Luciano Floridi on "Enveloping the World"

I'd thought of writing a blog post about this talk that I attended today, but my colleague Magnus Ramage has already written something in his 'Present on Earth' blog. This is handy, because I probably wouldn't have got around to writing anything (the 'posts' page of this blog contains 34 drafts that I started and never finished - many of them about talks I'd been to - "I ought to blog about that interesting talk").

So here's the start of Magnus's post:

Just back from a very interesting talk by Luciano Floridi, prof of the philosophy of information at the University of Hertfordshire. He was unable to come to our workshop The Difference That Makes a Difference 2011, but David Chapman and I have been reading his work quite a bit, so it was good to get to meet him. Luciano's title was "Enveloping the World: Understanding the Constraining Success of Smart Technologies", and he mostly talked about the interaction between technologies, especially those which might be seen as smart or even artificially intelligent, and their environment. He used the very helpful concept of enveloping from robotics, where a technology is situated within a constraining environment which has been tailored to make the robot work most efficiently; and he argued that the world as a whole has become tailored to enable us to interact smoothly with our supposedly smart technologies

Read it all

Information, Race, and Racism

One of the many fascinating talks at "The Difference That Makes a Difference" (DTMD2011) last September, was by my OU colleague Mustafa Ali, entitled: "Race: The Difference That Makes A Difference". As with all the talks at DTMD2011, you can get the slides and hear a 'podcast' of the talk via the Programme and Proceedings page of the website. Mustafa looks at race from an information-theoretical perspective and information from a race-theoretical perspective. His work is ongoing, and we hope to have a paper in which he develops his ideas further in the planned Special Issue of TripleC Journal.

As usual, whereas Mustafa's work is well-grounded, rigorous academic research, here in this blog post I want to wave my hands around and argue that understanding information provides some new insights into understanding race and racism. (So don't be put off if you are unimpressed by my comments, please go instead to Mustafa's presentation!)

The key word is 'difference'.  Information is the difference that makes a difference, and race is about defining differences.  I find it helpful to hang the ideas on those trapeziums again. Underneath are people in all their miscellaneous colours, shapes and sizes, while out the top comes some way of categorising people. Maybe, for example, as 'black' or 'white'. But why?  Why would the decoding the 'data' (people) give that particular 'information' (racial categorisations or by skin colour)?

An anecdote. Apparently (according to my mother - I've no memory of it) when was 5 or 6 years old, I came home from school one day and announced that I'd got a girlfriend. My mother quizzed me to try to identify her, and asked me whether she was black. I said no, but it turned out she was.

The point (and one that is often made about children) is that I hadn't yet learned to categorise people in that way - and therefore that the skin colour categorisation is not innate but is learned. The only reason it is a story worth relating is because of the baggage in the implications of defining someone as black. If the feature had been red hair, it would have been a reflection of my lack of observation and the incident would have been long forgotten, but because it was skin colour, and because I can now tell the story in a way that defines this girl 'as black' and readers will know what I mean, it becomes a story with a message.

Mustafa talks of race as a social construct, which is "genealogically-related to racism" (see his presentation). He says:

I think a really good case can be made that Race has a genealogical relationship to Racism, so it's not that race is some kind of neutral classification that just happens to have a historical development, but that it emerged in the context of a set of specific contingent social, political and economic circumstances

The way I'm describing it, it comes down to what determines the content of the trapezium. It's not that we can do without the trapezium. We can only deal with information[1], so we need to do the 'decoding' (the cognition, in the terminology of triple C[2]) - it is an example of a:

...binary opposition which we employ in our cultural practices help to generate order out of the dynamic complexity of experience

Chandler - see a previous post

I said it comes down to what determines the content of the trapezium, but maybe in this context more importantly it is a question of who determines the content. Who says 'this' is the information we get from the data - who has the power to construct the trapeziums that we all use?  Perhaps we might talk in terms of the dominant or hegemonic trapeziums which have come about because of "a set of specific contingent social, political and economic circumstances".

To finish, I want to flag a couple of stories which seem relevant, but I don't have time to discuss:

• Is it wrong to note 100m winners are always black?  A article from the BBC website, says:

"The fallacy, then, is simple. Just because some black people are good at something does not imply that black people in general will be good at it."

• MP Diane Abbott tweeted: "White people love playing "divide and rule" we should not play their game".
  BBC report of the story and Laurie Penny's commentary in the New Statesman.

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Notes:

1  It's like I've been saying about maps. We can't deal with the territory, only with maps of the territory. Similarly we can't talk about people, only about information about people.

2  I'm coming to the conclusion that the suggestion I put forward in an earlier post that cognition = triangles whereas communication = trapeziums just won't do. I want to use the trapeziums for cognition too.

Environmental and Semantic Information: Natural and Non Natural Meaning

Luciano Floridi, in his map of information (see, for example, "Information: A very short introduction" Oxford University Press 2010, or Semantic Conceptions of Information on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), has the primary distinction between Environmental and Semantic information.

Floridi's informational map, Source: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/information-semantic/

This is closely associated with Grice's distinction between Natural and Non Natural meaning (H. P. Grice, "Meaning" The Philosophical Review, 1957, Vol. 66(3), pp. 377-388 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2182440).

I talked about information being data plus meaning in a previous post, which is what Floridi refers to as "The General Definition of Information (GDI)", so we see that the two categories of information derive directly from the two categories of meaning.

Floridi points out that his concept of environmental information might not be 'natural'. Here's how he explains it in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (op. cit.):

One of the most often cited examples of environmental information is the series of concentric rings visible in the wood of a cut tree trunk, which may be used to estimate its age. Yet “environmental” information does not need to be natural. Going back to our example, when you turned the ignition key, the red light of the low battery indicator flashed. This signal too can be interpreted as an instance of environmental information. 

Environmental information is defined relative to an observer (an information agent), who is supposed to have no direct access to pure data in themselves. It requires two systems a and b to be coupled in such a way that a's being (of type, or in state) F is correlated to b being (of type, or in state) G, thus carrying for the observer the information that b is G [...]:

Environmental information:
Two systems a and b are coupled in such a way that a's being (of type, or in state) F is correlated to b being (of type, or in state) G, thus carrying for the information agent the information that b is G.

However, I don't think this in any significant way makes it different from Grice's 'natural meaning', or not in any way that matters for my concerns at the moment at least.

My interpretation is that semantic information/non-natural meaning requires intention, whereas environmental information/natural meaning 'just happens'.

Switching to the language of semiotics, a point about signs is that the signifier can be arbitrary. I'm wondering if there's a distinction between, say, natural signs and non-natural signs, where the signifier in a natural sign is necessary, but the signifier in a non-natural sign is arbitrary?  We might interpret the rings visible in the wood of a cut tree as the signifier in a sign meaning the age of the tree (or maybe not, I'm not sure about that), but in that case the rings can't be said to be arbitrary: they are a necessary consequence of the way the tree grows. However the word 'tree' as the signifier for a tree is arbitrary, in the sense that we could equally say "arbre" or "der Baum" (http://translate.definitions.net/tree).

One thing I'm still not quite ready to concede, though, is that non-natural/semantic information/meaning/signs necessarily requires people.

Certainly I want to suggestion that animals can be responsible for semantic/non-natural signs. I want to say that when a peacock display's his tail this is a sign with meaning, that there is intention on the part of the peacock, and that the sign is arbitrary (since other birds manage with different signs meaning essentially the same thing).

Source http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peacock.jpg

I'm still trying to get to grips with what we mean by 'meaning', however, and I'm not sure saying there is a distinction between natural and non-natural meaning gets us any closer to what meaning is. I'm still ploughing my way through Ogden and Richards, 'The Meaning of Meaning' (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949) but can't say it has been especially enlightening so far, and has been made a little more difficult by their style and the casual 'of-their-time' racism in one the examples they use to illustrate their argument. Wittgenstein's perspective that I mentioned in the previous post sounds rather more promising so perhaps I need to track that down.

Triangles, trapeziums and three Cs. And a missing T.

A few weeks back SIRG hosted a very interesting talk by Amanda Spink, Professor of Information Science at Loughborough University.  When asked about a definition of information, she commented that for her and for the Information Science community, the definition of information wasn't really an issue (ie they aren't agonizing over it the way I am!), but, if pushed for a definition, it would be something like 'data that is meaningful for someone'.*

Compare some the definitions used by various authors in Ramage and Chapman:

• Information is comprised of data in context (page 26, Bissell quoting Cordes)
• INTELLIGENCE provided, a PERSON is informed by a SIGN about some THING in a certain CONTEXT (page 27, Bissell quoting Borgmann)
• data plus meaning (interpretation) in a particular context at a particular time (page 72, Howell)

Triangles

Ignoring the reference to time in Howell's definition for the moment - I'll come back to that - I think we can encapsulate all these definitions in a semiotic triangle.

But what is 'data'? What is an 'interpreter? And what is 'meaning'?

With reference to the definitions of information above, the interpreter is the 'someone', 'person' or 'context'. Though several of the formulations above assume this to be human, my contention is that it need not be.

Likewise, my contention is that 'meaning' is not only something associated with people. At DTMD2011, Rainer Zimmermann proposed adopting "Wittgenstein's perspective that the meaning of a piece of information is to be found in the action this information provokes" (see Zimmermann's presentation on this page). I've not read Wittgenstein so I suppose that I could be doing damage to what he was talking about, but I'm using a definition of meaning that allows a mechanical response to data to constitute 'meaning'.

Data is a difference of some sort.  So - maybe you spotted it coming - by equating 'provoking action' with 'making a difference' this conveniently aligns with Bateson's 'difference that makes a difference'.

Trapeziums

Rather than the triangle, though, I prefer to use a trapezium, drawing from conventions in the engineering of communication systems.

There are two reasons for preferring the trapezium. (Actually it could equally well be a rectangle. You see both used in engineering, but I favour the trapezium because it distinguished the top and bottom, and looks nicer.)

1) It emphasises that information is always about communication. (I mentioned this here. But see also below, comments on tripleC.)

So the trapezium that I've drawn above, which is a 'receiver', must always somewhere be matched with a transmitter that is the source of the meaning. Or rather, you should always think about what the source of the meaning is, which you may recall was very revealing when exploring school reports.

2) It makes it easier to concatenate them in layers - so that the meaning from one becomes the data for the layer above. 'data' and 'meaning' are not absolutes: meaning is only ever relative to data, mediated by the interpretation.

TripleC: cognition, communication and cooperation

Wolfgang Hofkirchner and co-workers have developed the concept of 'triple C': cognition, communication and cooperation. Hofkirchner presented an interpretation of information exploiting the triple C framework in his presentation at DTMD2011.

Maybe the triangle is for cognition, and the trapezium for communication. Then when we bring in the dimension of time, we allow for cooperation.

Information doesn't emerge from one-off events. Meaning only ever emerges from conversation. A single message can convey information, but only because there have been messages before.  This is the beginning of cooperation.

So we need a diagramming convention that will display cooperation. I've no idea what that might be, at the moment, but it'd be really handy I can describe it by a word that begins with 'T' so we have 3Cs and 3Ts: cognition illustrated by a triangle; communication illustrated by a trapezium; and cooperation illustrated by a t...?

OK, so I know this doesn't all hold together, but this is a blog, not an academic paper, and it's work progress.

Any comments would be appreciated, though.

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* I may not have got that exactly right. Since I was organising the talk I was distracted by the mechanics of the event, and not fully focussed on listening to what she said and not taking notes!

*Where* is the information?

At Digital by Default last week one of the 'Masterclasses' that I attended was by epay, who provide electronic payment systems.

They were talking about stored-value cards, such might be used by schools for children to pay for their lunch, or store 'gift cards'.  The way their system works (or the one they were talking about at the event) is that the credit on the card is stored on a central database, and, when the card is used for payment, the payment terminal communicates with the central database to check for available balance and deduct value as appropriate.

A couple of thoughts:

1) One of the virtues of the system - as presented by epay - is that it tracks use of the card. The central database 'knows' where and when the card is used.  You wouldn't necessarily realise that, I'd not thought about it for store gift cards anyway. I'd thought of them as like cash, with the value 'on' the card, and therefore essentially untraceable.  Of course a gift card can be passed between people (given as gift!) and you are not tracking who is using it, so it's not tracking you like a credit or debit card does, but even so it's not as anonymous as cash.  Sometimes I like being anonymous (even though, pace Paul McMullan, I'm not a paedophile*)

2) But more relevant to the exploration of the nature of information, it draws attention to the problem of locating information.  I thought the information was on the card, but it's not, it is on the database. But actually epay have more than one database. The main database is in Germany, then they have a mirror in the UK. So is the information on the German database or the one in the UK?  And presumably they have a backup, so that if the database crashes it can be recovered.

There's nothing special about this, about stored value cards.  Similar things can be said about, for example, the text I'm typing on my PC at the moment. Where is it? Is it on my computer, or on one of Google's computers somewhere?  It's just that the stored-value card brought the question into sharp relief, because you might think the information is on the card (well I thought it was).

But even with cash when you start to think more carefully it's not so clear where the information is. Information is money but a five-pound note (or a pound coin) is only any use by virtue of its relationship to the monetary system in which is resides. This is reminder that information might have a body, but it doesn't reside in the body (think about Katherine Hales).

As an aside, not all card payment systems work in this way. Some use smart cards which store information on them.  Apparently the Oyster cards used on the London underground are smart cards which keep track of the credit on the card. There is a central database, however, and the Oyster card terminals communicate with the central database which is updated overnight. (Thanks to one of the epay people at Digital by Default for explaining this. epay don't run the Oyster card system but he knew how it worked.)

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* Paul McMullan, former deputy features editor of the News of the World. Actually he was referring to privacy, but it's the same idea.  McMullan's evidence to the Leveson inquiry (from the Guardian live blog, Tuesday 29 November 2011):

 4.20pm: McMullan is asked to clarify whether he believes that no one should have privacy. He says "yes".

In 21 years of invading people's privacy I've never actually come across anyone who's been doing any good. Privacy is the space bad people need to do bad things in.

Privacy is evil; it brings out the worst qualities in people.

Privacy is for paedos; fundamentally nobody else needs it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/blog/2011/nov/29/leveson-inquiry-nick-davies-paul-mcmullan-live

Digital by default

I was at Digital by Default today, and the first thing to say is how good it was. Well planned, good speakers, excellent venue (Barbican) and well run.   I learned a lot from it.

But, let me try out a slightly tendentious interpretation of the day...

We should go Digital by Default because Digital is Utopia. Not only will the government save money (billions of pounds), but people are happier when they are online.

Today was about exploring how close we are to Utopia; to identify why we are not there already; and explore what we need to do to get there.

We are quite close. It varies by location and services. For example Tameside has 100% of school applications online.

We are not there yet because:
1) The services are not yet all available online, or are not yet good enough
2) Though most of the population are digitally-enabled (online via web or smart-phone), a minority are not. The minority (which also happens to include the most heavy users of government services) is made up of two categories:
- the unfortunates, prevented by lack of opportunity, by disability, or by ignorance
- refuseniks (Martha Lane Fox's term), who won't go on line because they are deviants (my interpretation!)

What to do to get there:
1) Put all services online (or, better, on mobile phones) and make them work better. We just need to try a bit harder to get it right.
2) For the unfortunates, we, the fortunate ones, should do all in our power to help them. We should, for example, give an hour to them get online. For the refuseniks, we need a 'carrot and stick' approach. We need to show them how wonderful it is to be online. (The example of the man who said he wasn't interested, he preferred going crown-green bowling.  He was told he could watch all the crown green bowling online next year.) In the end, anyway, the alternatives will have to disappear because we won't make the savings if we leave them in place, so there'll be no choice. If you need government services it'll be digital or nothing.

As I said, slightly tendentious...

Seven people were nothing

Further to my last post.

From John le Carré "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold". Liz is depressed by the poor attendance at the Party Meetings when she visits East Germany - they are no better then the Communist Party meetings she attended back in Bayswater, London.

At last, on the fourth day, the Thursday, came their own Branch Meeting. This was to be, for Liz at least, the most exhilarating experience of all; it would be an example of all that her own Branch in Bayswater could be one day. They had chosen a wonderful title for the evening's discussions - Coexistence after two wars - and they expected a record attendance. The whole ward had been circularised, they had taken care to see that there was no rival meeting in the neighbourhood that evening; it was not a late shopping day.
Seven people came.
Seven people and Liz and the Branch Secretary and the man from the District. Liz put a brave face on it but she was terribly upset. [...] It was like the meetings in Bayswater, it was like mid-week evensong when she used to go to Church - the same dutiful little group of lost faces, the same fussy self-consciousness, the same feeling of a great idea in the hands of little people. She always felt the same thing - it was awful, really, but she did - she wished no one would turn up, because that was absolute and it suggested persecution, humiliation - it was something you could react to.
But seven people were nothing: they were worse than nothing, because they were evidence of the inertia of the uncapturable mass. They broke your heart.

There would be a message, information, in no one turning up, but seven people is thermodynamic equilibrium.