Quantum paradoxes

Roederer (Information and its role in nature, Springer 2005) page 51:

Quantum paradoxes are paradoxes because of our unavoidable urge to represent mentally what happens inside the quantum domain with familiar images and paradigms from our sensory experience in a classical, macroscopic world. But nothing that transcends physically or informationally from a quantum system into the macroscopic world is intrinsically paradoxical or contrary to the laws of classical and relativistic physics.

MySpace bullying

The technology newsfeed from the BBC on my MyYahoo said "Woman cleared of MySpace bullying".

The heading from Ray Corrigan's blog post, as it appears in my list of blogs on the left hand side of this page says "Guilty verdict in MySpace suicide case".

They are of course the same story. In the words of the BBC report:

Lori Drew, 49, was found not guilty of accessing a computer without authorisation to inflict emotional distress.

[...]

She was convicted on three minor counts of violating the website's terms and conditions.

So the BBC sees her being found not guilty of the more serious charge, while Ray sees her being found guilty of the violation of the website's terms and conditions.

From information to difference, and triangles

I don't know whether I am unusually slow, but some ideas take weeks, months or years to get through to me. I'm gradually coming around to understanding the significance of Gregory Bateson's definition of information as:

The Difference that makes a difference

In the layered model of communication that I've been pushing, I think that 'differences that make a difference' are precisely what is conveyed horizontally at each level.

There's a great little paper by Stuart Umpleby "Physical Relationships Among Matter, Energy and Information" that includes the following:

But because of the complexities introduced by having to specify one or more observers, the term “information” is not an elementary concept. “Difference” denotes the elementary building block of data or signal or information. Hence, when dealing with physical foundations, I believe it is preferable to speak in terms of matter, energy and difference. To define terms, a “difference” is a physical entity that can be noted by an observer. Drawing a “distinction” is a purposeful act that creates two categories.

Umpleby was at the Stockholm conference, talking on Reflections on the Russian and American Conversations on Cybernetics and Systems Theory.

Umpleby had this diagram in his talk

In his paper he has this:

While another speaker, Karl Mueller, had this:

(Mueller as talking about how people have described `scientific truth', and C stands for cognition, W for world and D for decription.)

I don't have time to discuss the content of these images here, but I just want to reflect on this use of triangles and the way that people keep seeing the world as having three elements, like the 'trinity' in Christianity. Doesn't fit with 'air, earth, fire and water' though. Shame.

Krippendorff, of course, wanted to know what the 'world' was in Umpleby's triangle and why anyone was interested in 'truth' in Muellers!

Follow-up to the Stockholm paper

NB. There may be people coming to this blog because I gave the URL at the talk. If you want specifically to see my blog posts with some relevance to the talk, click on the 'art' label from the list of labels in the left-hand column. Or just click here.

There are things that I know I failed to get across in the talk. Here's one.

I probably gave the impression that I was implying that there was something inferior about the Hirst, because it was possible to generate some sort of image of it using relatively few bits. I am suggesting that in a 'JPEG' layer it is possible to generate a version of the LSD with far fewer bits than are required for any sort of image of the Degas, but that does not imply that LSD is necessarily inferior. I really did mean it when I said that I can't pass judgements like that.

What it does seem to imply, however, is that the 'value' of the Hirst must reside to a great degree in the trapeziums, so that there is a lot of 'added-value' on the way up at the receiver. Maybe there is also similarly a lot of added value in the way up for the Degas, but it is the Hirst that reveals the fact. In fact, I might tentatively suggest that the more abstract the art is, the more weight is placed on the trapeziums, because they provide the context. Again, that is not to say that context doesn't matter for all art. I'm sure it does, but maybe abstract, and even more conceptual, art draw more attention to this role of context.

Now, it is true that the Degas has more value for me than the Hirst. But then that is explainable entirely by saying that I don't have access to the requisite context, so I don't have the trapeziums at the receiver in order to interpret the information contained in the Hirst. In fact, I did try and failed to locate an explanation of the Hirst spot paintings. I also tried to locate one of them that I might be able to visit, but also failed in that. (If someone reading this can help me there - with either the explanation or the location - that would be great!). By contrast, the reason I chose the Degas for my presentation, was that I'd read something about it a few months back (I've written about it in this blog a few time - here was the first). At the start, I'm not sure the Degas would have caught my attention, but over the past few months I've developed a fascination with it.

Physics is 'just' discourse?

I may not have heard exactly right, but in answer to questions following his talk "Cybernetics's Reflexive Turn" I think Klaus Krippendorff said something like 'Physics is just discourse'. He certainly used the word 'just'. Though his first language is not English, I am sure he is fully aware of the implications of the word 'just' because he is a Prof for 'Cybernetics, Language and Culture'. But I would like to probe his use of the word (I did not think quickly enough to attempt to raise it yesterday.)

My problem is that it is a 'reductionist' word, it is 'nothing buttery'. I could go along with the idea that physics is entirely constructed of language, in the same way that I am entirely constructed of atoms, but this does not make me just atoms nor physics just discourse.

Possibly Krippendorff would argue that there is nothing else for physics to be. But that case the word 'just' is redundant - or I'd rather say that in that case it is gratuitous. You can equally well say 'physics is discourse' as 'physics is just discourse'. Putting in the word 'just' only serves to belittle physics. It is a sort of imperialism...

From Cyber2008: day 1

Cyber 2008 is entitled 'Thinking and making connections'.

The first day for me has certainly been a day of seeing connections. There's no doubt that cybernetics reaches in all sorts of directions. A pleasing link today was the talk by Jasia Reichardt. As Assistant Director of the ICA in London, Jaisa was responsible for the 'Between Poetry and Painting' exhibition in 1965 that I mentioned here. Jasia talked more about a later exhibition entitled 'Cybernetic Serendipity' in 1968. It sounds intriguing, but at this stage I'm not sure quite how it feeds in to my own ideas.

In fact it will take on a while to 'process' all I've heard today. One, maybe superficial, observation, (but also one that supports the justification for Chris Bissell's talk) is that the speakers coming from non-engineering backgrounds clearly rely very heavily on references to Norbert Wiener. There's been very little mention of Shannon. Of course the reference to cybernetics on the conference title immediatley makes the Wiener link, but to my mind Shannon is every bit as significant as Wiener. It will be interesting to see what sort of reaction our panel session (papers by Chris Bissell, Magnus Ramage and me) gets tomorrow.

Stockholm presentation

Here is the presentation I'm giving at Stockholm.

NB. There may be people coming to this blog because I gave the URL at the talk. If you want to see specifically my blog posts with some relevance to the talk, click on the 'art' label from the list of labels in the left-hand column. Or just click here.

Art as communication

I am presenting a paper at Cyber2008 in Stockholm next week. My talk is entitled Information and meaning: complexity, surprise and context in telecommunications and art.

I did a practice presentation to colleagues yesterday, and this unearthed some issues that I will need to emphasise or that will need further explanation. The paper builds partly on some the issues I've been exploring here, and I intend to develop the ideas further in later posts.

I am using a layered model of communications to provide a framework for understanding art. (One of the issues I need to emphasise immediately, is that I am not claiming to be contributing to the content of the framework: my contribution is the framework itself.)

Here's the starting point:



Fundamental is the assumption that the artist is communicating something to viewer. I think that must be the case, if the artist is doing anything. A couple of points about that:

1) A tree is not art by itself. A painting of a tree is art. A photograph of a tree is art. Maybe a tree can become art by someone pointing to the tree and saying it is art. Maybe the tree even becomes art whenever someone points at it and just says "look at that tree", but I think there has to be someone to be the 'artist'. (See my related post on intentionality.)

2) The artist need not be conscious of what he or she is communicating. Indeed, my belief is that art works because it comes from the subconscious. I see the subconscious mind as huge compared to the conscious mind (the iceberg analogy). The reason that poetry, music, paintings etc do things that prose does not, is that they are communicating the subconscious. (Though actually I think prose can do the same, by communicating 'behind the scenes'. Well-crafted prose can move us just that same as poetry.) (See my comments on Solomonoff talking about Freud.)

US election

I can't have a blog of any sort and not say something about the election.

An election is, of course, about information. David Runciman reviewed the book Free Riding by Richard Tuck in the London Review of Books on 9th October. The book - and Runciman - was addressing the problem of why you should vote, since your individual vote will never - realistically - make a difference to the outcome. (When was an election ever won by 1 vote?) And more generally, the problem of the motivation for collective action - why shouldn't you get a 'free ride'?

There isn't a simple answer. But, I think a key point from the article is that the idea that people will not act collectively is a relatively modern phenomenon.

Contemporary economists and political scientists often take it for granted that anyone who views human beings as essentially self-interested creatures will inevitably conclude that groups are vulnerable to the defection of individual members who see that they can free ride off the contributions of others. But Tuck shows that before the 20th century philosophers who saw human behaviour in self-interested terms did not conclude this at all. Instead, they took it for granted that individuals will have good reason to co-operate in most circumstances, because it is obvious that the benefits of the group for the individual depend on the contribution of the individual to the group.

My emphasis, because it is another 'assumption about truth'. It is not seen as ideology: it is 'taken from granted'. Mind you, I don't view human beings as essentially self-interested anyway.

Anyway, back to the election. For me, it is as much - more - about the 'message' sent by whoever is elected as it is about the person. Although everything I read puts Obama streets ahead of McCain for me, still Obama is not exactly Gandhi or Martin Luther King. He's not even a European-style democrat. But selecting a black man as president says something important about America, if it happens. That matters in itself - and is an information issue.