Related papers: Dynamics of Meaning
Meaning cannot be based on dictionary definitions all the way down: at some point the circularity of definitions must be broken in some way, by grounding the meanings of certain words in sensorimotor categories learned from experience or…
Information is everywhere in nature which is very uncertain and unpredictable. But information, in itself, is a very ambiguous term. In this cursory write-up, we attempt to understand the formal meaning of information by quantifying…
A general notion of information-related complexity applicable to both natural and man-made systems is proposed. The overall approach is to explicitly consider a rational agent performing a certain task with a quantifiable degree of success.…
Some thoughts are presented on the inter-relation between beauty and truth in science in general and theoretical physics in particular. Some conjectural procedures that can be used to create new ideas, concepts and results are illustrated…
This work explores the hypothesis that subjectively attributed meaning constitutes the phenomenal content of conscious experience. That is, phenomenal content is semantic. This form of subjective meaning manifests as an intrinsic and…
Language technologies that accurately model the dynamics of events must perform commonsense reasoning. Existing work evaluating commonsense reasoning focuses on making inferences about common, everyday situations. To instead investigate the…
Information theory is a practical and theoretical framework developed for the study of communication over noisy channels. Its probabilistic basis and capacity to relate statistical structure to function make it ideally suited for studying…
We present several philosophical ideas emerging from the studies of complex systems. We make a brief introduction to the basic concepts of complex systems, for then defining "abstraction levels". These are useful for representing…
Here we deconstruct, and then in a reasoned way reconstruct, the concept of "entropy of a system," paying particular attention to where the randomness may be coming from. We start with the core concept of entropy as a COUNT associated with…
An inductive logic can be formulated in which the elements are not propositions or probability distributions, but information systems. The logic is complete for information systems with binary hypotheses, i.e., it applies to all such…
A system responding to a stochastic driving signal can be interpreted as computing, by means of its dynamics, an implicit model of the environmental variables. The system's state retains information about past environmental fluctuations,…
"Information Processing" is a recently launched buzzword whose meaning is vague and obscure even for the majority of its users. The reason for this is the lack of a suitable definition for the term "information". In my attempt to amend this…
What does it mean to "make sense" of physics? It's not a simple question. Most people have an intuitive feeling for when things do (or do not) make sense to them. But, putting this feeling into words--especially actionable words--is another…
Argumentation is a non-monotonic process. This reflects the fact that argumentation involves uncertain information, and so new information can cause a change in the conclusions drawn. However, the base logic does not need to be…
In this article, we review a general theoretical framework of thermodynamics of information on the basis of Bayesian networks. This framework can describe a broad class of nonequilibrium dynamics of multiple interacting systems with complex…
Communication of information in complex systems can be considered as major driver of systems evolution. What matters is not the communicated information by itself but rather the meaning that is supplied to the information. However…
The concept of emergence, or synergy in its simplest form, is widely used but lacks a rigorous definition. Our work connects information and set theory to uncover the mathematical nature of synergy as the failure of distributivity. It…
We show that the mutual information between two symbols, as a function of the number of symbols between the two, decays exponentially in any probabilistic regular grammar, but can decay like a power law for a context-free grammar. This…
Harmonic theory provides a mathematical framework to describe the structure, behavior, evolution and emergence of harmonic systems. A harmonic system is context aware, contains elements that manifest characteristics either collaboratively…
Inspired by a quantum mechanical formalism to model concepts and their disjunctions and conjunctions, we put forward in this paper a specific hypothesis. Namely that within human thought two superposed layers can be distinguished: (i) a…