Abstract
Notions like meaning, signal, intentionality, are difficult to relate to a physical world. I study a purely physical definition of “meaningful information”, from which these notions can be derived. It is inspired by a model recently illustrated by Kolchinsky and Wolpert, and improves on Dretske’s classic work on the relation between knowledge and information. I discuss what makes a physical process into a “signal”.
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Notes
- 1.
Related ideas are developed in the teleological approach to meaning, especially work of Dretske and of Millikan. See for instance Sect. 3 in: Neander, Karen,“Teleological Theories of Mental Content”,? The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy? (Spring 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2012/entries/content-teleological/.
- 2.
Here V(.) is the Liouville volume and the difference between the two volumes can be defined as the limit of a regularisation even when the two terms individually diverge. For instance, if A and B are both free particles on a circle of of size L, constrained to be at a distance less than or equal to L / N (say by a rope tying them), then we can easily regularise the phase space volume by bounding the momenta, and we get \(S = \log N\), independently from the regularisation.
- 3.
[There could be] “beings where it happens as if everything was organised in view of a purpose, while actually things have been structured appropriately only by chance; and the things that happen not to be organised adequately, perished, as Empedocles says” [6] II 8, 198b29).
References
Price, H.: Naturalism without Mirrors. Oxford University Press (2011)
Darwin, C.: On the Origin of Species. Penguin Classics (2009)
Dretske, F.: Knowledge and the Flow of Information. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass (1981)
Shannon, C.E.: A mathematical theory of communication. Bell Syst. Tech. J. XXVII(3), 379 (1948)
Wolpert, D.H., Kolchinsky, A.: Observers as systems that acquire information to stay out of equilibrium. In: The physics of the observer Conference. Banff (2016)
Aristotle, Physics. In: The Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, pp. 257–355. The University of Chicago (1990)
Acknowledgements
I thank David Wolpert for private communications and especially Jenann Ismael for a critical reading of the article and very helpful suggestions.
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Rovelli, C. (2018). Meaning and Intentionality = Information + Evolution. In: Aguirre, A., Foster, B., Merali, Z. (eds) Wandering Towards a Goal. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75726-1_3
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