Butler’s word games 11 Sep 2009 Gary Nelson recently sent me a paper from G. G. Simpson, published back around 1961: Simpson, GG. 1961. Lamarck, Darwin and Butler, three approaches to evolution. The American Scholar 30 (2):239-249. Unfortunately, this is not online, even through JSTOR, but it’s a wonderful essay, in which Simpson excoriates Samuel Butler’s “word games” (below the fold): Where Darwin failed to reach a solution [to the problem of the origins of variation – JSW] by the right method, Butler reached a wrong solution by the wrong method. Butler’s own statement, more than amply supported by his performance, was that his approach, methods and intentions were literary, artistic, nonscientific and even antiscientific. Basically his whole argument is a play on words. One may say, if one wishes, that sodium “knows” how to combine with chlorine to make salt, that an embryo “knows” how to develop into an adult and that a pianist “knows” how to play a composition. But the nature and source of the “knowledge” are so completely different in the three cases that the use of the same word, “knows,” becomes only a pun. Butler’s use of the words “memory,” [as in racial memory – JSW] “learning” and others suffer the same fate. Butler mistook his word game for truth. (Here I would like to insert a parenthetical cautionary query. Are we always quite sure that we are not playing one of Butler’s word games when we use such terms as “information,” “coding,” et cetera, in discussing these same matters today?) Hallelujah, brother! Amen! This is exactly what I have been saying about information for a decade or so. It’s a word game. Another word, which Simpson also critiques in that paper, is “design”. There is no design, no information, no code except what we put there in the ways we describe things, and often these terms are used in so very disparate ways that we really should drop them altogether, on pain of the fallacy of equivocation. Others have played this Butlerian word game. Dawkins, and those he relies upon who talk about genetic information, is one. Those who argue, as some have lately, that bacteria are intelligent problem solvers are others. Those who think that development is a program. [About now, the G&S song “I’ve got a little list” is playing in my head.] David Penny, at a conference on information in Canberra in 2001, with John Maynard Smith present, told a JMS anecdote. He and a bunch of JMS’s students were sitting in the university of Sussex cafeteria, when the great man himself came up and interrupted their conversation. “Is this about words, or the world? If it is about the world, I will stay, but if it’s about words, I shall go.” We should go, too. Evolution Metaphysics Philosophy Science
Creationism and Intelligent Design Tautology 2: The problem arises 23 Aug 2009 After Williams and others had made the comment that fitness is a tautology, it came around that the point needed to be discussed in more detail. One such discussion was by a student of Dobzhansky’s, Richard Lewontin. Read More
Philosophy A night about religion 1 Oct 2010 I’m part of a tag team night for the Student Philosophy Association at the University of Queensland. The Facebook page is here. I’m arguing for… guess which? Read More
Evolution New Carnival of Evolution 2 Nov 2010 Click on the button to go read lots of evolving goodness. Read More
Dawkins, and those he relies upon who talk about genetic information, is one. Worse, from what I’ve seen (which is admittedly not a lot, and that somewhat dated), Dawkins uses the colloquial, intuitive definition of “information” and by doing so accepts to debate the creationist claim that genetic information cannot increase, on its own terms. Instead, one can elect to treat the genome abstractly as a sequence of symbols from the alphabet ATGC, and then apply one of the formal info-theory definitions. In which case, the creationist argument dissolves rather neatly.
This is a slippery slope, John. There’s not much science that can done from a state of wordless samadhi.
I guess my question, rephrased, is: how do you draw a line in the sand between concrete and metaphorical language? What determines that a use of words is not a game?
“There is no design, no information, no code except what we put there” I like the simple term inflection range. The way tone and pitch can utterly change repetition and what we sense in language. I like playing with spoken words far more than written ones. But history and written words have an inflection range as well, just not so easy to grasp when it lies dead and flat on the page.
What about the phrase “ways of knowing”? What does this phrase mean? What does “knowing” mean? Is it just another word game.
I think the phrase is a bit of a dog whistle for the religious, yes, but it’s got its own legitimate history. To know something means to understand some domain or topic, and that can also mean domains that are not empirical (like, for example, the state of jazz aesthetics, or moral values).
While I share John’s disdain for loose references to ‘information’, particularly in biology, I suspect that my posit of objective information is at least part of what’s got him riled up. So be it. I think that like many theoretical posits, this one can be neither vindicated nor undermined by pure argument. It’s more a matter of fecundity, which can only be properly assessed if we play with the idea in a variety of relevant contexts.
The advice of my fav historian when I took up p.g study was (a) don’t do it, just try and get something published (why did I not listen) and B. if you must pick some fashionable buzz words and a nice of the moment title (I ignored that one as well). Whenever I think of his advice, the Iggy Pop line from lust for life “well thats just hypnotizing chickens” always springs to mind.
I think I can buy into part of John’s position here. First you have to assume an ontology that’s a superset of mind – almost everyone accepts that. Second, you have to assume that this ontology is fundamentally unknowable, as in Kant’s noumenon. No real problem there either. So… we experience mental models of our own construction that we call “information”, that may have a tenuous connection at best, with any noumenon. However, there must at least be *some* correlation between our mental models (information) and the noumenon, otherwise we wouldn’t be surviving, none of machines would work, etc. One could also argue (if one is a physical monist), that our mental information is also instantiated in the universe, and therefore it does indeed “exist” objectively.
That’s a very succinct summation of my views, jeff. I forget how much I need to specify rather than take for granted outside the conventions of philosophy. The view I accept on this is roughly that of Stathos Psillos, called “structural realism”: our scientific theories track truth, but not so closely we must think that everything in them can be assumed to exist. Our informational constructs exists in our heads and conversations between ourselves. These things and events exist objectively. But we must always guard against projection of our own properties onto the world, of anthropomorphism, and information talk about the world is exactly such a case. There may be an example in which information, of the Shannon kind, is directly related to physical properties, as outlined in this article in the Stanford Encyclopedia, but that’s not going to help us with Butlerian word games.
John – That there are Butlerian word games is an unfortunate fact; but there are also thoughtful applications of the idea of ‘informational content’ that can’t be dismissed as anthropomorphic confusions. Theories of perception, especially what are called direct theories, are the sorts of applications where I think an objective conception of information is quite appropriate. To think that this involves some sort of projection of subjectivity onto the world simply misunderstands what the theories are about.
Again, you seem to think that I am denying that one may use informational theories. I am not. I am merely pointing out that the pure mathematical abstractions of these theories are at best only roughly instantiated in physical systems (my Mac is not a real Turing machine, just something that comes very close. Turing machines do not suffer heating problems, or have crashes due to media failure). Where the mathematics works is a matter of empirical investigations, as well as allowing for abstraction of the description of the phenomena. I think, for example, that informational accounts apply nicely to cell–cell signalling, and any process that is constructed from that, so an informational account will apply to kinases, nervous systems (including perception) and so on. It fails to apply to genes, as there is literally no information theory that instantiates anything much like a genetic system (although we can, of course, do a dynamic model in silico, but then we can do that for anything, including stuff we don’t usually call informational, like orbiting masses). The information is not objective in such a case, but the phenomena that informational models describe are. You have to be careful to recognise when you are disquoting.
Well, the imperfect fit between abstract theories and the world seems to be a very different matter from your earlier remarks about projecting information onto the world. Saying the emperor is naked is quite different from saying his clothes are ill-fitted.
Bob, you still don’t get it (so I must be being more than ordinarily opaque): there are no clothes, just our descriptions of the skin they would cover.
I don’t know if you’re being opaque, or if I’m being obtuse, so I’ll put the question directly. Is it a factual error to say that light carries information? (note that nothing is being disquoted here)
Yes it is. But we can use the physical properties of light to encode and decode information transmitting it according to Shannon entropy, and we can use the physical properties of surfaces that reflect light to make inferences and measurements about the world (Fisher information).
OK. So our disagreement is factual in nature. I think there’s information in light that sighted organisms have evolved to take advantage of. You’d have to tell some other sort of story.
We’ve been here before but I would still maintain that electro-magnetic transmissions do not contain information. Eyes or other electro-magnetic transmission receptors construct information out of the transmissions and this is something else altogether. I’m not sure if this is the right way to express it but I think that the information is only implicit in the transmission and only becomes explicit through translation by the receptor. Different receptors constructing different information dependent on their translating capabilities.
I’m not even sure if we could say that it is implicit in the “transmission” without knowing in advance that there will be a “receiver.” This starts to sound awfully Platonic. Who put that information there? I think Bob K’s story is the kind that comes from overemphasizing Darwin’s selection metaphor. Organisms don’t just “take” advantage, they make it, too. We have to be careful not to surmise that there’s a world of possible games or challenges that evolving organisms will either succeed or fail at. There is also the question of novelty. Calling natural selection a “law” induces us to forget that we can’t predict the course of evolutionary change.
Your criticsm is exactly the reason that I expressed doubt about my own choice of terms but at the moment I can’t think of a better way to express it.
Chris – Would you explain what connection you see between the idea that information is objective and an overemphasis on selection? The sort of account of information I’ve mentioned (again, see Dretske and/or Gibson) “cashes out” the notion of ‘information’ in terms of conditions of causal specificity. I’m a bit vague about how you get from there to selection, or even Platonism.
Bob, I think we have to start by asking what light was like before there were eyes to see it. It’s a tree-falling-in-the-forest problem if you like. We might say that photons existed before there was life, emitted by the sun and stars and other cosmic activity, but to say these photons carried information waiting to be taken advantage of is to presuppose the development of the eye–something very easy for us to take for granted now that it has happened. There was no luminosity, and most importantly there was no “darkness,” before there were eyes to construe these things. We can imagine the earth or some other planet, 4 billion years ago, lit by the sun, in all it’s craggy glory, but in doing so we would be implicitly imagining ourselves looking at such a scape. Such a view was never seen, and as such never existed. (The view, mind you, not the reality underlying the view). Calling anything “objective” is awfully dicey because there is no position from which to objectively observe. There are only conditioned observations. The story you seem to want to tell is Platonically ideal in the sense that it takes light as something real and eternal, as though our finite and morphologically inflexible bodies (and “extended phenotypes”) could get a bead on the true nature of things. I think it’s more accurate to call light the negotiation between photons and eyes (but even this is problematic because neither photons or eyes can be described “objectively” either.) Most importantly, information (that is, non-anthropogenic information) cannot objectively exist because there is no one to encode and transmit the message. In the natural world things refer only to themselves. Natural selection appears to encode something like information in the genome as an instinctual semiotic response, such as when a large fish takes a certain red flash in the water as a sign there is prey nearby (which we can exploit with fishing lures). But this is a different thing than saying that the information is there in the prey’s movement waiting to be exploited. Abstracting signs from the overall fabric of nature is a creative process, not a deterministic one.
But while I am a little Kantian, I am not entirely Kantian. We can know the overall noumenal facets of the world – that’s what science is for. What I (and presumably Simpson) object to is the projection onto the world of the properties of ourselves and our theories. Several times I have mentioned Psillos’ version of “structural realism” here. There’s a Stanford Encyclopedia article, but I have to blog about that sometime, probably when I get back from my World Tour. But basically it means that the referential content of a scientific theory is determined by it being empirically adequate, so that it refers overall. But that hardly licenses the view that, say, the math of the theory is somehow real; at best it is a representation of the things that are real, to which the theory as a whole refers. In pseudosemiotic terms, the signs and the signified do not have the same properties, because, well, one is a sign, and one is the thing being signified. A signpost to Paris doesn’t have the same ambience as Paris itself.
If we care to follow Count Korzybski (as I often do), then Paris itself isn’t even Paris itself. Naming things is a reduction to a representation. “Paris” is just a rush of air through the lips. Also, John, do you think super-evolved oysters or African violets would have the same scientific concept of the noumenal that we do?
No, of course not, but there’s a much abused concept of von Uexküll’s: Umwelt. This is the sensory environment of the organism, as it were. It is the interaction of the noumenal environment with the sensory modalities of the particular organism/species. What an oyster or a violet responds to (if a violet had a nervous system or analogue) depends on its apparatus. But a point about the scientific conception: it exceeds the biological sensory Umwelt of the human being. My friend Paul Griffiths and I argue in a forthcoming paper that common sense is just the primate Umwelt; science is much different. For a start it has a whole host of different sensory apparatus, such as its assays and instruments of measurement. Secondly, it has, as a whole, a “nervous system” that happens to include but is not limited to the nervous systems of scientists. Science can “know” much more than an individual scientist does. This is why we talk of theories – they are conceptions in the scientific Umwelt.
Uh, if I’d read through the Tautology posts in their entirety I would have seen that this is old ground by now. If I understand JW correctly, he is asking something like: Where is the location of the information (in the flower petal, e.g)? If it is objectively actual, and not merely Platonically possible, we should be able to describe it. And yet without an apparatus that sees in the UV spectrum it is indescribable. The information exists in the relationship between bee and petal. That is, it is relational and conditioned by multiple participants, and not objective.
John, There’s no “reply” link to your comment of 6:12 this morning (does WordPress have a “last word” feature for moderators that I’m not aware of?) but this is intended to respond to that. Scientific apparati certainly extend (and often correct) the nervous systems of their employers. But all measurements begin in the human mind. Science can know much more than any ordinary scientist, but this is a long way from saying that it can know what is noumenal. It expands the human Umwelt, yes, but can it transcend it?
Chris – The concept of information can be defined independently of considerations about its use or significance for cognitive systems — e.g., by characterizing it in terms of causal specificity as do Dretske and Gibson (and others…). Granted, this notion is not unproblematic; but it’s not more problematic for a theory of information than for any other sort of theory that draws on notions of causality. If one is working with such an objectivist notion of information, your ponderings about what light was like before there were eyes are simply beside the point. Until you drop the assumption that information implies a user that is informed, you haven’t even engaged the notion of objective information. Talk of encoding, and messages, and signs and signals is premature at this point. All these are viewed as derivative concepts which get constructed after we have the notion of information in hand.
In that case I think I’m going to have a lot of trouble “engaging” the idea of objective information. What is information outside of the process of informing? I think you mean to say it’s some kind of order. But order is a property of mind, not matter. It inevitably refers back to other forms to acquire its meaning. Can you present me with a meaningful definition of information that does refer to the mind or sensory array that will be informed?
Thony C – Of course, one is free to reject the thesis that information is objective. If you go that route, though, you complicate the sort of story that might explain how there come to be cognitive systems that devise symobol systems and codes and traffic in messages and all the other neat things that occupy communication theorists. You’ll notice that I haven’t offered any arguments intended to establish that information is actually objective. Instead, I’ve tried to coax people into articulating their reasons for their rejection. I’ve also intimated that people might want to acquaint themselves with the views of some pretty smart people who have opted for objective information. Chris – You ask, “What is information outside of the process of informing?” Well, have you googled Dretske and/or Gibson to see what I might actually be talking about? Barring that, how about checking out the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/information-semantic/
Bob, If “environmental information” is aptly conveyed by that Stanford article then I think I’ve already addressed it. Litmus paper turning red is a “sign” that it’s come into contact with an acid. But “litmus paper turning red” is also an event that requires a nervous system attuned to the visible spectrum to occur. It is not independent of an informee. Redness and blueness do not exist before the development of eyes and minds that can see them, so I am still curious as to just what has been “embedded” in the litmus paper. (Using a word from the Stanford article). I could arbitrarily decide not to get up from my park bench on a breezy autumn day until the next leaf fell from a nearby tree. I would be responding to a sign if I followed through with this, but we wouldn’t say there was any objective information in that falling leaf, would we?
Science can “know” much more than an individual scientist does. As far as Butlerian word games go, aren’t you being hoisted by your own petard, with that statement? 😉
An objective ontology was a leap of faith that we all took in early childhood, and without it, this discussion would not be possible. However, it would seem that as we look deeper into things, for some strange reason that faith is continually being called into question.