Claude Shannon

The most common usages of the terms "information" and "communication" are not applicable with objective validity when the object of discourse is the mind-brain system. Neither can these terms be validly employed in the description of biological objects except in a very specific and limited context. Over the past several years some writers have adopted some very careless habits of misusing these terms in ways that promote ontological fallacies and misguided metaphors. Softening the meaning of technical terms used in any science damages the science, and persistent misusages over time tend to render the words we use to explain Nature meaningless.

Historical review of Communication Theory versus Information Theory, several models explained including Bühler, Jakobson, Ruesch & Bateson, Shannon, and Alexander. Focus on the contrast between Human and Machine communication. Winner of 2015 "Top Book Chapter", Philosophy of Communication Division, National Communication Association (USA).

The point of departure of this study is a seemingly trivial question: how did “code” come to designate a key concept of linguistics and semiotics? It is generally held that the term migrated from information theory to linguistics in the early 1950s, and accordingly it followed its own path in the study of language and other semiotic systems. In that way, a new semiotic concept emerged.
This deceptively straightforward answer gives rise to some crucial questions. First, how did the migration of a technical term give rise to a linguistic concept? Was the new term adopted simply as a fashionable alternative label for a well-established concept (e.g. Saussure’s langue)? If not, how can we account for a concept formation solely in terms of terminological shifts? Moreover, how did a semiotic concept emerge out of a linguistic concept of code?
The present study will seek to address for the first time these questions in an attempt to shed new light to the emergence and early development of the semiotic concept of code, focusing on the work of the key figures (Eco, Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss) in this neglected episode of the history of concepts in the humanities and social sciences.

The purpose of this article is to interrogate Marx’s analysis of the circulation of capital through the ‘new materialist’ communications and media theory of Friedrich Kittler. It explores the connections between Marx’s commodity fetish and how Kittler posits human beings as components of an information system alongside technologies and institutions. The article ask whether a ‘non-human’ Marxist theory is possible, i.e. if it is possible to remove the human being from its privileged position in Marx’s political economy. Specifically the paper argues that human beings are programmable human matter that serves to aid the communication of value through capital’s circuit. This stance necessitates adopting the point of view of capital and the fetish, bracketing the social and moving away from categories such as labour, production and class consciousness in favour of the value form, circulation and programmability.

What is business getting itself into in its embrace of so-called artificial intelligence? What is it getting the world into?

In approaching these questions, it may be useful to set aside the term "artificial intelligence" in favour of "interpretation machines."

To do so is to point to ecological and political continuities between 19th-century and 21st-century automation -- continuities that may help clarify strategies for popular struggle.

The article reflects the author's speech in the discussion club of the journal "Historical Informatics" at a meeting dedicated to the discussion of the collective monograph "Information. A Historical Companion", published in 2021 at Princeton. The author examines not only the history of the functioning and evolution of information in various historical societies, but also the social history of science and technology related to the production of information and its transmission, dissemination and processing. It is this second aspect of this publication that is discussed in the article, it is he who is of the greatest interest in the context of modern applications of Data Science in the social sciences and humanities, as well as discussions about historical information and historical knowledge in the "digital age". Starting from the materials of the Companion, the article discusses the following questions: What role did discrete and analog approaches play in the formation of the concept of information in the late 1940s? What was the mutual influence of the outstanding scientists who created the theory of information? To what extent can these achievements be of interest to the historical (and, more broadly, the humanities) sciences? The position of the authors of the Companion is also discussed on the question of whether the concepts of "information" and "knowledge" should be associated with the position of the historian-researcher or with the perception of the subject of historical research? Peter Burke's point of view seems justified here, believing that throughout the centuries under consideration, people belonging to various historical societies were aware of information as a critical aspect of their lives.

Статья отражает выступление автора в дискуссионном клубе журнала «Историческая информатика» в заседании, посвященном обсуждению коллективной монографии «Information. A Historical Companion», опубликованной в 2021 г. в Принстоне. Автор рассматривает не только историю функционирования и эволюции информации в различных исторических социумах, но и социальную историю науки и техники, связанную с производством информации и ее передачей, распространением и обработкой. Именно этот, второй аспект данного издания обсуждается в статье, именно он представляет наибольший интерес в контексте современных приложений Data Science в социально-гуманитарных науках, а также дискуссий об исторической информации и историческом знании в «цифровую эпоху». Отталкиваясь от материалов "Компаньона", в статье обсуждаются следующие вопросы: Какую роль сыграли дискретные и аналоговые подходы в становлении концепции информации в конце 1940-х гг.? Каким было взаимовлияние выдающихся ученых, создававших теорию информации? В какой мере эти достижения могут представлять интерес для исторических (и – шире – гуманитарных) наук? Обсуждается также позиция авторов «Компаньона» по вопросу о том, следует ли понятия «информация» и «знание» ассоциировать с позицией историка-исследователя или с восприятием субъекта исторического исследования? Здесь оправданной представляется точка зрения Питера Берка, полагающего, что на протяжении рассмотренных веков люди, принадлежавшие к различным историческим социумам, осознавали информацию как критический аспект своей жизни.

Early uses of computers as artistic means and ends date back to the fifties and sixties. For the pioneers of computer art cybernetics, as the were founded in the forties by Norbert Wiener and Clude Elwood Shannon, were a source of inspiration. Simultaneously to the evolution of kinetic art integrating moving parts into the art object a 'cybernetic art'  arose. Its protagonists developed works reacting to input data and interacting with the environment. "Material models" (N. Wiener) of cybernetics were the forerunners of cybernetic sulptures (Nicolas Schöffer) and responsive environments (Gordon Pask). The cybernetic term information and information aesthetics (Max Bense, Abraham Moles) inspired artists to program computer graphics (Georg Nees, Frieder Nake, Herbert Werner Franke).

The introduction to my book, published by Duke University Press, 2021

Back cover blurb: In Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher offers not only an information theory of art, but an aesthetic theory of information. Applying close readings of the information theories of Claude Shannon and Gilbert Simondon to 1960s American art, Hoelscher proposes that art is information in its aesthetic or indeterminate mode-information oriented less toward answers and resolvability than toward questions, irresolvability, and sustained difference. These irresolvable differences, Hoelscher demonstrates, fuel the richness of aesthetic experience by which viewers glean new information and insight from an artwork with each encounter. In this way, art constitutes information that remains in formation, as a difference that makes a difference that keeps on differencing. Considering the artwork of Frank Stella, Robert Morris, Adrian Piper, the Drop City commune, Eva Hesse, and others, Hoelscher finds that art exists within an information ecology of complex feedback between artwork and artworld, driven by the unfolding of difference. By charting how information in its aesthetic mode can exist beyond today's strictly quantifiable and monetizable forms, Hoelscher reconceives our understanding of how artworks work and how information operates.

PRAISE:
“Masterfully intertwining aesthetics, information theory, and entropy concepts, Jason A. Hoelscher offers an insightful account of the accelerated transformations of art practices in the 1960s. Art as Information Ecology will open new pathways toward a better understanding of the complexities of periodizing contemporary art at a time when artworlds are in more intense communication with other systems. This ambitious book is bound to create ripple effects.”
— Cristina Albu, author of Mirror Affect: Seeing Self, Observing Others in Contemporary Art

“In Art as Information Ecology, Jason A. Hoelscher digs deep, looking into contemporary artworks in very different ways than ever before: from the premise that art can be a foundation of information that is like a multilayered cake, impossible to finish. I applaud Hoelscher for his in-depth, intense, and focused look into how art is a base for information systems that carry beyond the work themselves.”
— Sharon Louden, artist, educator advocate for artists, and editor of the Living and Sustaining a Creative Life series of books

THOUGHT IN THE ACT
A series edited by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi

Jason A. Hoelscher is Associate Professor of Art and Gallery Director at Georgia Southern University.

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For more information, and to order the book directly from Duke University Press at a 30% discount, please visit the Duke UP website and enter the coupon code E21HLSR during checkout

La teoría de Shannon ha sido enormemente exitosa durante el siglo 20 en el sentido de optimizar los canales de información mediante codificaciones óptimas que esa teoría permite definir. Pero mi objeción es que no se trata realmente de una teoría de la información, si no sólo de la codificación. La definición de información que entrega es estrictamente instrumental e incompleta. La teoría que a mí juicio logra una definición de información realmente interesante es la algorítmica de Chaitin Kolmogorov, pero que no pretendo comentar en ésta nota. A continuación las objeciones que enumero sobre la teoría de Shannon • No es en esencia una teoría de la información, sino más bien solo de la codificación. • No se propone indagar en lo que significa la información, solo construye una definición útil para el caso de un canal con un emisor y un receptor. • Requiere receptores conscientes capaces de asignar previamente probabilidades al mensaje por recibir, de otro modo la información no se puede mesurar • No tiene sentido si no existen receptores humanos. No es útil en un entorno donde nadie puede asignar probabilidades. • No existe manera de poder saber cuanta información recibe alguien desde una perspectiva externa ya que no podemos saber que probabilidades de ocurrencia habría asignado a priori el observador. • No permite analizar un sistema cerrado y los intercambios de información que ocurren en el mismo, por ejemplo dentro de una computadora.

This is the outline: Introduction — La question de la cybernétique et de l'information — Une « pensée du milieu » — Cybernétique et homologie — Une théorie de l'apprentissage — L'information vue de l'autre côté — Champ et domaine unitaire — La thèse des « autres-je » — Le passage par l'axiologie — La rétroaction vraie — L'ontologie de Ruyer — Le bruissement de l'être même

Una doverosa avvertenza, di seguito non si vuole specificatamente discutere della consistenza, dal punto di vista della fisica e più in generale della scienza, dell’ipotesi dell'Universo Olografico, della Fisica dell’Informazione, dell'Argomento della Simulazione, del Modello ORCHestrated Objective Reduction, argomenti che chi scrive ritiene più metafisici che fisici, ma solo ricostruire la genealogia delle idee alla base delle ipotesi citate, trattandole come idee connesse tra loro e soggette a mutua influenza reciproca, prescindendo dal loro valore epistemologico per la filosofia della scienza o, in senso più ampio, la conoscenza dei metodi dei principi secondo i quali la scienza costruisce sé stessa.
Per quanto poco plausibile possa sembrare l'idea che la realtà che percepiamo possa essere un ologramma o addirittura una simulazione generata da un computer, motivo per cui la fisica deve anche trattare l'informazione, è indubbio che negli ultimi anni queste idee hanno raggiunto una grande popolarità, sia nella cultura popolare, che in alcuni ambiti della fisica teorica.
Di seguito s'intende evidenziare le reciproche contaminazioni tra le idee ascrivibili alla scienza ed alla filosofia e le concezioni pseudoscientifiche espresse dalla cultura di massa che hanno portato alle ipotesi precedentemente elencate.

Abstract. The following study departs from the lecture, entitled “Creative thinking”, delivered by Claude Shannon in 1952 at the Bell Laboratories. This paper includes an interpretive and critical account of the necessary conditions (innate and acquired), as well as the desirable procedures, which must be satisfied in the scientific and technological invention, within the frame of the so-called scientist’s spontaneous philosophy (SSP).

Keywords: Analogy • generalization • method • model • Shannon.

In recent years noise seems to have become an interdisciplinary concept par excellence, apt to capturing important dynamics at work whether in technological, scientific, social, or aesthetic domains. But when economists, biologists, psychologists, and musicians speak of noise, are they really all referring to the same thing? In An Epistemology of Noise Cecile Malaspina takes this dispersion of the notion of noise as a starting point, and moreover accepts that, when removed from its mathematical formulation in information theory and spread into diverse disciplines, noise takes on a metaphorical ambiguity. Yet rather than aiming to eliminate this ambiguity, Malaspina sets out to account for it. The key problem in An Epistemology of Noise is not to identify the legitimate usage of the concept of noise, but rather to examine what happens when noise moves between disciplines, and what the 'noisiness' of this movement tells us about the conditions for interdisciplinary knowledge. Noise here is both an object (or many objects) of inquiry and a condition for that inquiry, and presents us with the problem of how knowledge can find its ground in these 'shifting sands' (9).

Claude Shannon is renowned for his master’s thesis in which he applied George Boole’s binary logic to electrical switching networks, establishing the mathematical basis for digital circuit design. Far less publicized is his contribution to the innovation of a personal digital computer some 20 years later. Between 1954 and 1961, while working at AT&T’s Bell Telephone Laboratories and teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he designed and built an embodiment of a programmable, digital switching network of electromechanical relays and licensed its techniques to two entrepreneurs, Edmund Berkeley and Oliver Garfield, for sale as a home computer. The GENIAC, BRAINIAC, and MINIVAC represented iterations of Shannon’s work at Bell Labs and sowed interest in digital computing with young people in the United States and in parts of Europe, well over ten years before electronic digital computers equipped with microprocessors reached a much bigger audience.

If you think of (linguistic) intuitions as measuring instruments you will want to know what the precision of those instruments is: the size of the measurement scale (what is the smallest/the largest value that can be detected) and how many distinctions (just noticeable differences) do we have along that scale and are they evenly or unevenly distributed, i.e. are our intuitions more sensitive for some parts of that scale than others? Shannon entropy, the uncertainty associated with a discrete random variable or the smallest, ideal compressed filesize of a string of digital code, can be a measure of the dimensions and detail of such a scale. Based on the assumption that a function for the frequency distribution of the entire English vocabulary I derived from corpus data can be thought of as the sensitivity of our intuitions (if I show you two lexical items and ask you to judge how familiar you are with them and how much they differ in that familiarity, then the assumption is that you will find that task easier for items in the middle of the bell curve in figure 1 (where common nouns and lexical verbs are) than for items on the right tail (function words such as auxiliary verbs and prepositions) or on the left tail (proper nouns and old-fashioned/archaic terms). Of course the entropy value we get for this intuition is in itself meaningless because we do not know what the working and storage capacity of the brain is (we know it is probably substantial, but we do not know how many GB or TB exactly; and there probably is lots of interpersonal variation). I therefore suggest that we compare it to visual and auditory perception because (1) perception and intuition are similarly fundamental cognitive functions and we would expect similar cognitive complexities) and (2) there are well-established internationally standardized empirical measurements of people's visual and auditory perception. It turns out that the filesize (number of bits of information to encode each increment of the scale times the total number of increments per scale) to store the three sensitivity scales would be quite similar.

Asked to edit and critically review the exchange between philosopher Rafael Capurro and Linda Treude on the concept of information, the below linked document presents the final version of the exchange, including my contributions to copy and content editing as well as bibliographic suggestions from my review. The final version of the document can be accessed at http://www.capurro.de/moraes.html

- Jared Bielby


"The term information is omnipresent in academic research as well as in everyday life. Buzz words such as information society, information age or information overload are floating around everywhere. But what do we mean exactly with 'information' in different contexts?

The philosopher Rafael Capurro dealt with this question in the late 1970's in his PhD thesis on the concept of information. Especially the philosophical community was suffering at that time from a lack of reflection thereupon. Capurro tried to fill this gap. The following remark by the physicist and philosopher Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (1912-2007) had a particular impact on him.

"Today we are getting accustomed [...] to understand information as something different from matter and consciousness. What we have discovered is an old truth in a new place. It is the Platonic eidos, the Aristotelian form, expressed in words such that also a human being in the 20th century can learn about them."

Weizsäcker’s step back to the history of ideas motivated Capurro also to deal with ethical issues of the information society particularly since the rise of the internet. The handling of digital information requires new cultural skills that are addressed with the term 'information literacy.' In the last ten years many projects in the Library and Information Science field (LIS) include or are even focused on information literacy (IL). In many of these projects there is a pre-understanding that IL has to do with the ability to find, filter, and process digital information. At the same time, there is a gap between this pre-understanding and an the ongoing academic discussion on the concept of information. The following dialogue deals particularly with this gap."

~ Linda Treude

"Machines and Symbols (I) – Semantic Aspects of Cybernetics and Automation".
This article is the first part of the cycle titled “Machines and symbols”. The main issue of this cycle may be formulated as a question: can machines and technical devices operate with symbols? A very important problem raised in this essay is the difference between symbols and signals. The concept of signal is also broadly discussed in the paper, because there are many different definitions of this concept. The present text contains semantic and philosophical considerations concerning cybernetics, mathematical theory of communication, industrial semiotics and semio-technics. In these theories, terms “symbol” and “signal” are often used interchangeably which leads to misconceptions. One of the most frequent misconceptions is confusing discrete signals with symbols. The author focused on communication systems where machines are senders and humans are receivers, because descriptions of these systems tend towards anthropomorphization of a machine-sender. This tendency makes signals sent out by machines treated as symbols comprehensible by a human-receiver. Another interesting aspect of machine-human communication systems is the treatment of a
human-receiver as some kind of machine. Such an idea is called “mechanomorphism”.

This study is an exploration in measuring quantities of information transferred in the course of interaction in human-machine systems, which deemed necessary as fundamental support for interface design. We put forwards several possible measures found in previous research works, including the infamous Hick’s law, and validate their applicability with dedicated experiment with 33 users performing selection tasks. The results suggest that interface “effective information capacity” factor, incorporating number of alternative targets (N) and logarithm of their vocabulary size (K, possible different symbols), provided better fit to the observed performance time, while Hick’s law model and “interface message length” (IML) based models were clearly inferior. ANOVA suggested strong effect of interaction between N, K, and IML, but building corresponding conclusive model would require further theoretical research. We also calculated selection tasks throughput, which amounted to 59.0 bit/s in the experiment, steadily increasing per K and decreasing with age. Our findings might aid interface designers, in particular ones developing human-machine control systems that seek to maximize overall operating efficiency and minimize costly human errors.

Claude Shannon is renowned for his master’s thesis in which he applied George Boole’s binary logic to electrical switching networks, establishing the mathematical basis for digital circuit design. Far less publicized is his contribution to the innovation of a personal digital computer some 20 years later. Between 1954 and 1961, while working at AT&T’s Bell Telephone Laboratories and teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he designed and built an embodiment of a programmable, digital switching network of electromechanical relays and licensed its techniques to two entrepreneurs, Edmund Berkeley and Oliver Garfield, for sale as a home computer. The GENIAC, BRAINIAC, and MINIVAC represented iterations of Shannon’s work at Bell Labs and sowed interest in digital computing with young people in the United States and in parts of Europe, well over ten years before electronic digital computers equipped with microprocessors reached a much bigger audience.

The following study departs from the lecture, entitled “Creative thinking”, delivered by Claude Shannon in 1952 at the Bell Laboratories. This paper includes an interpretive and critical account of the necessary conditions (innate and acquired), as well as the desirable procedures, which must be satisfied in the scientific and technological invention, within the frame of the so-called scientist’s spontaneous philosophy (SSP).

The purpose of this article is to interrogate Marx’s analysis of the circulation of capital through the ‘new materialist’ communications and media theory of Friedrich Kittler. It explores the connections between Marx’s commodity fetish and how Kittler posits human beings as components of an information system alongside technologies and institutions. The article ask whether a ‘non-human’ Marxist theory is possible, i.e. if it is possible to remove the human being from its privileged position in Marx’s political economy. Specifically the paper argues that human beings are programmable human matter that serves to aid the communication of value through capital’s circuit. This stance necessitates adopting the point of view of capital and the fetish, bracketing the social and moving away from categories such as labour, production and class consciousness in favour of the value form, circulation and programmability.

I possess a wide range of experience critiquing and editing academic literature including abstracts, articles, book chapters, proposals and thesis drafts. I have edited ESL work from international scholars and international PhD students from Brazil to Romania to Germany. I am currently Co-editing a Festschrift project from proposal to final manuscript, incorporating input from authors, consultants and reviewers. My editing services include copy editing, content editing, style editing and proof reading. Topics of expertise include, but are not limited to, Humanities Computing, Philosophy, History, Religion, Digital Humanities, Information Ethics, Philosophy of Information, Digital Citizenship, Global Citizenship, and Intercultural Information Ethics. Services available at www.jaredbielby.com