Wednesday 14 November 2007

Dennett

In the way of the web, a slightly tangential route* led me to this site: mind, matter, meaning and information.


It leads with this quotation:
It is tempting to suppose that some concept of information could serve eventually to unify mind, matter, and meaning in a single theory.

Daniel C Dennett and John Haugeland

I guess that is pretty much where I'm coming from.

*The current London Review of Books contains letters following on from a paper about evolution in an earlier issue (Jerry Fodor Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings, LRB 18 October 2007). A letter from Daniel Dennett was the only one that used the word 'information', yet it seems to me that you can't talk meaningfully about evolution without reference to information. This led me to search the web for 'Dennett information'.

2 comments:

Tony Hirst said...

This post pulls at memories of things past for me, specifically chunks of my PhD...

The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution
By Susan Oyama

I don't recall now the extent to which I agreed with the book, but it certainly influenced my thinking...

tony

DaveoftheNewCity said...

There's something wrong with your link, it has got a bit of the following tag caught up with it, I think. I'll try to put in here:

The Ontogeny...