[Avery Andrews 930412.1030]
(Bill Powers (930410.2000 MDT))
>I think this is still begging the question of which usage of
>"information" is meant: the technical information-theoretic
>usage, or the "everybody knows what information is -- it's
>_information_" usage.
The `everybody knows ...' sense. The idea is to think up a concrete
situation where people might use the word `information', & then try
to figure what concept, if any, might be useful to use as a meaning
for the word. In the case of the patch of skin in an illuminated
environment, `representational potential' might be a useful sense:
depending on the nature of the environment, it is possible to
derive all sorts of representations from the incident light.
In the case of an ECS, however, there is clearly zero potential
to form a representation of D from P alone, tho it may be possible
to represent certain kinds of D from P plus additional information
of various kinds (e.g, the external force acting on a steering wheel,
from perceptions of muscle tension and wheel motion).
Avery.Andrews@anu.edu.au