Introduction: Information Is What Information Does

Adriaans, Pieter; Benthem, Johan van

doi:10.1016/b978-0-444-51726-5.50006-6

Cited by 21 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 33 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…They brook information-theoretic descriptions of (clusters of) neurons. They do not consider all the different notions of information currently on the market (see Adriaans, 2018 ). Nevertheless, they are right to distinguish “engineering information” from “semantic information.” While the latter consists of true propositions that can be apprehended—believed, known—by an epistemic subject, the former concerns non-epistemic phenomena such as the probability of a datum and the freedom of choice in transmitting a signal.…”

Section: Behavior and The Brainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Minds, Brains, and Capacities: Situated Cognition and Neo-Aristotelianism

Glock

2020

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article compares situated cognition to contemporary Neo-Aristotelian approaches to the mind. The article distinguishes two components in this paradigm: an Aristotelian essentialism which is alien to situated cognition and a Wittgensteinian “capacity approach” to the mind which is not just congenial to it but provides important conceptual and argumentative resources in defending social cognition against orthodox cognitive (neuro-)science. It focuses on a central tenet of that orthodoxy. According to what I call “encephalocentrism,” cognition is primarily or even exclusively a computational process occurring inside the brain. Neo-Aristotelians accuse this claim of committing a “homuncular” (Kenny) or “mereological fallacy” (Bennett and Hacker). The article explains why the label “fallacy” is misleading, reconstructs the argument to the effect that encephalocentric applications of psychological predicates to the brain and its parts amount to a category mistake, and defends this argument against objections by Dennett, Searle, and Figdor. At the same time it criticizes the Neo-Aristotelian denial that the brain is the organ of cognition. It ends by suggesting ways in which the capacity approach and situated cognition might be combined to provide a realistic and ecologically sound picture of cognition as a suite of powers that flesh-and-blood animals exercise within their physical and social environments.

show abstract

Section: Behavior and The Brainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Minds, Brains, and Capacities: Situated Cognition and Neo-Aristotelianism

Glock

2020

Front. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…It has been pointed out a number of times that our everyday concept of "information" is multifaceted and seems to defy simple characterization (see for example Adriaans & van Benthem, 2008;Floridi, 2010). There are a number of alternative definitions of information that attempt to capture these different aspects of what we mean by "being informed".…”

Section: The Information Argumentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Compressibility and the Algorithmic Theory of Laws

Wheeler¹

2019

Principia

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The algorithmic theory of laws claims that the laws of nature are the algorithms in the best possible compression of all empirical data. This position assumes that the universe is compressible and that data received from observing it is easily reproducible using a simple set of rules. However, there are three sources of evidence that suggest that the universe as a whole is incompressible. The first comes from the practice of science. The other two come from the nature of the universe itself: the presence of chaotic behavior and the nature of quantum systems also suggests that the universe is incompressible. This paper evaluates these sources and argues that none provides a convincing case to reject the algorithmic theory of laws.

show abstract

“…By the early Renaissance, the French word information came to be used interchangeably to refer to such things as '"investigation," "education," "the act of informing or communicating knowledge," and "intelligence"' (Adriaans & Van Benthem, 2008, p. 8). However, by the end of the seventeenth century, the original technical sense of the word had disappeared, as British Empiricists who returned to Platonic sources chose instead to use the term 'idea' (Adriaans & Van Benthem, 2008), from 'eidos', the Greek word for Platonic Form (Dusek, 2006). It was only in the twentieth century that 'information' began to recover its technical connotation.…”

Section: Understanding Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Overcoming Information Aesthetics: In Defense of a Non-Quantitative Informational Understanding of Artworks

Hernández-Ramírez

2016

CITAR Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Attempts to describe aesthetic artefacts through informational models have existed at least since the late 1950s; but they have not been as successful as their proponents expected nor are they popular among art scholars because of their (mostly) quantitative nature. However, given how information technology has deeply shifted every aspect of our world, it is fair to ask whether aesthetic value continues to be immune to informational interpretations. This paper discusses the ideas of the late Russian biophysicist, Mikhail Volkenstein concerning art and aesthetic value. It contrasts them with Max Bense's 'information aesthetics', and with contemporary philosophical understandings of information. Overall, this paper shows that an informational but not necessarily quantitative approach serves not only as an effective means to describe our interaction with artworks, but also contributes to explain why purely quantitative models struggle to formalise aesthetic value. Finally, it makes the case that adopting an informational outlook helps overcome the 'analogue vs digital' dichotomy by arguing the distinction is epistemological rather than ontological, and therefore the two notions need not be incompatible.

show abstract

Introduction: Information Is What Information Does

Cited by 21 publications

References 33 publications

Minds, Brains, and Capacities: Situated Cognition and Neo-Aristotelianism

Minds, Brains, and Capacities: Situated Cognition and Neo-Aristotelianism

Compressibility and the Algorithmic Theory of Laws

Overcoming Information Aesthetics: In Defense of a Non-Quantitative Informational Understanding of Artworks

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About