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>It's a bit absurdly reductionist, imo. The more reductionist, the better imo. >Meaning, as we humans experience it, is fully bound up with consciousness and

>It's a bit absurdly reductionist, imo. The more reductionist, the better imo. >Meaning, as we humans experience it, is fully bound up with consciousness and sense of self. And it is important to avoid giving meaning an anthropocentric framing which will constrain the analysis too much and thus miss important phenomena. Why should meaning have some qualitative experience associated with it? All sorts of organisms and processes behave in meaningful ways that suggest meaning is embedded in these systems without consciousness. A successful definition of meaning should explain the widespread appearance of meaning in the world. >we should not be projecting our experience of the phenomena of consciousness and sense of self (agency) to black boxes that can already be modeled as computation. But computation is necessarily meaningful! We cannot take some meaningful information, apply an arbitrary sequence of transformations on it, and expect to get meaningful information out. In other words: garbage transformations, garbage out. We see that program can meaningfully transform an input sequence, and that same program will produce garbage with another input sequence. The context of the program, i.e. what input it is operating on, determine what those operations mean, or whether they mean anything at all. The fact that nature picks the useful transformations out of the space of the garbage, or a human programmer picks out the useful transformations needs to be explained. The explanation is that some transformations are meaningful in a given context, and operating in the space of meaning helps guide one through the space of possibility.

eternalban 6y ago
I would much prefer it if [for example] one used 'sense' instead of 'meaning'. For example 'the reaction of processor is the sense of the input'. Why? Because language hygiene matters. There will be inevitable leakage of strictly defined terms of a conceptual model that have far broader scope in the general usage. > But computation is necessarily meaningful! Damn straight, but it is "meaningful!" to the programmer, not the program. :)
- hackinthebochs 6y ago
  >Damn straight, but it is "meaningful!" to the programmer, not the program. :) But the meaning of the computation exists independent of the programmer. That is, the program doesn't require the existence of a human interpreter to be meaningful. To explain this, it helps to get clear what a computation really is. Essentially, a program takes some input and transforms it to some output. But not just any transformation counts as a computation. What separates transformations that merely increase entropy in the universe and ones that count as computations are the fact that mutual information is preserved across the transformation. The input has mutual information with some system, and the transformation preserves some amount of this mutual information. This is in contrast to destructive transformations where the mutual information is lost entirely. We can further refine the concept by noticing that computations are revelatory, they can tell us something we didn't know about some external system. The result of a computation is such that some new information is revealed about some external system that was inaccessible prior to the computation. Thus we can define a computation as a process that uses an input signal to reduce entropy (the unknown information) with respect to some external system. But mutual information and entropy are not concepts that depend on human interpreters.
  - eternalban 6y ago
    Are you not describing 'effect' here? You, the observer, are seeing side effects of the program. You are a 'reader' of these effects. You ascribe 'meaning' to the transformation. The program itself is just a mechanism. "But the meaning of the computation exists independent of the programmer." But not outside of an external "observer". I assert that you still require another "mind" to read/note the "meaningful effects" let's try r/meaning/effect: "But the [effect] of the computation exists independent of the programmer. That is, the program doesn't require the existence of a human interpreter to be [effective]." And that is perfectly reasonable and doesn't seem to nullify your further remarks regarding [processes] that preserve mutual information. And it is interesting and informative and we happen to in agreement. My beef is with use of loaded words like "meaning". Your cite (Dennet) certainly doesn't shy away from a very expansive philosophical program: "This biological re-grounding of much-debated concepts yields a bounty of insights into the nature of meaning and life." That's borderline theological. > We can further refine the concept by noticing that computations are revelatory And this is interesting since I wanted to mention revelatory experiences in context of -zero- input/information. I'm sure you've must have had your share of epiphanies and bolts out of the blue insights.
    - hackinthebochs 6y ago
      >I assert that you still require another "mind" to read/note the "meaningful effects" The issue is less that you need another mind to "note" something, but whether two independent minds will come to the same conclusion when undertaking independent analyses. We think mathematics is objective because two intelligent agents with entirely different histories will ultimately discover much of the same mathematical structure. The consequences for mutual information and entropy of a given process would reveal itself to a sufficiently determined analysis. The meaning/effect translation works at first glance because computation is a species of causation. The question is, are there features of computation that a general causation description doesn't capture? I think so. An example is that causation does not require an input with some amount of mutual information, any "input" will do. Remember, mutual information is the shared information between two systems, self information is mutual information with itself. Everything has self-information, few systems have mutual information. My definition constrains the analysis of causative processes to inputs with mutual information. As another example, consider the sentence "the program I wrote to invert a matrix has a bug, its output has no meaning/effect". Replacing meaning with effect and the sentence completely changes meaning. >That's borderline theological. I think you are misreading Dennett's claim here. He's not using "meaning and life" in the sense of grand notions of the human spirit, he means it very matter-of-factly, in the sense of meaning as the content of communication and life as in biological processes. Dennett is about as far from theology and the woo-peddlers as you can get. >I'm sure you've must have had your share of epiphanies and bolts out of the blue insights. I would characterize epiphanies like this as the result of sub-conscious processes ruminating on prior inputs from memory.

eternalban 6y ago

I would much prefer it if [for example] one used 'sense' instead of 'meaning'. For example 'the reaction of processor is the sense of the input'. Why? Because language hygiene matters. There will be inevitable leakage of strictly defined terms of a conceptual model that have far broader scope in the general usage. > But computation is necessarily meaningful! Damn straight, but it is "meaningful!" to the programmer, not the program. :)

hackinthebochs 6y ago
>Damn straight, but it is "meaningful!" to the programmer, not the program. :) But the meaning of the computation exists independent of the programmer. That is, the program doesn't require the existence of a human interpreter to be meaningful. To explain this, it helps to get clear what a computation really is. Essentially, a program takes some input and transforms it to some output. But not just any transformation counts as a computation. What separates transformations that merely increase entropy in the universe and ones that count as computations are the fact that mutual information is preserved across the transformation. The input has mutual information with some system, and the transformation preserves some amount of this mutual information. This is in contrast to destructive transformations where the mutual information is lost entirely. We can further refine the concept by noticing that computations are revelatory, they can tell us something we didn't know about some external system. The result of a computation is such that some new information is revealed about some external system that was inaccessible prior to the computation. Thus we can define a computation as a process that uses an input signal to reduce entropy (the unknown information) with respect to some external system. But mutual information and entropy are not concepts that depend on human interpreters.
- eternalban 6y ago
  Are you not describing 'effect' here? You, the observer, are seeing side effects of the program. You are a 'reader' of these effects. You ascribe 'meaning' to the transformation. The program itself is just a mechanism. "But the meaning of the computation exists independent of the programmer." But not outside of an external "observer". I assert that you still require another "mind" to read/note the "meaningful effects" let's try r/meaning/effect: "But the [effect] of the computation exists independent of the programmer. That is, the program doesn't require the existence of a human interpreter to be [effective]." And that is perfectly reasonable and doesn't seem to nullify your further remarks regarding [processes] that preserve mutual information. And it is interesting and informative and we happen to in agreement. My beef is with use of loaded words like "meaning". Your cite (Dennet) certainly doesn't shy away from a very expansive philosophical program: "This biological re-grounding of much-debated concepts yields a bounty of insights into the nature of meaning and life." That's borderline theological. > We can further refine the concept by noticing that computations are revelatory And this is interesting since I wanted to mention revelatory experiences in context of -zero- input/information. I'm sure you've must have had your share of epiphanies and bolts out of the blue insights.
  - hackinthebochs 6y ago
    >I assert that you still require another "mind" to read/note the "meaningful effects" The issue is less that you need another mind to "note" something, but whether two independent minds will come to the same conclusion when undertaking independent analyses. We think mathematics is objective because two intelligent agents with entirely different histories will ultimately discover much of the same mathematical structure. The consequences for mutual information and entropy of a given process would reveal itself to a sufficiently determined analysis. The meaning/effect translation works at first glance because computation is a species of causation. The question is, are there features of computation that a general causation description doesn't capture? I think so. An example is that causation does not require an input with some amount of mutual information, any "input" will do. Remember, mutual information is the shared information between two systems, self information is mutual information with itself. Everything has self-information, few systems have mutual information. My definition constrains the analysis of causative processes to inputs with mutual information. As another example, consider the sentence "the program I wrote to invert a matrix has a bug, its output has no meaning/effect". Replacing meaning with effect and the sentence completely changes meaning. >That's borderline theological. I think you are misreading Dennett's claim here. He's not using "meaning and life" in the sense of grand notions of the human spirit, he means it very matter-of-factly, in the sense of meaning as the content of communication and life as in biological processes. Dennett is about as far from theology and the woo-peddlers as you can get. >I'm sure you've must have had your share of epiphanies and bolts out of the blue insights. I would characterize epiphanies like this as the result of sub-conscious processes ruminating on prior inputs from memory.