my mind on books

In the recent book Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, Alex Wright defines information: “Information is the juxtaposition of data to create meaning.” (p. 10)

I liked the definition given by Hans Christian von Baeyer in Information: The New Language of Science: “the transfer of form from one medium to another, or, the communication of relationships.” (p. 25).

Richard Saul Wurman in Information Anxiety (I have the 1st ed. from 1989) suggests that information is relative to the person: “Information must be that which leads to understanding. Everyone needs a personal measure against which to define the word. What constitutes information to one person may be data to another. If it doesn’t make sense to you, it doesn’t qualify for the appellation.” (p. 38-39) From that perspective, the UC Berkeley project to measure “how much information” is really measuring data, or potential information.

Perhaps data + meaning = information, and information + understanding = knowledge; then knowledge + experience = wisdom.

More:

Google search: “define: information”

A course on History of Information from UC Berkeley School of Information (Fall 2006) – with lecture podcasts, pdf files and links to some readings.

Monsters and Critics has posted a review of Steven Pinker’s forthcoming book ‘The Stuff of Thought.‘ which is due out in Sept 07.

Also Grumpy Old Bookman is discussing Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s ‘The Black Swan.’

TEDBlog recently posted a talk by Dan Dennett on memes, originally recorded in 2002.

The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding by Mark Johnson is coming soon from the University of Chicago Press, with a scheduled release date of July 15 (according to Amazon.com). Johnson is co-author with George Lakoff of Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Johnson is also the author of The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason.

For more on “embodied cognition”: (1)Embodied cognition: a field guide by Michael L. Anderson (2003, pdf) , (2) article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Also Evan Thompson, who was a co-author of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, has recently published Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind.

“The main consideration that drives the entire argument of the book is the thesis that the often quirky behaviors of ordinary descriptive predicates derive, not merely from controllable human inattention or carelessness, but from a basic unwillingness of the physical universe to sit still while we frame its descriptive picture. Like a photographer dealing with a rambunctious child, we must resort to odd and roundabout strategies if we hope to capture even a glimpse of our flighty universe upon our linguistic film.” (p. 11)

Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual Behavior