Information Systems- Causation- Meaning

Design or intention do not determine what is or is not an information system, it’s a matter of function. A broken computer is a paper weight, not an information based system.

Verbal behavior, even prepositional behavior, is not information, it’s a potential source of information, it can be converted into information, may contain information but is in itself not information at the cortical level. This because not ever causal event in an information based system is an information caused event. Suppose I hear a proposition in a language I don’t understand. My auditory system will function pretty much as usual, especially if the phonemes of the language are similar to those of a language I do understand, but after auditory processing everything is different. Conventionally we would say that I didn’t know the meaning of the utterance. What we need is an information theoretic explanation of the difference.

The response envelope for the uncomprehended utterance is different. In particular, the cognitive response envelope (non emotional component ) is different. (Quine’s radical translation –how is this done? Certainly below the level of ontological commitments it has been done. Consider the problems of the first European arrivals on American shores. The natives point at a rabbit, yell “gavagi”, “gavagi”, and then shoot it with their bows and arrows, you get the idea quickly. “Gavagi” is rabbit or food or something, they throw it into a pot with other edibles with apparently different names. So “gavagi” is not target, or animal or food ….it means rabbit