Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id RAA24548 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 17 Jan 2001 17:04:59 GMT Message-ID: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3101745BE2@inchna.stir.ac.uk> From: Vincent Campbell <v.p.campbell@stir.ac.uk> To: "'memetics@mmu.ac.uk'" <memetics@mmu.ac.uk> Subject: RE: DNA Culture .... Trivia? Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2001 17:03:40 -0000 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: text/plain Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
I've strung a couple of different replies here together, to help me
(if no-one else).
<<Vincent:
> Or, in other words, what kind of information could be bereft of
> meaning?>>
<Derek:
> In information theory, informational entropy is defined as H =
> sigma(-xlog2x) where x is the frequency of a token, symbol or event. A
> random series of n events (or a gibberish text of n symbols) will have
> high
> informational entropy H as all xs will be near enough 1/n. Where one or
> more symbols are overrepresented relative to the others, or the series of
> events are not random, the value of H will be smaller. You can therefore
> predict if a phenomenon is likely to contain information without knowing
> its
> meaning. Thus a message from an extraterrestrial civilisation might be
> recognisable as such without having a clue as to what it is about.>
>
Well, this was partly my point. SETI works on this basis of looking
for patterns in radio waves from distant stars, but although the specifics
of any pattern they may (improbably) find may elude us, the 'meaning' of it
would be simple to the SETI people- evidence of intelligent
extra-terrestrial life elsewhere in the universe.
<Joe: There is such a thing; ordered sequences do not have to mean
> anything. Just ask Robin faichnet, or read THE MATHEMATICAL
> THEORY OF INFORMATION by Shannon and Weaver. In fact,
> something is not information only when it is random. This means
> that it has no discernible pattern that can be symbolized in some
> sort of shorthand; in other words, it is incompressible. The
> sequence 001001001001001001001001001001001001001001001...
> can be symbolized, and thus compressed, by the statement
> "reiterate sequence 001 ad infinitum", but what meaning does it
> have?>
>
What I was driving at in my initial question Joe, was might we distinguish
meaningful information, and thus a meme, from other kinds of information in
your conception?
I think you're talking not so much about meaning but about importance
(relevance? significance?), after all you mentioned utility (what it does).
There's nothing necessarily consequential about the sequence of numbers
above, but it's not meaningless, in the sense that it has pattern, as you
say. If a SETI astronomer received 001001001... from Alpha Centauri, it
would have consequence/meaning to them- meaning is context-sensitive, which
is the other thing you were saying.
To give another example, switch on a radio or TV, and put them on an untuned
channel. What do you get? 'Meaningless' white noise, right? But that
noise does have a meaning- it's the background noise of the Big Bang (not
exclusively). In other words it conveys a particular piece of information
about the universe, that is generally entirely inconsequential for most
people, most of the time- in a social sense that is.
If you're trying to indicate what distinguishes memes from other phenomena
then saying they are pieces of meaningful information doesn't get us very
far in resolving with the within/between minds problem. I don't see how it
resolves the problems of either view to point where one can incorporate both
of them.
Vincent
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