Levels, layers, levelism

(This is one of these posts where I just put up miscellaneous odds and ends as a way of making some of my reading more interactive. I drafted it back in March and didn't post it then.) 

Exploring Floridi's references in his chapter on "The Method of Levels of Abstraction" (Chapter 3 in The Philosophy of Information*). Text in blue is from Floridi

*Floridi, L. The philosophy of information Oxford University Press, 2011

1     p47 line 2.  "Reality can be studied at different levels, so forms of ‘levelism’ have often been advocated in the past [Brown 1916]"

Brown, Harold Chapman Structural Levels in the Scientist's World The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, Journal of Philosophy, Inc., 1916, Vol. 13(13), pp. 337-345

I enjoyed this paper. It is basically putting forward arguments for the importance of emergence.

"Each level of the physical world, above the electronic, is then to be looked upon as containing entities constituted by an integration of entities on a lower level in accordance with the lawful forms of their behavior. But it is to be noted that the consequent behavior of these aggregates is not the behavior of the elements of which they are composed: electrons do not have valency, atoms have not molecular properties, and, for the molecule, surface tension or the solid, liquid, and gaseous states are meaningless. Even when a property seems to be present on several levels, as a mutual attraction between entities, its description is markedly different in the different cases, as was the case in the now outlived "distance coefficient" physics." [p 339]

"[N]o genuine whole is merely the sum of its parts, but is a consequence of the integration of its parts, and such integration is not, in general, expressible entirely in terms of the parts and their relations. Because picking a pocket involves movements of physical masses at varying velocities and therefore could be studied from the point of view of mechanics, and chemical and organic processes that might make it of interest to the chemist or the physiologist, it does not follow that it is not also a real fact for the student of human conduct from a social point of view and that for him it may not constitute an event the significance of which can not be expressed in terms of the sciences previously mentioned. Also the reaction of any integrated group or whole to any other such group is something quite different from the reactions of any of their constituents to each other or from any fact that can be ex- pressed in terms of such reactions." [p 341]

It all seems reasonable to me.  One oddity, from the perspective of 2017 anyway, is the comments on ether: "... while there can be little doubt that the ether concept represents something physically real...". I better not get side-tracked, but the Michelson–Morley experiment was in 1887 and this paper was published in 1916, so had people not abandoned ether by 1916?

2  p47 ll 10-24

Consider the following varieties of levelism currently available in the philosophical literature:

1. epistemological, e.g. levels of observation or interpretation of a system;
2. ontological, e.g. levels (or rather layers) of organization, complexity, or causal interaction etc. of a system;[Poli (2001) provides a reconstruction of ontological levelism]
3. methodological, e.g. levels of interdependence or reducibility among theories about a system; and
4. an amalgamation of (1)–(3), e.g. as in Oppenheim and Putnam (1958).

The current debate on multirealizability in the philosophy of AI and cognitive science has made (3) controversial, as Block (1997) has shown; while Heil (2003) and Schaffer (2003) have seriously and convincingly questioned the plausibility of (2). Since criticisms of (2) and (3) end up undermining (4), rumours are that levelism should probably be decommissioned.

I agree with Heil and Schaffer that ontological levelism is probably untenable. However, I shall argue that a version of epistemological levelism should be retained, as a fundamental and indispensable method of conceptual engineering (philosophical analysis and construction) in PI, albeit in a suitably refined version.

Poli, R. The Basic Problem of the Theory of Levels of Reality Axiomathes, 2001, Vol. 12(3), pp. 261-283

I struggled with this paper. Probably because I don't have philosophical background so don't have a firm enough foundation in ideas of things like ontology and epistemology, but maybe also it not such a well-written paper? The idea I take from it (which may be a completely misunderstanding) is that we should consider alternative (ontological) hierarchies to that of a hierarchy based on aggregation. If that is what Polis is saying, then, fine, I'm sort-of OK with it.

[T]he predominant opinion is that there is only one multi-dynamic (multi-layered) system: the one described by the natural sciences. Other forms of knowledge are scientific to the extent that they can be located in the progressive series of supraformations (groups of groups of groups of items, each with its specific kinds of interaction). Hence the alternative: a discipline is scientific to the extent that it can be located in the series of aggregation levels – if so it can be more or less easily reduced to the base level – or it cannot be thus located and is consequently not a science: it has no citizenship in the realm of knowledge and is scientifically stateless.

We shall see that this is not so, and that the opinion just described is simply wrong. The progressive array of levels, in fact, has breaks in it where the frame of reference is categorially modified. The only way to handle this is to acknowledge that the hierarchy of levels of granularity is only one of the hierarchies of reality. A satisfactory theory must obviously recognize the former, but it must recognize the other forms of organization into levels as well. For this reason too, a categorial approach is more promising than an ’objectual’ one base on items of some kind in interaction. [p266]

Schaffer, J. Is There a Fundamental Level?. Nous, 2003, Vol. 37(3), pp. 498 - 517

Another really good read!

Talk about "the fundamental level of reality" pervades contemporary metaphysics. The fundamentalist starts with (a) a hierarchical picture of nature as stratified into levels, adds (b) an assumption that there is a bottom level which is fundamental, and winds up, often enough, with (c) an ontological attitude according to which the entities of the fundamental level are primarily real, while any remaining contingent entities are at best derivative, if real at all. Thus the physicalist claims that microphysical theory (or some future extension thereof) describes the fundamental level of reality on which all else supervenes; the Humean claims that all supervenes on the distribution of local, fundamental qualities in spacetime; the epiphenomenalist claims that all causal powers inhere at the fundamental level; and the atomist claims that there are no macroentities at all but only fundamental entities in various arrangements. 

I find the hierarchical picture of nature in (a) plausible as reflected in the structure and discoveries of the sciences, and consider the ontological primacy of the fundamental entities in (c) a natural (though not inevitable) conclusion. In any case I will not discuss these issues here. Rather I will discuss the assumption (b) that there exists a fundamental level; first because it is almost entirely second because, as I will argue, there is no evidence in its favor; and third because the hierarchical picture minus (b) yields a far more palatable metaphysic in which, contra (c), all entities are equally real. [p498, emphasis in the original]

Schaffer proceeds to present an argument that (i) suggests there is no reason to cling to atomism and (ii) rejects the idea that there is any reason to suppose that physics is approaching a complete microphysical theory.

I am tempted to quote lots from it because it is so nicely written. (And, in terms of (ii), accords with my own thinking. I’d simply not thought about (i)). However, instead I just encourage any reader to read the paper for themselves. But, some key conclusions:

So I conclude that we do not, right now, have any evidence for atomism. We now have no evidence that there will be a final theory, no evidence that such a theory will postulate anything that could serve as a mereological atom, and no evidence that such a theoretical postulate will correspond to an ontological atom as opposed to a boringly decomposable composite. Evidence for fundamentality is lacking thrice over. 

In short, there are at least two perfectly good conceptions of the hierarchy of nature: fundamentality and infinite descent. The empirical evidence to date is neutral as to which structure science is reflecting. And so, concerning the proposition that there exists a fundamental level of nature, one should withhold belief. [p505-506]

And then

[First line of retreat] [C]an certain fundamentalist doctrines be (re)formulated without presupposing the existence of a fundamental level? I will consider physicalism, Humeanism, epiphenomenalism, and atomism in turn, and show that all presuppose fundamentality in some sense.

BTW, a handy links: supervenience 

As a second line of retreat, the fundamentalist might maintain that, while there is no evidence for mereological atoms, there may yet be evidence for a fundamental something else. I think that there is one particularly interesting form of this retreat, on which this "something else" is a fundamental supervenience base. In any case I will limit my discussion of this retreat to this particular maneuver. [p509]
...
So it is in fact worth distinguishing (at least) three metaphysical pictures: full-blown fundamentality, supervenience-only fundamentality, and full- blown infinite descent. Should we not discover a complete microphysics (or should we at least continue to discover ever-deeper novel structure) this would provide evidence for infinite descent. Should we discover a complete microphysics, this would then provide evidence for supervenience- only fundamentality, and allow for physicalism and Humeanism. Should the complete microphysics also turn out to postulate particles, and should these particles turn out indivisible, this would then provide evidence for full-blown fundamentality, and allow for epiphenomenalism and atomism in addition. For now, all of these outcomes must be regarded as live possibilities. [p512]

And, finally

What would a metaphysic of infinite descent look like? The most striking feature of an infinite descent is that no level is special.25 Infinite descent yields an egalitarian ontological attitude which is at home in the macro- world precisely because everything is macro. Mesons, molecules, minds, and mountains are in every sense ontologically equal. Because there can be no privileged locus for the causal powers, and because they must be somewhere, they are everywhere. So infinite descent yields an egalitarian metaphysic which dignifies and empowers the whole of nature.

Treat infinite descent as a working hypothesis, and since all entities turn out to be composite, supervenient, realized, and governed, it emerges that these attributes cannot be barriers to full citizenship in the republic of being.

The macroworld, once regained, is not easily lost, even should real evidence for fundamentality arrive. Here I am, a human organism, a macro- entity, but in no sense unreal for that. I believe that I am both composed of and dependent on certain cells, which are in turn both composed of and dependent on certain molecules, which are in turn both composed of and dependent on certain atoms, which are in turn both composed of and dependent on certain subatomic particles, which are in turn both composed of and dependent on certain quarks and leptons. We just don't know whether this chain stops. But from this perspective it seems obvious that my realness does not in any sense turn on whether there are preons and so on below, or not.

To see that there is no evidence for fundamentality is already to regain the macroworld.

Information ethics and corporations

In Luciano Floridi's Information Ethics (IE), the basic ethical unit is an informational entity.

[A]ll informational entities have an intrinsic moral value, although possibly quite minimal and overridable, and hence … qualify as moral patients subject to some (possibly equally minimal) degree of moral respect

(Luciano Floridi, “The Ethics of Information”, OUP, Oxford 2013, p109)

Some informational entities are also agents and potentially accountable and may or may not be responsible. Humans, for example, are informational agents which are accountable and responsible.

A drone is an (artificial) informational agent which is accountable, though whether it is responsible remains in dispute. Artificial agents are not restricted to technological agents but can also be social agents such as corporations.

And this gets me to the piece in The Washington Post that was the motivation for this blog post:

Corporations are people, except when it comes time to go to jail

Corporations sure like to be people, what with all the rights and privileges that people get in this country. Why, the word corporate practically MEANS body. But sometimes they don’t like it so very much: when it’s PUNISHMENT time!

Here and here are two stories on the recent Goldman deal. “’Today’s settlement is another example of the department’s resolve to hold accountable those whose illegal conduct resulted in the financial crisis of 2008,’ Benjamin C. Mizer, head of the Justice Department’s civil division, said in a statement.”

‘Those who’??? Read these stories as many times as you like, and the ‘those who’ referred to are very hard to identify. All of a sudden, the ‘who’ morphs into ‘it.’ “Goldman did not alert investors who were buying the bonds it was packaging.” “it knew that they were full of mortgages that were likely to fail.” “it sold packages of shoddy mortgages.” “Goldman Sachs repeatedly discovered problems with the mortgages it was selling to investors but didn’t tell investors.” Just try to put a pair of handcuffs on that ‘it.’...

Tom Toles, Washington Post, April 12

Floridi's The Fourth Revolution (2 minute introduction)

(See more in an earlier post)

Cogito Ergo Sum, The Matrix, and Information

My French teacher at school was prone to wandering off the subject. I don't know if that was why I got such poor grade at French O-Level (in truth I've never been much of linguist anyway), but I am still grateful for Mr Fallon for introducing me to Descartes' Cogito Ergo Sum.

You can argue about whether it really proves that 'I' exist, or what it means to say I exist (what do I mean by 'I', what do I mean by 'proves', what do I mean by 'exist'?) but the basic idea seems pretty undeniable. The greatest claim to reality, for me, is my passing thought. (And for you - if you exist - it's your passing thought.)

Where you go with that, of course, what use it is, is a different question.

To go beyond the 'I', requires an act of faith. You take the next step on trust. But what is the next step, what is the first thing outside that one thought? The next step is that there is something other than my thought, that there is something that my thought connects to. To say what that is would require a further step. To say that there is really a chair that I'm sitting on, really air that I breath, really a computer that I'm typing on, is an extra step of faith. All these could be illusions, dreams, or virtually reality. This, of course, takes us into the territory of The Matrix.


Again, though: so what? Well, for me, that 'next step' from my passing thought to something more, takes me to information. It's just that if we search for reality, we start with Cogito, move out to information, and only then can we acknowledge the reality of the material world.

The thing is that I suggest that this the opposite way around to received wisdom. Matter is supposed to be really real, information is a bit iffy, and the subjective stuff inside my head, well, that just can't be trusted.

In his talk at Turing 12, Luciano Floridi made a passing comment, something about young students getting over-enthusiastic about information, that there is nothing but information. He, Luciano, was cautioning against going too far. Maybe, but at the very least I think information demands a better hearing. I think the tyranny of materialism has had its day!

[Added later. I suppose this is wandering towards existentialism.]

Turing 12 - thoughts from AISB/IACAP World Congress

Monday and Tuesday this week I spent at the AISB/IACAP World Congress (Turing 2012), at Birmingham University. (The event is continued all week, but I just went for the two days.)  It was very worthwhile - many thanks to the organisers - and I've come away with lots to think about and, in an ideal world, blog about.

Here's just a few notes to flag some of the things I would write about (for a variety of different reasons) if I had time:

- Floridi's 'Level of Abstraction' (LoA). I agree with his emphasis of the utility of the idea, but I call it a map rather than an LoA.
- The requirement for information to be true to count as information (adding that to the General Definition of Information, GDI). Yes but there's more I want to say about that. (James Cussens very clear comments on the Barwise/Carnap paradox)
- The Big Picture about information - paradigm shift? Grand narrative? Philosophia prima?
- Various thoughts about ontology
- Defining intentionality, whether a machine can 'intend' something - see my blog post about intentionality in the genetic code, 'irreducible first person perspective'; synthetic semiotics
- distinction between ontological and epistemological emergentism;
- Kants claim that only the creator of the world can have direct access to it - the designer of a simulation can have access to the noumenal
- Suzanne Embury on "Forget Dimensions, Define your Information Quality Using View Patterns". About a specific task to do with information quality, but surely links to all sorts of ontologies.
- (Floridi) "since 2007, information created has exceeded storage capacity" (so you can't just store everything and worry about what to do with it later)
- Intuition and Ingenuity: Alan Turing Centenary Exhibition

The 'Author meets Critics' session, when five eminent academics gave comment (it could hardly be called 'criticism' in any sense, to be fair!) on Luciano Floridi's excellent new book: "The Philosophy of Information" (from the left: Luciano Floridi; James Cussens; Phyllis Illari; Jean-Gabriel Ganascia; Chryssa Sdrolia and Barry Cooper).

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

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 displays 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.

Floridi on Information Ethics

I like this:

...[I]nformation ethics holds that every entity, as an expression of being, has a dignity, constituted by its mode of existence and essence...

This ontological equality principle means that any form of reality (any instance of information/being), simply for the fact of being what it is, enjoys a minimal, initial, overridable, equal right to exist and develop in a way appropriate to its nature.

Information: A Very Short Introduction Oxford 2010

It is like we might go beyond extending ethics from humans to animals so that we take in anything - any 'informational' object. Floridi talks about replacing biocentrism with ontocentrism.

It [ontocentrism] suggests that there is something even more elemental than life, namely being [...] and something even more fundamental than suffering, namely entropy.

He goes on to point out that this is not the concept of thermodynamic entropy:

Entropy here refers to any kind of corruption, destruction, pollution and depletion of informational object... that is, any form of impoverishment of reality.

Need to be careful with this line of thinking of course, but an interesting line of thought.

General Definition of Information: GDI (Floridi)

In Information: A Very Short Introduction, Luciano Floridi has the following, as a formulation of the idea that Information is 'data plus meaning'.

The General Definition of Information (GDI):
σ is an instance of information, understood as semantic content, if and only if:

(GDI.1) σ consists of one or more data;
(GDI.2) the data in σ are well-formed;
(GDI.3) the well-formed data in σ are meaningful.

At the moment I'm not convinced the formulation adds anything to saying 'data plus meaning'. It still begs all sorts of questions, but maybe it is useful to have it there as a reference point.

Luciano Floridi on the fourth revolution and the infosphere

In a Philosophy bites interview, Luciano Floridi talks about the fourth revolution - the information revolution.

I've removed the emedded audio because it was taking a long time to load - please go to the site instead if you want to listed to it.

Some notes and comments:

Four revolutions which change our understanding of where we stand in relation to the universe.

1st Copernicus
2nd Darwin
3rd Freud
4th The information revolution. ICT modifies our interaction with reality. "Things exist if we can interact with them."

"The infosphere", goes back to the invention of writing, expanding to include more and more aspects of our reality.

A square with four corners:
1 knowledge
2 ethics
3 our self-understanding
4 how we make sense of reality

ICT has changed all four. 4th: Things exist if we can interact with them - "For example, in the world of physics"... we have become used to treating as existing subatomic particles that we have never perceived but we have been able to interact with"

He talks about the way in which we can play different roles and characters online (as in Second Life) and makes the point that if someone spends a lot of time playing these roles it can feed back in to who that person is.

This reminded me of an episode in "The Joke" by Milan Kundera, where the narrator is in a jail, and the man in charge of the jail is young and cruel. Kundera argues that his cruelty arises from not knowing how he should behave, so he has to create a role for himself:

The young can't help playacting; themselves incomplete, they are thrust by life into a completed world where they are compelled to act fully grown. They therefore adopt forms, pattern, models - those that are in fashion, that suit, that please - and enact them.

My point is that it is not just online that we act out roles. Maybe, though, the virtual world provides somewhere we can start afresh, and escape from the role we created in the physical world?

"We are 80% 90% information"

"There is a sense in which people who are not online do not exist"

Information technology has given us reasons to reconsider the classical problems from a different perspective.