How do you measure information?: Philosophy Forums

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How do you measure information?

NarahBhavati
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Posted 11/15/09 - 05:44 PM:	#21
Is it possible that perhaps 'information' is not a useful set to establish? Perhaps there are different types of information. When we talk about information we most likely mean something like, an amount of meaning that some agent receives. When we deal with texts, it seems that there are different categories of meaning we can derive. For one, I can read an argument and receive information about the proposition and what it says. I can also read a surreal poem and not receive information about a proposition but rather receive aesthetic pleasure. If aesthetic pleasure is anything at all, surely it is a different type of information that I get from reading the text, or aesthetic information. Are there different 'types' of information? Is there such a thing as aesthetic information? What is an aesthetic experience?

treemanshope
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Posted 11/15/09 - 06:19 PM:	#22
Yup. You got it. Of course something must be somewhat conscious in order to measure information. Its just that we are certainly not conscious of all the signals informing the biological life in an environment. We cant possibly know what we are doing because we are not conscious of all this information which we call noise. Information in a human society is whatever is part of the conscious value system. It seems we are more conscious of our abstractions than the sensuous experiences of our environment. Yes, I think that we can look to what we call noise to learn something about consciousness. A procedure of distinguishing what is valuable information is a measure of consciousness itself.

Shamantrixx
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Posted 11/16/09 - 04:57 AM:	#23
I can almost see the "equation", but I also understand that building a functioning model will be difficult since it's hard to quantify both noise and attention... let alone determining the width of "bandwidth". But the idea is well worth contemplating.
Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior. Marshall McLuhan

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