Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id RAA24732 (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 17:23:55 GMT Message-Id: <200101171726.MAA18866@mail1.lig.bellsouth.net> From: "Joe E. Dees" <joedees@bellsouth.net> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk Date: Wed, 17 Jan 2001 11:26:36 -0600 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: RE: DNA Culture .... Trivia? In-reply-to: <2D1C159B783DD211808A006008062D3101745BE2@inchna.stir.ac.uk> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.01b) Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.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 sent: Wed, 17 Jan 2001 17:03:40 -0000
Send 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 Faichney, 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?
>
Meaningful information relates to some other information one
possesses; if you don't know what the TV white noise means
(IOW, you do not have any other information, such as BB
background radiation, you can relate it to), it isn't meaningful to
you. In the case you give, however, it means that the TV is on.
The sequence I gave you was bereft of any associational contexts,
and therefore could possess no (concrete) meaning.
>
> I think you're talking not so much about meaning but about importance
> (relevance? significance?), after all you mentioned utility (what it does).
>
What is meaningful is significant; it signifies something, is a sign
for it. What is meaningful is also relevant, in that it relates to
something else. If something has no relation at all to anything
else, it can obviously do nothing.
>
> 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.
>
Well, there, you have indeed added a context, and related it to
something concrete. The bare sequence I gave you did not
possess those addenda. There can be no such thing as an
absolutely isolated meaning.
>
> 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.
>
As I said above, for those who don't know about the BB
background radiation, it simply means that the TV is on.
>
> 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.
>
Actually, the fact that memes must both reside in minds and pass
between them stands whether or not you accept the definition of
meaningful information, although it is hard to see how
meaninglessness could propagate.
>
> Vincent
>
>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
> Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
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> 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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