INFORMATION & RECORDED SYMBOLS

INFORMATION & RECORDED SYMBOLS Robert M. Hayes 2007

Overview • I. Definition & nature of recorded symbols • Definition of “recorded symbol” • Exploration • II. The role of structure • III. The role of processes • IV. Recorded symbols & Wittgenstein • V. The cycle of reference • Wittgenstein • Proust • Proust—Volume II • Henry Adams • Thinking with the Heart, Feeling with the Head • The Structure of Language

Definition & Nature Of Recorded Symbols • INTRODUCTION • DEFINITION OF “RECORDED SYMBOL” • EXPLORATION • STAGES IN DEVELOPMENT OF SYMBOLS • IMPLICATIONS FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE

INTRODUCTION • This examination of some philosophical issues began when I considered more closely the implications of a definition of information that I had formulated many years before: • Information is that property of data (i.e., recorded symbols) which represents (and measures) effects of processing of them. • The question I faced was, “What are recorded symbols and what makes them so?” • It seemed to me that something, recorded or otherwise, became a “symbol” only when someone interpreted it as representing something else. And that led into what I will now present.

Definition Of “Recorded Symbol” • The Definition • Recorded Symbol • Constituent Elements • Interpretation • Entity • Observor • Context • Representation • Other Thing

DEFINITION OF "RECORDED SYMBOL" S = (E,O,C/R,T)

Examples of Recorded Symbols • Printed characters and words • Images • Numbers • Signs (e.g., a “STOP” sign) • Persons • Pieces of paper, metal, or plastic

Examples of Elements • Observers: humans, animals, constructs (e.g., computers) • Contexts: physical, symbolic, mixed • Representations: name, description, surrogate, cause/effect • Things: real or imaginary, true or false, physical or symbolic • Interpretations: physical, mental, emotional responses

Stages in Development of Symbols • Physical World • Sense Images • Immediate Interpretation • Awareness • Ideation • Conceptualization—Symbol to Process

Implications for Information Science • The Role of Structure • The Role of Process

II. The Role Of Structure • Structure • Equivalence Classes • Conceptual Entities • Interior Vs. Exterior Entities • Levels of Symbolization • Relationship to Entity Being Represented • Equivalence Classes and Classifications • Syntactical Structures • Structure Derived From Analysis • The Philosophical Issues

III. The Role of Processes • Levels of Processing • Structures & Processes • Equivalence Classes • Syntactic Structures • Analytical Structures • The Philosophical Issues • Whether Propositions Are Well-formed • The Effect of Error • The Issue of Measurement • The Issue of Purpose

Processes • Levels of Processing • Data Transfer • Data Selection • Data Analysis • Data Reduction • The Philosophical Issues • Measurement • Data Transfer -- The Shannon Measure • Data Selection -- Weighted Entropy • Data Analysis -- Semantic & Syntactic • Data Reduction -- Dimensional Structure

The Proactive Context • The Bases for Motivations, for Goals • Personal Wishes • Ethical Obligations • Leaps of Faith • The Means for Determining Goals • Built-in Goals -- Survival • Force-field of Goals • Experiental Goals

IV. Recorded Symbols & Wittgenstein • Introduction: Wittgenstein • Review of Definitions • Tractatus & The Definition Of "Recorded Symbol" • Tractatus & Levels Of Context • Tractatus & Symbolic Structures • Tractatus & Processes

Tractatus & the Definition of "Recorded Symbol" • Interpretation • Entity • Observer & Context • Representation.

Tractatus & Levels of Context • Real, Empirical World • Sense Images • Thoughts

Tractatus & Symbolic Structures • Equivalence Class Structures • Syntactic Structures • Analytic Structures

The Tractatus & Processes

V. The Cycle of Reference • Introduction • Real World Objects to Sense Images • My Concept • Proust • The Eastern Religions

Schematic • The following schematic is intended to illustrate the succession of stages in symbolization (interpretation by an observor of an entity as representing another entity). The Sense Image is the internal symbol for the Real World; the Idea is the symbol for the Sense Image; the Equivalence Class is the symbol for the Idea; the Real World is the symbol for the Equivalence Class.

The Cycle of Reference

Equivalence Class to Real World • The tricky step in this succession is that from the equivalence class to the real world, but clearly this is Platos's view. There is a fascinating new development by the religionists in their battle with evolution theory. It is called “intelligent design” and is oriented toward finding evidence that life was designed by an intelligent force rather than by a random process. As I see it, it focuses on D, the transition from the equivalence class (which I am going to call “concept”) to the real world, • Watanabe, Teresa. “Enlisting science to find fingerprints of a creator”. LA Times, 25 Mar 2001.

Natural Philosophers • The first set of foci of philosophical investigation is on the four stages. For example, the Greek "natural philosophers" (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Parmenides, Zeon of Elea, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus) were concerned with the nature of the real world.

Sense Images • The Sense Image is the body's response to the external world; it is the most immediate, and the recall of it serves to recall the entire array of associations. Now, who was concerned with sense images?

Ideas • Who was concerned with ideas?

Equivalence Classes • Who was concerned with equivalence classes? (I must find a better term than "equivalence class", not to replace it but to refer to it.)

Transitions • The arrows between successive stages identify the transition from one stage to the next. Of more importance, though, they represent the focus of philosophical attention, and it is to that I now turn. • The arrow labeled A is the focus of attention by Proust, by the Eastern philosophers, by Wittgenstein (when he refers to "what we cannot know").

Wittgenstein • Wittgenstein says, • 2.1511 Thus the picture is linked to reality; it reaches up to it. • 2.1512 It is like a scale applied to reality. • 2.15121 Only the outermost points of the dividing lines touch the object to be measured. • 2.1513 According to this view the representing relations which makes a picture, also belongs to the picture. • 2.1514 The representing relations consist of the co-ordinations of the elements of the picture and the things. • These co-ordinations are as it were the feelers of its elements with which the picture touches reality.

Proust • The entire focus of Proust is on A: • Proust, Marcel. Remembrance of Things Past. New York: Random House, 1934. • P 64. A 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. • P 134. Meanwhile I was endeavoring to apply to this image, … to this fresh and unchanging image the idea: "It is Mme. de Guermantes"; but I succeeded only in making the idea pass between me and the image, as though they were two discs moving in separate planes, with a space between.

Proust • But this Mme. de Guermantes of whom I had so often dreamed, now that I could see she had a real existence independent of myself, acquired a fresh increase in power over my imagination. Which, paralyzed for a moment by contact with a reality so different from anything that it had expected, began to react and say within me … • P 159. But at a given moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to collect, to treasure in his memory the phrase or harmony -- he knew not which -- that had just been played, and had opened and expanded his soul, just as the fragrance of certain roses, wafted upon the moist air of evening, has the power of dilating our nostrils.

Proust • Perhaps it was owing to his own ignorance of music that he had been able to receive so confused an impression, one of those that are, notwithstanding, our only purely musical impressions, limited in their extent, entirely original, and irreducible to any other kind. An impression of this order, vanishing in an instant is, so to speak, an impression sine materia. Presumably the notes that we hear at such moments tend to spread out before our eyes, over surfaces greater or smaller according to their pitch and volume; to trace arabesque designs, to give us the sensation of breath of tenuity, stability or caprice.

Proust • But the notes themselves have vanished before these sensations have developed sufficiently to escape submersion under those which the following, or even simultaneous notes have already begun to awaken in us. … if our memory , like a laborer who toils in the laying down of firm foundations under the tumult of the waves, did not, by fashioning for us facsimiles of those fugitive phrases, enable us to compare and contrast them with those that follow.

Proust • P 344. But at the same time, all my pleasure had ceased; in vain might I strain towards Berma's eyes, ears, mind, so as not to let one morsel escape me of the reasons which she would furnish for my admiring her, I did not succeed in gathering a single one. … I listened to her as though I were reading Phedre, or as though Phaedra herself had at that moment uttered the words I was hearing, without it appearing that Berma's talent had added anything at all to them.

Proust • P 404. And yet when, later on, this sonata had been played for me two or three times I found that I knew it quite well. And so it is not wrong to speak of hearing a thing for the first time. If one had indeed, as one supposes, received no impression from the first hearing, the second, the third would be equally 'first hearings' and there would be no reason why one should understand it any better after the tenth. Probably what was wanting, the first time, is not comprehension but memory. For our memory, compared to the complexity of the impressions which it has to face while we are listening, is infinitesimal, as brief as the memory of a man who in his sleep thinks of a thousand things and at once forgets them,… Of these multiple impressions our memory is not capable of furnishing us with an immediate picture.

Proust • P 465. … he will find that the love of which he can speak unmoved he did not, at the moment of speaking, feel, and therefore did not know, knowledge of these matters being intermittent and not outlasting the actual presence of the sentiment.

Proust • P 488. And as Habit weakens every impression, what a person recalls for us most vividly is precisely what we have forgotten, because it was of no importance, and had therefore left in full possession of its strength. That is why the better part of our memory exists outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: whenever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source can make us weep again. Outside ourselves, did I say; rather within ourselves bu hidden from out eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged.

Proust • P 544. I looked at the three trees; I could see them plainly, but my mind felt that they were concealing something which it had not grasped, as when things are placed out of our reach, so that our fingers, stretched out at arm's length, can only touch for a moment their outer surface, and can take hold of nothing. • P 686. It would require so immense an effort to reconstruct everything that has been imparted to us by things other than ourselves -- were it only the taste of a fruit -- that no sooner is the impression received than we begin imperceptibly to descend the slope of memory and, without noticing anything, in a very short time, we have come a long way from what we actually felt. So that every fresh encounter is a sort of rectification, which brings up back to what we really did see.

Proust • P 720. At the age when a Name, offering us an image of the unknowable which we have poured into its mould, while at the same moment it connotes for us also an existing place, forces us accordingly to identify one with the other to such a point that we set out to seek in a city a soul which it cannot embody but which we no longer have the power to expel from its name … • P 749. We feel in one world, we think, we give names to things in another; between the two we can establish a certain correspondence, but not bridge the interval. It was quite narrow, this interval, this fault that I had to cross when, that afternoon on which I went first to hear Berma …

Proust • P 760. … the truth has no need to be uttered to be made apparent, and that one may perhaps gather it with more certainty, without waiting for words, without even bothering one's head about them, froma thousand outward signs, even from certain invisible phenomena, analogous in the sphere of human character to what in nature are atmospheric changes. • P 815. We never see the people we are dear to us save in the animated system, the perpetual motion of our love for them, which before allowing the images that their faces present to reach us catches them in its vortex, flings them back upon the idea that we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, conincide with it.

Proust—Volume II • P 991. Engrossed in the unhappy meditations I described a moment ago, I had entered the court of the Guermantes residence and, in my absorption, failed to notice an automobile that was coming in; at the chauffeur’s cry I had barely time to get out of the way and, in stepping back, struck my foot against some unevenly cut flagstones leading to a carriage house.

Proust—Volume II • In recovering my balance, I put my foot on a stone that was a little lower than the one next to it; immediately all my discouragement vanished before a feeling of happiness which I had experienced at different moments of my life, at the sight of trees I thought I recognised when driving around Balbec, or the church spires of Martinville, or the savor of a madeleine, dipped in herb tea, or from many other sensations I have mentioned, which had seemed to me to be synthesised in the last works of Vinteuil. Just as when I tasted the madeleine, all anxiety as to the future, all intellectual doubt was dispelled. The misgivings that had been harassing me a moment before concerning the reality of my literary gifts, and even of literature itself, were suddenly banished as if by magic.

Proust—Volume II • But this time I made a firm resolve that I would not be satisfied to leave the question unanswered (as I did the day I tasted of a madeleine dipped in herb tea) as to why, without my having worked out any new line of reasoning or found any decisive argument, the difficulties that had seemed insoluble a short time before had now lost all their importance. The feeling of happiness which had just come over me was, indeed, exactly the same as I had experienced while eating the madeleine, but at that time I put off seeking the deep-lying causes for it. There was a purely material difference in the mental images evoked.

Proust—Volume II • A deep azure blue intoxicated my sight, impressions of coolness and dazzling light hovered near me and, in my eagerness to seize them, not daring to move-just as when I tasted the flavour of the made IIleine and tried to bring back to my mind what it suggested to me-I stood there, swaying back and forth, as I had done a moment before, one foot on the higher stone and the other on the lower. indifferent to the possible amusement of the large crowd of chauffeurs.

Proust—Volume II • Each time that I merely repeated the action physically, the effort was in vain; but if I forgot the Guermantes reception and succeeded in recapturing the sensation I had felt the instant I placed my feet in that position, again the dazzling, elusive vision brushed me with its wings, as if to say, "Seize me in my flight, if you have the power, and try to solve the riddle of happiness I propound to you.”

Proust—Volume II • And almost immediately I recognized it; it was Venice, about which my efforts at description and the supposed 'snapshots' taken by my memory had never yielded me anything, but which was brought back to me by the sensation I had once felt as I stood on two uneven flagstones in the baptistry of Saint Mark's, and with that sensation came all the others connected with it that day, which had been waiting in their proper place in the series of forgotten days, until a sudden happening had imperiously commanded them to come forth. It was in the same way that the taste of the little madeleine had recalled Combray to my mind.

Proust—Volume II • But why had the mental images of Combray and Venice at their respective moments given me a joy like a sense of certainty, sufficient, without other proofs, to make me indifferent to death? While I was still putting this question to myself, determined this time to find the answer to it, I entered the Guermantes mansion-for we always put ahead of the subjective task we have to perform the outward r6le we are playing, and mine that day was that of an invited guest. But, when I reached the second story, a butler asked me to step for a moment into a small library adjoin- ing the buffet, until the selection they were playing was finished, the Princess having forbidden that the dors be opened while it was being played.

Proust—Volume II • At that very moment a second signal came to reinforce the one I had received from the two uneven flagstones, and urged me to persevere in my task. YVhat happened was that a servant, trying in vain to make no noise, struck a spoon against a plate. The same kind of felicity as I had received from the uneven paving stones now came over me; the sensations were again those of great heat, but entirely different, mingled with the odour of smoke, tempered by the cool fragrance of a forest setting, and 1 recognized that what seemed to me so delightful was the very row of trees which I had found it wearisome to study and describe

Proust—Volume II • and which, in a sort of hallucination, I thought now stood before me as I uncorked the bottle of beer I had with me in the railway carriage, the sound of the spoon striking the plate having given me-until I came to myself again the illusion of the very similar noise of the hammer of a workman who bad made some repairs to a wheel while our train stopped before that little clump of trees. Then one would have said that the signs which were to lift me out of my discouragement that day and restore my faith in literature had determined to come thick and fast, for when a butler who had been for a long time in the service of the Prince de Guermantes recognised me and, in order to save my going to the buffet, brought to me in the library a small plate of petits jours and a glass of orangeade, I wiped my mouth with the napkin he had given me;

Proust—Volume II • but immediately, like the character in The Arabian Nights who unwittingly performs precisely the rite that calls up before him, visible to his eyes alone, a docile genie, ready to transport him far away, a fresh vision of azure blue passed before my eyes; but this time it was pure and saline and it rounded upward like bluish breasts. The impression was so vivid that the moment I was re- living fused with the real present and, more dazed than on that day when I wondered whether I was really going to be received by the Princesse de Guermantes or was everything going to crash about my head, I thought the servant had just opened the window toward the beach and everything called me to go down and stroll along the embankment at high tide;

INFORMATION & RECORDED SYMBOLS