Biosemiotics: yet another strand of 'information' to explore

What is particularly pleasing about this for me is the reference to Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen. In a former life, long, long ago as a schoolboy who liked birdwatching and wildlife in general, I read Konrad Lorenz's 'King Solomon's Ring' and then later 'On Aggression', and I also read Tinbergen's 'The Herring Gull's World'. I then studied physics at university and became an engineer, leaving anything to do with birds and animals behind.

Amplify’d from www.newscientist.com

Biosemiotics: Searching for meanings in a meadow

One of the nascent field's leading lights, Donald Favareau of the National University of Singapore, provides a definition on the group's website. "Biosemiotics is the study of the myriad forms of communications... observable both within and between living systems. It is thus the study of representation, meaning, sense, and the biological significance of sign processes- from intracellular signalling processes to animal display behaviour to human... artefacts such as language and abstract symbolic thought."

To get a better sense of what this means, it is best to go back to the field's roots. Biosemiotics traces its earliest influences to the independent efforts of an Estonian-born biologist in the early 20th century and an American philosopher of the 19th century, who wrote much of his work hidden in an attic to avoid his creditors.

Estonian-born Jakob von Uexküll was an animal physiologist whose 1934 book A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A picture book of invisible worlds - and later works - inspired Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, who then went on to win a Nobel prize in 1973 for their studies in animal behaviour, or ethology.

Favareau came to biosemiotics as a result of "growing discontent with the inability of cognitive neuroscience to explain the reality of experiential 'meaning' at the same level that it was so successful in, and manifestly committed to, explaining the mechanics of the electrochemical transmission events by which such meanings are asserted (without explanation) to be produced".

For Gerard Battail, an information theorist at Télécom ParisTech in France, it is the fact that mainstream biology, while loosely using a vocabulary borrowed from communication theory- "pathways", "codes" and the like- "remains basically concerned with the flow of matter and energy into and between living entities, failing to recognise [that] the information flow is at least as important". Read more at www.newscientist.com

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/c0jlBR

A theory based on information solves the mysteries of quantum mechanics

OK, I know that is a little bit of a simplification! But it looks like information is at least part of the answer.

Amplify’d from www.newscientist.com

Is quantum theory weird enough for the real world?

That was all true until quantum theory arrived on the scene. Quantum theory is odd, not just because its weird predictions are a source of consternation for physicists and philosophers, but because its mathematical structures bear no obvious connection to the real world, as far as we can see. "We do not have a source for the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics," says Časlav Brukner of the University of Vienna in Austria. "We do not have a nice physically plausible set of principles from which to derive it." Quantum physics might be quantum - but as far as we can tell it isn't physics.

Popescu and Rohrlich had shown that the principle of "relativistic causality" alone was not the answer: the cosmic speed limit set in Einstein's relativity can produce theories that allow greater correlation than quantum mechanics. That prompted Marek Zukowski of the University of Gdansk, Poland, and colleagues to suggest last year that a tighter variant of the principle might do the trick.

They call their idea "causality of information access". It states that if you send me a certain number of bits of information, the maximum amount of information I can access is that number of bits - a truism in both the classical and the quantum worlds. "Say I want to send you a part of my nine-digit home phone number in an encoded form," says Zukowski. "If I send you information about the first three digits, you can only decode the first three digits." Read more at www.newscientist.com

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/9LPCBL

Limits to knowledge

From the current New Scientist. It's 'just' Gödel's incompleteness theorem again, but New Scientist again telling us how little we know. When I graduated with a degree in Physics in 1980, I thought we - human-kind - had a pretty good knowledge of the world. The older I get, the more I learn about what we don't know.

Amplify’d from www.newscientist.com

To infinity and beyond: The struggle to save arithmetic

The two possible conclusions are equally unpalatable. We can deny the existence of infinity, a quantity that pervades modern mathematics, or we must resign ourselves to the idea that there are certain things about numbers we are destined never to know.Read more at www.newscientist.com

See this Amp at http://bit.ly/dvDKYC

Edit: this was created automatically from 'amplify' - I'm using to try it out. I like the idea of linking from amplify to my blog - amplify is an easy way to get and comment on quotes from elsewhere - but I hope there is some way to avoid that huge text on a yellow background!

"On Human Communication" by Colin Cherry

Currently reading "On Human Communication" by Colin Cherry (MIT press 1957), and keeping notes as I go along.

You can see my notes here, if you wish - though they are very much notes for myself, done to keep my reading active and to come back to for later reference.

Cherry is one of the key 'information pioneers', alonside people like Shannon, MacKay, Carnap and Bar-Hillel. "On Human Communication" covers the range - from the technical of Shannon through semiotics and language to philosophy - and would be the ideal starting point for information and communication. I wish I'd read it years ago.

Profile of Claude Shannon from UCTV

A 30-minute profile of Claude Shannon from 2002. Contains footage of the man himself, but also contributions from lots of the big names in information theory and communications.

More on Tuesday's child - the fallacy in Tet Woo Lee's argument

OK, this is serious displacement activity, but I can't stop myself...

Further to the two posts yesterday (main explanation, and follow-up), this is what I believe is wrong about Tet Woo Lee's argument in his letter in the New Scientist on 3 July.

Lee says: "What you are changing is the group of parents we are talking about."

Correct, but his argument is based the group of parents changing from all those with at least one son to all those with at least one son born on a Tuesday, which is not right. We are not changing it to all those with at least one son born on a Tuesday, we are changing to all those who declare the son that was born on a Tuesday. The group of parents we are talking about now does not include those with two sons but who choose to declare the one that born on some other day.

The information in the Tuesday's child puzzle

Further to my previous post on 'Tuesday's child'.

In the process of composing a letter to New Scientist about this - see below - I've realised where the extra information is coming from.

In the terms I've used in the letter (I've managed to add confusion by changing who is 'me' and who is 'you' between the letter and my blog post!), the probability that you have two boys increases when you answer 'yes' to my question 'do you have a boy that was born on a Tuesday'. Notice that that question is about both your children, whereas if you had said 'I have a boy that was born on a Tuesday' you are only giving me information about one child.

OK, I've spent far too long on this already.
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Dear Sir/Madam,

I fear you have not got this one (Tuesday's child, letters 4th July) sorted yet. Probabilities unearth lots of counter-intuitive and surprising results, and there's one in here to do with specifying the birth day, but you have to be very, very careful how you present it. I don't think Bellos got it right in the initial article (Mathemagical, 29th May) and the letters of 4th July don't help.

The claim is that adding the day your son was born to the fact that you have two children and one of them is a boy, changes the probability that you have two sons from 1/3 to almost 1/2. However, since your son must have been born on some day, stating what day that is does not by itself change the probabilities. Externally specifying the day, on the other hand, does make a difference.

If you say you have two children and that at least one is a boy then I can conclude that the probability you have two boys is 1/3 (it is more likely that you are one of the people with a boy and a girl) - we're all agreed on that bit of the argument. If you also tell me the day the boy was born nothing changes because I knew all along that he must have been born on one day of the week. If, however, instead of you telling me up-front the day your boy is born, I say 'have you a boy that was born on a Tuesday?' and you say 'yes', that does raise the probability that you have two boys to nearly a half.

The reason it changes in the latter case is that, when I specify a day, someone with two boys is more likely to have one of them born on the day of my choice than someone who only has one boy.

I've teased this out in tedious detail on my blog: intropy.co.uk

Regards,
David Chapman