wallpaper animals

"What is information?" - this question will be guaranteed to cause maximum consternation and argument amongst cyberneticians - those who think about information more than anyone else.

"What is learning?" - this question will be guaranteed to cause maximum consternation and argument educationalists, learning technologists and the like - those who think about learning more than anyone else.

"What matters?"

Now that is a different sort of question. My family matters. Those that I love and care for and who love and care for me. Then the threats to those that I love and care for and the threats to me - they matter. And particularly the threats that may lie in the future for my daughter. They matter. Politics matters. And information and learning and education and knowledge and everything else is tied up in politics.

But we can't seem to get from "what is information?" to "what matters?". And we can't seem to get from "What is learning?" to "what matters?".

That's where I think technology is important.

Because to ask "What technology do we need?" is another way of asking "What matters?". The study of technology is political.

So the move from studying 'information' to the serious study of 'technology' is the move from worrying about epistemology to thinking about action.

Marx would be seriously into technology right now!!

So stuff the theory of information, or the theory of learning! We need a theory of technology - and then we need to act on it!

The relationship between information and politics is one of the most intriguing questions in the discourse on the knowledge economy. For example, Floridi claims that False Information (FI) is not information, because according to his 'veridicality thesis', semantic information must be true, meaningful well-formed data. There are good arguments for upholding the veridicality thesis (see http://theinformationalturn.net/philosophy_information/false-information/). Part of the problem hangs on the role of the word 'false' in FI (well explained in the blog-post). But I think False Information is politically significant in a way where the assertion that it "isn't information" is difficult to apprehend.

There is a deeper issue here and it has to do with the nature of the truth attribute in the first place. I've discussed Bhaskar's 'truth tertrapolity' before (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/university-in-wild.html) and I think it is revealing with regard to the veridicality thesis. Bhaskar argues that truth is dialectical, and there are distinct 'moments' in the dialectical process.
1. Normative fiduciary
2. adequating
3. expressive-referential
4. alethic

The normative-fiduciary level is truth as represented in the "trustworthiness of the person making the statement about truth". 'Adequating' truth concern the logical assertability of a statement. Truth as 'expressive referential' ties together an ontological aspect of truth with the logical and epistemological aspects: expressive-referential truth relates truth propositions to things in the world (this I think is most close to correspondence theories of truth). 'Alethic' truth however, is a level deeper still: the causal ground for things at a deep ontological level.

I find these distinctions about truth useful. At the very least, it allows us to pretend that there is a Father Christmas to small children. That is false information. But really it can be seen as a complex interplay between normative-fiduciary level (your parents tell you that Father Christmas exists), the construction of adequating circumstances (mince pies for Rudolf, men in Santa outfits), expressive-referential (belief in Father Christmas is important in establishing the atmosphere of Christmas which feeds the belief) and the alethic level where the deep grounds for celebrations and human togetherness can be seen to be connected to the pretence in the existence of Father Christmas.

The bond between the normative-fiduciary level and the alethic level for the false information that Father Christmas exists illustrates the fundamentally social import of this particular aspect of false information. So what does it mean to say that False information isn't information? On the face of it, it appears to deny social import to information, rather seeing information as logical (adequating). To what extent is this useful? To what extent is it right?

I think the veridicality thesis is ontologically naive and because of this, its predictive and explanatory power will be compromised. Information is uttered (in one form or another). The way this is done matters. No two utterances are the same. Each utterance is the result of human agency which is ontologically grounded in a world whose dimensions extend beyond mere adequation or correspondence. This of course is what Wittgenstein unpicked in his later work. Understanding information necessitates understanding agency. With Wittgenstein, I think understanding agency means understanding the game that is played. Floridi tries to deal with this by acknowledging the role of agency in information, but doing it by developing a theory using 'autonomous agents'. In this way, the veridicality thesis becomes related to a positivised and individualised concept of agency. The idea of information as transpersonal, or political is entirely absent. Indeed, the concept of absence itself conveying information (as Deacon discusses) is also not considered.

Floridi has opened up an impressive area for philosophising the nature of information. But he rests on a narrow and idealistic conception of truth which is basically Kantian. Information cannot be understood in the absence of an understanding of truth (on this, Floridi is correct).  But the ontology of truth need inspecting in a Wittgensteinian manner to reveal the games that are played with truth and the games which are then played with information. At the same time, as Floridi notes, Wittgenstein himself had views about what was and wasn't information, when he writes:

'it either rains, or it doesn't rain. If it rains, we'll stay in my room; if it doesn't...' The first part of this sentence is no piece of information (just as 'take it or leave it' is no order) - Brown book p. 161 

I think this is interesting. The statement 'it either rains, or it doesn't rain. If it rains, we'll stay in my room; if it doesn't...' isn't FI, although it is certainly agency - a speech act. What does it do? I think it addresses an absence. In so doing, it has a political effect.

That's what I'm after - a political theory of information.

There were two pieces of music on the radio this morning, one by Tippett and the other by Tchaikovsky. Both were very good. But both very different in terms of style. Yet, in their respective 'goodness' they shared something fundamental: an ability to surprise: Tippett in his dancing rhythms and tonal colourings, and Tchaikovsky in drastic changes of mood and colour. But what is surprising on hearing this is the sensation within me that "this is interesting". What is happening there?

I've been pursuing a variety of models of this kind of moment. First of all, I think it is a "restructuring of anticipation" that might be related to 'meaning' (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/anticipation-and-meaning.html). More broadly, I think we may consider things meaningful when they change our expectations of the world. More recently, I have begun to think of 'expectation' or anticipation in terms of a meta-strategy game tree (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/release-concepts-and-understanding-more.html). This thinking makes anticipation and the strategy tree dependent on the participation of other people: we do not think within our individual heads, but between each of our heads, for our anticipations are anticipations of the agency of others. Thinking is necessarily social.

This position has political implications which I will explore in a later post. But for now, I want to concentrate on the transformation of the meta-strategy tree. What I think brings about a restructuring of anticipation is the grasping of a concept. The restructuring is effectively a collapse of complexity in the game tree. Where numerous branches disappeared off in various directions, the concept comes along and fundamentally changes the structure. It does this because powerful concepts are recursively applicable: they apply at many levels of the meta-strategy. Recursive applicability simplifies complexity. It means that more becomes thinkable.

With music, though, as we listen - where is the concept? Is it in the notes? Is it in the experience? Is it in the composer? or the performer? Whilst it is probably in all of these, and the concept itself will work in all of these cases, I think there is merit in looking for something in the actual notes. In this way, motivic structures within the work, or tonal shifts, etc can correlate to moments of revelation in performance. If we were to analyse the work, would picking up these recursive structures help us to identify that moment of meaning where anticipation is transformed? I wondering if the techniques of granular computing might help here - after all, granular computing makes its distinctions around those pattern that recur at many levels.

If we had some kind of recursive map of a data stream, would it be able to indicate where something meaningful happened? Would it be able to filter out the noise and reveal the essence of what might have been transformative? If this was possible, then a new way of steering playful interventions might present itself...