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  • Post #11

Hi John -- Thanks for your comments.

I think I see what you mean with your dichotomy of energy and information. My problem with terms like "energy" or "raw awareness" is that although they're evocative, they don't articulate any of the important structure of what's going on in processes that define and communicate information, either at the physical level or at the human level. For example, that information always appears from a specific point of view in space, in a specific ongoing present moment, in a context of ongoing relationships with other viewpoints.

I think the key issue is whether we're using objective language, or language that reflects a standpoint inside the real-time web of communications. Both are needed. Our intellectual tradition (evolved in writing) has from the beginning adopted a standpoint outside the world, describing things as they are in themselves, abstracting from the context of present-time relationships that make what they are meaningful. That's not at all a bad way to describe the world, but it's one-sided. It abstracts the lasting information from the living context.

The two-way participatory aspect of oral culture, including some electronic media, suggests that a different conceptual language can be developed to describe the world from inside the web of communicating viewpoints. That should help us unpack the highly-evolved complexity that's hidden when we talk about objective "energy" or subjective "awareness" as existing in themselves.

System logged me out two seconds before I posted the above...

Thanks -- Conrad

Conrad,

I certainly agree about the fundamentally subjective nature of information. Even forming a thought or concept requires framing information in a particular fashion that has to essentially isolate it from context; ie, the signal from the noise. I compare it to taking a picture. We have to set the shutter speed, aperture, focus, lighting, distance, angles, etc to create a clear image and if you mess any one of those up, it's more confusion/noise than perceptiveness/signal. You are looking at these ages of information evolution as going through some very basic steps on the development of our sense of awareness. I'm simply making a related observation about how and why we think of properties, such as energy and awareness as inarticulate. They are dynamic, not static and to be able to express a concept, we need to freeze it. That 'outside,' objective sense of the way things are, is a belief in this framing as real, when it is actually a process of distilling that frame out of its dynamic context. Think in terms of the uncertainty principle of position vs. momentum. What is position for something that is moving? Even a moving car doesn't have an exact position, let alone some subatomic point/quantum of energy! If we totally froze something, we would have to freeze it down to that subatomic level and you would have a temperature of absolute zero and there would be no reality as we know it, since so much of the energy manifesting it is momentum. So what you might think of as inarticulate, I see as foundational to that process of articulation.

Sorry to sound worked up there, but I have problems with this idea that everything is information.

Regards,

John

Hello Conrad,

You wrote very good essay. I really like you thinking about verbal and oral speech communication.

Specifically-human symbolic communication is not the main topic of my essay, but I hope you will still read it. My essay is about the imagining, analogous imagining and about how people think. I also wrote down my thoughts about logical design and ultimate goals of communication.

I also want to remind you foundational-level observations made by Lewis Carroll. These observations are important for the better understanding of the speech communication. For the first one, I could not find an exact quote .. it is about Alice saying that she knows what she thinks by speaking it out. Them the others are .. I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then ... I don't think ... then you shouldn't talk, said the Hatter ... He was part of my dream, of course ... but then I was part of his dream, too...

My essay is a part of a large futuristic work like one called Summa Technologae by S. Lem. I hope you have your ideas to share.

You may look at my entry about imagining the future. I hope my essay will encourage you to learn more about ways of knowing and to apply analogous imagining in your field of interests.

Please disregard any typo mistakes you may encounter.

Cheers,

Margarita Iudin

    Dale,

    Another excellent essay this year, looking in a perceptive way and identifying important things we take for granted, including erroneously i.e. "that every detail of this reality is also physically observable".

    I particularly agree with; "The nature of communication itself tends to hide its own functionality." and your also previous suggestions that; "the reason we've

    been unable to clarify the role of measurement in quantum theory, or the relation between quantum mechanics and relativity, is that we haven't understood the communications capacity of the universe as something remarkable and significant."

    So true in so many ways, and I'm very glad you didn't get into promoting superluminal nonsense. I look into the paradoxical elements of SR and find, by analysing the 'method' of communication (fundamentally OAM transfer) that we can derive ALL effects with classical dynamics.

    Funnily enough I show that; "It's true that to concentrate on serious issues we need to be able to be alone by ourselves." so send Bob and Alice off very much alone to work it out! (hopefully in a more understandable way than QM)

    String of valuable little jewels, excellently written and presented, top marks, very well done. I do like to find commonality in such totally different aspects.

    Best wishes

    Peter

    Margarita --

    Thank you for your comment! Though I didn't note it in my essay, I do think imagination plays a fundamental role in human communication. I did suggest that there's a deep dimension of communication that's prior to language. In this dimension of emotional connection we're essentially learning to imagine the other person as another person, from very early on. A book I like very much, Vasudevi Reddy's How Infants Know Minds, describes the various stages of this development. The key point for me is that the "you" aspect of existential connection is already in play before we begin learning to imagine the "it" aspect, exploring the object-world we share with others. And the "I" aspect, learning to imagine ourselves, comes much later, only as we begin learning to talk.

    As to your term "analogical" -- I do think there are profound analogies to be explored between the structure of physical communications that I described in my previous essays and the systems of human connection discussed in this current essay. Apart from noting that in both cases, "communications systems tend to hide their own functionality," I wasn't able to develop this theme here.

    Conrad

    Hi Peter --

    Thanks for your generous comments; I'm very glad you found my perspective on communication useful to you.

    On my first read through your essay I found it rather tightly focused on a particular aspect of spin-measurement that I don't feel at all competent to assess. But I'll try again to pull out what you're saying about the method of communication.

    As I understand it, though, quantum entanglement and the issue of correlation of distant measurements applies to any measurement of a quantum system, not just to spin. Does your argument generalize that way?

    As to "superluminal nonsense" -- I think the seeming "paradox" arises from the very basic, nearly unquestioned assumption that all aspects of physics should make sense within a single unified structure. Yet all evidence seems to indicate that the way QM describes measurement doesn't fit into the causal structure of Relativistic spacetime.

    If we think of physics rather as a communications system, though, we should expect there to be a number of essentially different structural frameworks, in base-level physics. That's because any meaningful (measurable) interaction always requires a context of other kinds of interactions, to which it makes a difference. Though I'm not yet able to argue this very persuasively, I think it's true that if the physical world were really the kind of coherent, unified mathematical structure that's usually imagined, it could support no observable information.

    So I'm not surprised that QM gives us one system of correlations between our observations and Relativity gives us an essentially different one. The two don't contradict each other, and both seem to be required to support the kind of world in which things are measurable.

    Thanks again -- Conrad

    4 days later

    Conrad,

    Your essay is as well written and entertaining as it is insightful. Same goes for your 2012 contest essay "An Observable Universe." Your remarks on communication, subject-object duality, and context resonate, for me, with the lesson taught us by the quixotic 19th century search for a complete and consistent axiomatic system. They also bring to mind the distinction Feynman drew between "Babylonian" and "Greek" mathematics.

    It may be that much of the alienation between content and connection, which you talk about, can be traced back to Shannon's seminal paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" (1948). For example, Shannon says in the introduction:

    "The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point...a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning ; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem."

    Good luck,

    Ben

      Dear Conrad,

      Great essay. As I understand you, that our very possibility to rationalize the world is dependent of our communication system. A system that itself changes in the process of evolution. This challenges my kantian approach in my essay to understand physics from the precondition of experience.

      From that it would follows, that the precondition as itself is subjected to the evolution of communication process. And so our physical understanding of world. This is hard to swallow as we as physicist think that physics describes the world as it is. What do you think?

      Luca

        Luca --

        Thanks very much! Yes, I think the project of uncovering a rational pattern in the physical world could only be conceived once the Greeks got used to reading and writing as a form of everyday communication. Of course, the long development of thought leading eventually to modern physics was subject to many different cultural influences. But our communications systems play a special role in the evolution of consciousness, roughly parallel to the role of reproductive systems in biological evolution.

        I'll post some thoughts on Kant and the idea of "preconditions" under your essay. But to clarify, I agree that physics describes the world as it is, independently of how we humans imagine it. I think -- as you suggested also -- that what's relevant for understanding physics are the physical preconditions for the kinds of events we use as measurements, i.e. events that define and communicate definite information.

        The communications systems that constitute our human world are quite distinct from those that constitute the physical world. But both are complex and multi-layered. I think we're only beginning to recognize this kind of system and think about how they might evolve, for the reason I pointed out in section 2 of my essay... i.e. that when communications systems work, it's their content that stands out, not the "technology" that gets it across and gives it a context.

        Conrad

        Ben -- thanks for your interest and your kind words.

        You're right that Shannon's approach has been hugely influential. To become a useful concept in the physics of the last century, communication had to be reduced to the transmission of quantifiable data. What's unfortunate is that "the semantic aspects of communication" -- i.e. what makes information meaningful -- has rarely been connected with the physical issue of measurement. That involves a different and more complicated "engineering problem" -- how to set up the physical contexts that let particular kinds of information be determined. We tend to think of "meaning" as something we humans project onto the world.

        Conrad

        Hi John,

        I take your point about "inarticulate" concepts. My own notion that information depends on contexts of meaning is likewise extremely vague and general -- it points to an aspect of the world's structure that our intellectual tradition hasn't yet explored very deeply. So while you didn't actually sound worked up in your comment above, I wouldn't blame you for being so.

        I agree that "everything is information" doesn't take us very far. I would rather say, "all information is communicated information"... which opens up more interesting questions. I'm not sure yet how that relates to the concept of energy. But clearly you're pointing to the dynamic aspect of connections, in contrast to the relatively fixed and stable data-content.

        Thanks -- Conrad

        5 days later

        Hi Conrad,

        Great essay! You offer good arguments supporting your views about communications technology and the future. I enjoyed reading your essay very much, especially the part about Communication and Community. I agree with you that technology had great impact on humanity's present, especially communications and electronic media. I believe that science and technology can lead us to a better future, and in my essay I try to discuss how to accelerate the path to that future. I'd be glad to take your opinion.

        Good luck in the contest, and best regards,

        Mohammed

          Mohammed -- Thank you very much. So far I've only glanced at your essay, but I can see that you've put some serious thought into the question of how science itself can become more efficient. I'll read it and comment as soon as I can.

          Conrad

          20 days later

          Hi Conrad,

          In a newly published Preprint from Aerts he tries to find quantum structures in macroscopic structures (language, cognition etc.). This might be interesting for you.

          And thanks for the interesting link you posted in my blog. I have to reread the paper again before I comment it. However it touches the main aspects of my essay.

          Regards,

          Luca

          Hi Conrad,

          Yours is one of a number of interesting and enlightening essays in this contest which I consider to be essential reading. I like your hopeful vision of how our symbolic communication technologies, from speech to writing to modern electronic technologies, has enhanced our engagement with others and enhanced our imagining of our world and our universe. As you say "But at least we're now seeing something basic about ourselves that's been taken for granted and largely ignored throughout our history". And I agree with you that "that has to help".

          Regards,

          Lorraine