Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id XAA26058 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Fri, 11 Feb 2000 23:05:59 GMT Message-Id: <200002112304.SAA16245@mail3.lig.bellsouth.net> From: "Joe E. Dees" <joedees@bellsouth.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2000 17:08:04 -0600 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: More on what memes are made of References: <200002110116.UAA03564@mail1.lig.bellsouth.net> In-reply-to: <Pine.GSO.4.05.10002120027010.23627-100000@wehiz.wehi.EDU.AU> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12b) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Date sent: Sat, 12 Feb 2000 00:35:37 +1100 (EST)
From: John Wilkins <wilkins@wehi.EDU.AU>
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Subject: Re: More on what memes are made of
Send reply to: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Nobody said that communication between people is physical interactions
> between things and nothing more, but it is *at least* physical
> interactions between things, and as such cannot escape the physical
> limitations on communications. It doesn't really matter if meaning is
> communicated from one perspective - that of communications theory. Apart
> from the obvious comment that we do not have direct access into the minds
> or in some cases even the cultures of the communicants (hence the problem
> of the hermeneutic circle), *any* analysis of information must be
> consonant with the technical notion of Shannon-Weaver information, and all
> the other related notions such as Algorithmic Information, Fisher
> Information and so on.
>
> Any other technical notion of information you may have in mind will need
> to be a fair bit more rigorous than the intuitive sense appealed to by
> semiotics and hermeneutics. Attempts have been made in the philosophy of
> language, but they still aren't fully explicated. Usually they either go
> for a referential notion qua Dummett and Davidson, a causal notion qua
> Kitcher and Putnam, or appeal to some Platonist notion qua Frege. If they
> rely upon decidability, as does Dretske's account, they *must* be
> Shannon-Weaver friendly, since a decision is a binary piece of
> information, ie, a bit.
>
> "Common sense" notions of information are misleading and generally false.
>
The realm of meaning is "in addition to", not "instead of" the realm
of being.
>
> John Wilkins
> Walter and Eliza Hall Institute
> Sending from home on (ugh) pine
>
> On Thu, 10 Feb 2000, Joe E. Dees wrote:
>
> > > I too have degrees in analytic philosophy, and indeed I'm still getting
> > > another one, but although I've read Frege, Dummett, Davidson, and
> > > Dretske, et al I still do not see how meaning qua representation escapes
> > > the constraints upon transmitted information sensu Shannon-Weaver or
> > > Kolmogorov-Chaitin, etc.
> > >
> > > Peircean semiotics is taken very seriously by a number of people I
> > > respect, but they all recognise that information and content are two
> > > different aspects of any message and that they do not relate directly.
> > >
> > Perhaps you should read the existential and hermeneutic
> > phenomenologists as well as the Greimassian semioticians, so
> > that you do not reduce communications between people to
> > physical interactions between things, and nothing more.
>
>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
> Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
> For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
> see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
>
>
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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