“…No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day. (Wiener 1948, 132; quoted in Floridi 2011, 91) It from bit . Otherwise put, every “it”—every particle, every field of force, even the space–time continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence (even if in some contexts indirectly) from the apparatus‐elicited answers to yes‐or‐no questions, binary choices, bits .…”
Section: The Metaphysics Of Informationmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day. (Wiener 1948, 132; quoted in Floridi 2011, 91)…”
An ontology of information belies our common intuitions about reality today and animates and governs both explicit scholarly study in philosophy and the sciences as well as the ideologies that are growing out of them. Transhumanism is one such technoscientific ideology that holds to a very specific ontology of information which need not be the only one on offer. This article argues that the transhumanist ontology of information exhibits gnostic and docetic religious overtones in it and that it devalues physical existence. At the same time, despite claiming a rejection of supernature, hypothetical transhumanist practices (such as mind‐uploading) posit the infosphere as a kind of supernatural realm that is often set in opposition to the natural world. This article presents a critique of transhumanist conceptions of information and offers an alternative ontology of information that more adequately accounts for the distinction between the natural and supernatural as well as the integrity of the physical world.
“…No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day. (Wiener 1948, 132; quoted in Floridi 2011, 91) It from bit . Otherwise put, every “it”—every particle, every field of force, even the space–time continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence (even if in some contexts indirectly) from the apparatus‐elicited answers to yes‐or‐no questions, binary choices, bits .…”
Section: The Metaphysics Of Informationmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day. (Wiener 1948, 132; quoted in Floridi 2011, 91)…”
An ontology of information belies our common intuitions about reality today and animates and governs both explicit scholarly study in philosophy and the sciences as well as the ideologies that are growing out of them. Transhumanism is one such technoscientific ideology that holds to a very specific ontology of information which need not be the only one on offer. This article argues that the transhumanist ontology of information exhibits gnostic and docetic religious overtones in it and that it devalues physical existence. At the same time, despite claiming a rejection of supernature, hypothetical transhumanist practices (such as mind‐uploading) posit the infosphere as a kind of supernatural realm that is often set in opposition to the natural world. This article presents a critique of transhumanist conceptions of information and offers an alternative ontology of information that more adequately accounts for the distinction between the natural and supernatural as well as the integrity of the physical world.
“…In positive feedback, the system reinforces the tendency/direction of its input and increases the response towards this direction over successive data iterations, which usually tends to disruption and instability. In negative feedback, the system response counterbalances its input tendency, which provides equilibrium and stability to the system's overall behavior (ASHBY, 1956, WIENER, 1948.…”
Section: General Conceptualizationmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…ince the 1960's, audio feedback has been inventively used in experimental approaches in music creation: from the use of the Larsen effect (BONER & BONNER, 1996) by guitar players in bands such as The Beatles and The Jimmy Hendrix Experience, to the creation of analog feedback circuitry in the avant-garde/experimental art-scene, in works by Robert Ashley, John Cage, David Tudor, Gordon Muma and Alvin Lucier (HOLMES, 2008). Alongside these experimental (maybe more empirical and intuitive) approaches, a theoretically motivated use of feedback in the art of the 1960's took place under the influence of cybernetics (WIENER, 1948;ASHBY, 1956) and system theory (BERTALANFFY, 1968) -that were popular at the time, for instance in works by Nicolas Schöffer or Roland Kayn (SANFILIPPO & VALLE, 2013;PATTESON, 2012).…”
This article presents practical and artistic contributions to the field of computer music systems based on audio feedback networks. The ideas that oriented the conception of two digital music instruments and examples of their use in the author's music practice are discussed. The article begins with a general conceptualization of feedback systems as well as a brief historical review of its use in experimental music. Later, a more specific contextualization of its application in recent computer music research and artwork is made, and two contributions are presented: the first is a network of cross-modulated sinusoidal oscillators (by frequency modulation), and the second is a network of algorithms for playing and transforming pre-recorded sound samples. In conclusion, examples of the artistic usage of the described systems to the creation of electroacoustic music are discussed.
“…But Shannon's communication theory was not the only information theory that became enormously popular in the scientific community of the United States in the late 1940s. Remarkably, mathematician Norbert Wiener independently developed the other great information theoretical proposal of the time, which he called "cybernetics" (Wiener 1948), and presented in a book of the same name, published in the same year as Shannon's paper and based closely on the notion of selfregulating systems and feed-back communication. Interestingly, his statistical concept of information interpreted as "negative entropy of the observed system" was formally identical to that developed by Shannon, except for the difference in its sign.…”
Section: Shannon's Theory and The American Schoolmentioning
Argument
In this comparative historical analysis, we will analyze the intellectual tendency that emerged between 1946 and 1956 to take advantage of the popularity of communication theory to develop a kind of informational epistemology of statistical mechanics. We will argue that this tendency results from a historical confluence in the early 1950s of certain theoretical claims of the so-called English School of Information Theory, championed by authors such as Gabor (1956) or MacKay (1969), and from the attempt to extend the profound success of Shannon’s ([1948] 1993) technical theory of sign transmission to the field of statistical thermal physics. As a paradigmatic example of this tendency, we will evaluate the intellectual work of Léon Brillouin (1956), who, in the mid-fifties, developed an information theoretical approach to statistical mechanical physics based on a concept of information linked to the knowledge of the observer.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
