Camp Followers in bed with Axe Grinders

[jporter]

"Just talk, Stig..."

" 'My name is Gudrid,'....."


Eliot:  "...all of the people, all of the time."

Dylan: "...if I can be in your dream."

Fitzgerald: "...different than you and me."

Hemingway: "Yea, they have money"

Stig: " 'at the mouth of one of the Rivers of Vineland,
	the Skraellings come, to trade pelts for milk.
	What they really want are weapons.' "

Mrs. Eggslap: "Do we really need the Ax right here, like this?"

LED: "This seems to be all right."

Feynman "A dippy process"

jody


By contrast, in the context of biological evolution, information
must be acquired and used for survival. Otherwise, it is entirely
gratuitous to attribute function, fitness, or meaning to biological
structures. However, in all cases there is one essential require-
ment for semantic information in both physics and biology: we
must define an epistemic cut separating the world from the
organism or observer. In other words, wherever it is applied, the
concept of semantic information requires the separation of the
knower and the known. Semantic information, by definition, is
about something. The apparent arbitrariness of where this cut
is made is the root of the problem. Von Neumann stated this
condition clearly: "That is, we must always divide the world into
two parts, the one being the observed system, the other the
observer . . . . That this boundary can be pushed arbitrarily
deeply into the interior of the body of the actual observer is
the content of the principle of the psycho-physical parallelism
- but this does not change the fact that in each method of
description the boundary must be put somewhere, if the method
is not to proceed vacuously."

Von Neumann's argument needs to be thoroughly understood in
order to see why dynamic and semiotic modes of description are
necessary, complementary, and irreducible one to the other at
all levels. Von Neumann used measurement for his discussion,
but the same argument holds for any epistemic cut from the
genotype/phenotype cut in the cell to the mind/matter cut in the brain.

http://www.ws.binghamton.edu/pattee/semiotic.html


Mrs Eggslap: "You fellows do like a nice Fjord, it seems."