دانلود کتاب اطلاعات در دنیای فیزیکی -چگونه بی‌معنایی معنادار می‌شود

We no longer find it unusual to see someone using their smartphone to chat face-toface with a friend in a distant city, even while standing in line waiting to purchase a cup of coffee with that same smartphone. Nor do we think it is magical that your car can guide you to an unfamiliar destination by telling you when to turn left or right down unfamiliar roads. We have even become familiar with the ability of law enforcement to identify a crime suspect by comparing the DNA evidence to data in a public DNA database. None of these examples of modern information technology at work seem remarkable anymore. They are all everyday occurrences in the information age. Curiously, however, if you ask what it is that we call information in these cases we get oddly diverse answers. An engineer might tell you that it’s electrical signals. A software designer might tell you that it’s bits. A philosopher might tell you that it’s meaning. Like the parable of the blind men explaining that an elephant is a hose or tree trunk, we seem unable to grasp the whole of the thing, even when it is ever-present. It’s been three-quarters of a century since Claude Shannon provided his definitive analysis of the mathematics of communication which effectively initiated the dawn of the information age. His insight into the nature of information sparked a revolution that reshaped almost every aspect of life in the 21th century. And yet, ironically, it has also contributed to a troubling ambiguity in our understanding of the nature of information. As many a writer has lamented, the technical precision that Shannon’s analysis achieved was in large measure made possible because he was able to bracket any discussion of the referential (“aboutness”) and normative (“useful”) attributes of information as it is colloquially understood. In a famous Scientific American article (that also inspired the foreword to a book version of Shannon’s “technical report”) Warren Weaver clarifies this special usage as follows: First off, we have to be clear about the rather strange way in which, in this theory, the word “information” is used; for it has a special sense which, among other things, must not be confused at all with meaning. And in the introductory paragraph of his “report,” Shannon also makes clear that for his purposes this defining property of “information” need not be considered because “These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.” Weaver further warns that this special use of the word “information” can lead to serious confusion if not carefully distinguished from the common sense understanding of the term. It is surprising but true that, from the present viewpoint, two messages, one heavily loaded with meaning and the other pure nonsense, can be equivalent as regards to information. Ironically, the incredible technological impact of this special restricted usage of the term “information” has effectively caused this special meaning to eclipse the colloquial meaning. In the intervening decades the tail has begun to wag the dog, so to speak, with the technical meaning and colloquial meaning often becoming interchanged or used ambiguously as though they are synonymous. This is particularly problematic in more popular treatments of the concept of information, such as in James Gleick’s award-winning book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. While recounting in wonderful detail the history and current implications of this revolutionary theory we find no attempt to even consider questions about meaning or use, as though these issues are peripheral. Of course, the history of philosophical debate over these “peripheral” issues has been raging for millennia and shows no signs of having reached a resolution. In many respects, these debates have been carried out with different terminology over issues of representation, theories of knowledge, the concept of value, the nature of purpose, etc. Since Shannon’s contribution, these philosophical conversations have also begun to incorporate discussions of the relevance of this special interpretation of the information concept. Scholarly efforts to integrate information theory into the philosophy of mind and theories of knowledge have given rise to a number of groundbreaking books on information by such authors as Bar-Hillel and Carnap, Wiener, Dretske, Millikan, Floridi and Skyrms, just to name a few. University departments, international professional societies and professional journals focused on different approaches to information have also grown in numbers over the years. So, 75 years after Shannon, one might reasonably assume that only modest adjustments to our knowledge of information are possible. How could there be any fundamental questions that have not been considered and answered? The title of this book—Information in a Physical World—hints that a fundamental question does indeed remain unanswered. The title cryptically juxtaposes two quite different understandings of the concept of information. On the one hand, bits of information in the form of physical images, texts and numbers are found everywhere in the modern world. This physicality is obvious, but its consequences tend to be relatively minor. On the other hand, the meaning conveyed by these tokens is not any part of their physicality, and yet it is nevertheless causally relevant, often initiating massive changes in societies and their physical surroundings. But this difference in effect seems to violate a common assumption that only physically present properties have causal effects.