, then finally units, the building blocks of rational thought. Sensory inputs, the "source" of all of this perception, are not conceptualized until much later, and while included in the sensory mechanism feeding perception, are not conceptual elements of perception.

The tumblers just clicked on a big chunk of this - no need to answer the other musings... Thanks again.

Okay, I'm with you on attributes. I was smearing into the term the concept of sensation, or the source of sensation. I think I see the mistake now. Thanks. (edit to reduce quote)

I think we are thinking the same thing. I'm saying that your life, in an imperfect (non-Objectivist) world is very likely not the life you would choose if you lived in a proper society. To put it into a concrete, would a slave who gives his life to kill his master (and thus end slavery for his family) be acting irrationally?

Are you saying here that entities equate to existence, but attributes don't? Attributes cannot exist without entities. Entities cannot exist without attributes. We sense entities through their attributes (their reflection or emission of light being the main one). The process of perception is: An entity exists. It has an attribute which is emission or reflection of light. We receive the light (not the entity) reflected or emitted by the entity. The reception of light into our senses causes our brain to surmise the existence of the entity. We don't "re"-"ceive" entities, we "per"-"ceive" them, that is, we take or grasp them "through" something, that something being the process of sensory input. In electronic warfare, radar reception (a strong analog to vision) can be spoofed by intentionally misleading emission of EM energy. Can I spoof your perception in the same way? Apparently: Holographs create a spoofed appearance of an entity where there is only a microscopic interference pattern. Television spoofs your vision with light patterns generated artificially on a phosphor screen by accelerated electrons. Do the entities in the holograph exist? Do the football players on my TV exist there? To my perception, the answer seems to be: yes. In "reality" I know that the answer is: no. And I don't need high tech to make this point: I can create the illusion of an entity with attributes where there is only pigments mixed with oils, spread on a cloth. How does a painting create the perception of an entity? By presenting similar attributes to the perceived entity. Similar enough so the mind is tricked into perceiving the entity. So if two entities with similar sensed attributes, but with completely different states of existence, can be perceived identically, are entities really primary, or is the perception of entities based on the primacy of their attributes? I don't know the answer... In my last post, I distanced myself from these prior musings and admitted that perception of entities is a valid concept, and that we probably don't "learn" how to perceive entities, but simply perceive them directly into our consciousness. But this perception requires an automatic translation of received light into perceived entities, which implies an innate "knowledge" of the nature of entities (i.e., that they have boundaries to detect, "colors", 3-D presence and shapes). An evolutionary approach to this could be taken, that is, that the brain randomly evolved ways of translating sensory inputs into useful perception of reality, with the evolution guided by the relative efficacy of each perceptual development. Any contradictions between perception and reality would be eliminated through natural selection. Over hundreds of millions of generations, the process created a perceptive model that closely reflects reality. In that approach, the innate "knowledge" would have been developed over many million years and provided to each of us encoded in our DNA. I was wondering if anyone had a take on this question, or if it considered in any of the literature. Or if it considered outside the bounds of philosophy, because it requires special sciences. By the way, I admit I'm anthropomorphizing to work through a conceptual process, but I'm doing so about the human brain. Is giving man's brain human characteristics really a violation of logic?

Hmmm... I know you have a mind, even a rational one, by observing the concepts you've embedded in these funny symbols you've put on my computer screen. I have a heck of a lot more evidence for your existence, and your mind's, than I've ever seen claimed for ghosts, spirits, souls and gods... Who, apparently, never existed? But back on topic, the point of telepathy would be a valid one if we didn't have some idea that our minds function in similar manners and process sensory data similarly. I believe we can agree that we all experience similar emotional responses from certain types of music. This is not telepathy or some spooky action at a distance, it is the encoding of emotion into musical components, just as concepts are encoded in our vocal grunts. (the next question is: are the emotional responses to music learned or innate?) However, I agree with your point (?) that you don't need to analyze music rationally in order to determine what you like and don't like. (but maybe to determine why you like or don't like) Existentialism means never having to define your terms.

The meaning of "life" has been shifted to an irrelevant abstraction here. (unless we're willing to shift the meaning of "choose" as well)

We're in complete agreement on this. I'm not advocating controls, I'm just trying to figure out how Greenspan could advocate them while still holding on to Objectivist principles (which I believe his book shows he does). There seems to be a contradiction there, and with AS still fresh on the brain, I made a connection that seemed to give an explanation. But, peace. I admit it's a cockamamie theory, and it doesn't deserve any more of our time.