New article over at Philosophy Now: http://philosophynow.org/issues/98/Information_Knowledge_and_Intelligence
Category: Miscellaneous
Information-Theoretic Death
Was watching an episode of Futurama, which led me to look up cryonics, which led me to discover the concept of information-theoretic death.
R.I.P. Fred Dretske
The legendary epistemologist, who was a central figure in bringing the concept of information into philosophy, has sadly passed away.
As a search for ‘Dretske’ on this blog will reveal, his work has been a major influence on my research and features heavily in my thesis.
Here is some information on Dretske at ‘New APPS’: http://www.newappsblog.com/2013/07/fred-dretske-1932-2013.html
Google scholar entry
Year 2038 Problem
I have recently been dealing with Unix timestamps and whilst doing some reading up on them became aware of the Year 2038 Problem; interesting enough to warrant a mention in a blog post I thought.
Towards a Framework for Semantic Information
Towards a Framework for Semantic Information (my PhD thesis)
Abstract: This thesis addresses some important questions regarding an account of semantic information. Starting with the contention that semantic information is to be understood as truthful meaningful data, several key elements for an account of semantic information are developed. After an introductory overview of information, the thesis is developed over four chapters. ‘Quantifying Semantic Information’ looks at the quantification of semantic information as represented in terms of propositional logic. The main objective is to investigate how traditional inverse probabilistic approaches to quantifying semantic information can be replaced with approaches based on the notion of truthlikeness. In ‘Agent-Relative Informativeness’ the results of the previous chapter are combined with belief revision in order to construct a formal framework in which to, amongst other things, measure agent-relative informativeness; how informative some piece of information is relative to a given agent. ‘Environmental Information and Information Flow’ analyses several existing accounts of environmental information and information flow before using this investigation to develop a better account of and explicate these notions. Finally, ‘Information and Knowledge’ contributes towards the case for an informational epistemology, based on Fred Dretske’s information-theoretic account of knowledge.
Thesis Finished and CV Updated
Much to my contentment I have finished my thesis and submitted it for examination.
I have just revised my CV: view CV.
The frequency of ‘information’.
Interesting fact about the word ‘information’. According to this list, ‘information’ is the 315th most used word in the 450 million word Corpus of Contemporary American English, appearing 127331 times.
Thesis Completion Seminar
Details of my upcoming thesis completion seminar:
Title: A Framework for Semantic Information
Date, Time: 24/7/2012, 5:15pm
Location: Old Quad Common Room, Melbourne University
Abstract: In this talk I present a summary of my thesis research, which develops an account of semantic information. After an introductory overview of information, I shall outline the main points and results of the following chapters:
– Quantifying Semantic Information
– Agent-Relative Informativeness
– Environmental Information and Information Flow
– Information and Knowledge