information, a property of a state or event, X, (a signal) enabling one to infer truths about some state or event Y (where X and Y are usually distinct). Alternately, “information” may be used to refer to the truths about Y that X enables inferences of. The mathematical theory of information (Shannon and Weaver’s “Mathematical Theory of Communication”) provides means for defining amounts of information (such as “bits”) in terms of the number and probability of possible events. Philosophical theories of information strive to define the semantic CONTENT of information, that is, they strive to define not how much information a signal carries but instead what information a signal carries. Various philosophical conceptions of information define signal content in terms of what events are either causally, nomologically, or probabilistically correlated with the occurrence of a signal. The notion of information may be utilized to characterize various mental states such as states of PERCEPTION and MEMORY as information-bearing states: states by which a creature respectively acquires and retains information about its environment. The notion of information has also been used by some philosophers as a basis for understanding INTENTIONALITY and CONTENT (see INFORMATIONAL THEORY OF CONTENT). A further use of information of significance for the philosophy of mind is in characterizations of COMPUTATION as “information processing”.

Fig. 1. Proud Mary keeps on burnin’. And Blind Mary knows what it’s like to see red.

My $.02 on zombiology: either we know that we’re not zombies or we don’t know that we’re not zombies. If we know that we’re not zombies, then physicalism is true (see “Transcending Zombies“). If we don’t know that we’re not zombies, then physicalism is true (see “Type-Q Materialism“).

Such a “babelfish”, which gets its name from the translating fish in Douglas Adams’s book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, would require a much more advanced understanding of language than we currently have. But a first step would be recognising that all languages must have a universal structure, according to Terrence Deacon of the University of California, Berkeley, US.

[…]Deacon argues that all languages arise from the common goal of describing the physical world. That limits the way a language could be constructed, he concludes.

[…]
Deacon argues that no matter how abstract a symbol becomes, it is still somehow grounded in physical reality, and that limits the number of relationships it can have with other symbol words. In turn, this defines the grammatical structure that emerges from stringing words together.

If that is true, then in the distant future it might be possible to invent a gadget that uses complex software to decode alien languages on the spot, Deacon said. He presented his ideas on Thursday 17 April at the 2008 Astrobiology Science Conference in Santa Clara, California, US.

Testing the theory might be tough because we would have to make contact with aliens advanced enough to engage in abstract thinking and the use of linguistic symbols.

The lack of aliens does indeed make that a tough nut to crack. Also, problematic is the lack of a physical “grounding” relation that would serve to distinguish between reference to rabbits, un-detached rabbit parts, and the cosmic complement of a rabbit. Good luck, exolinguists!

Fig. 1. Stick this in your ear hole.

My recollection of Douglas Adams’s description of the Babelfish was that it fed off of the brain-waves of the speaker and secreted telepathic translations into the brain of the listener. Regarding the ‘gavagai’ problem, this is just to kick the problem upstairs: specifying determinate contents for alien brain states is not obviously easier than specifying determinate contents for their utterances.

However, perhaps one can appeal to a strategy outlined recently by Paul Churchland (Churchland, P. (2001). Neurosemantics: On the Mapping of Minds and the Portrayal of Worlds. The Emergence of Mind. K. E. White. Milan, Fondazione Carlo Elba: 117-47.) The gist of Churchland’s suggestion is that the neural activation spaces of distinct brains may be uniquely mapped to one another in spite of large differences between the brains’ fine-grained structure. This is alleged to provide an objective basis for measuring similarities of content in the respective neural representations.

Even if this Churchlandish proposal is correct, huge hurdles remain to harness the proposal in the service of a Babelfish-esque technology. Scanning an alien brain and then adjusting my own to resemble it and thus token representations with similar contents may suffice for me to think like an alien, but it wouldn’t suffice for me to have thereby translated the alien’s thoughts into my own. Consider: if someone zapped a monolingual English speaker with a ray that turned them into a monolingual Chinese speaker, the zapped speaker is no closer than before to understanding how to translate Chinese into English.

Fig. 2. By the way, my Babelfish tells me that the cover of his book says “To Serve Man“. Nice!

Also: There’s Swampthing about Mary.

Also also: Dave Chalmers has his pics up here and here.

One of the articles I’m especially excited about is Thompson’s. Here’s the title and abstract from his website:

Gibson and Quine: Experimental philosophy and the reciprocal containment of epistemology and ontology: One of Roger Gibson’s most valuable philosophical contributions is his interpretation of W.V. Quine as a systematic philosopher. Much of his work has consisted in laying out Quine’s central themes and showing the various relationships among them. Gibson invariably highlights a terse claim in Quine, one which has been passed over by most philosophers, and shows how this claim embodies a crucial relationship among the Quinean themes. In this paper, I want to highlight one such claim: that for Quine, epistemology and ontology reciprocally contain one another. I will use this claim to analyze recent work in experimental philosophy which suggests an instability in the intuitions to which analytic epistemologists appeal. While it may seem that this empirical investigation is an example of Quinean naturalized epistemology, par excellence, I will argue that the results are much less interesting than they seem, if we are to be thoroughgoing Quineans. These results may offer more evidence that there is no non-natural source for knowledge, but they are only significant if one adopts a theory of explanation and confirmation which is radically non-Quinean. Given that Quine was not above offering thought experiments of his own, I will attempt to give a more thoroughly Quinean account of these results.

Anyway, Josh and I and a bazillion other zombies are descending upon Tuscon AZ for the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference next week. If you’ll be in town, dear Brain Hammer reader, please say ‘hi’.