User:Cristinac/Othernotes

Umberto Eco-The Open Work

• The existence of these relationships of cause and effect in systems organized according to decreasing entropy is at the basis of memory. Physically speaking, memory is a record (an imprint, a print), an "ordered macroarrangement, the order of which is preserved: a frozen order, so to speak."' Memory helps us reestablish causal links, reconstruct facts. "Since the second law of thermodynamics leads to the existence of records of the past, and records store infor-mation, it is to be expected that there is a close relationship between entropy and information." page 49

• We shouldn't, therefore, be too surprised by the frequent use of the term "entropy" in information theories, since to measure a quantity of information means nothing more than to measure the levels of order and disorder in the organization of a given message. page 49

• Let's say I want to transmit the message "Mets won" to another fan who lives on the other side of the Hudson. Either I shout it at him with the help of a loudspeaker, or I have it wired to him by a possibly inexperienced telex operator, or I phone it to him over a static-filled line, or I put a note in the classic bottle and abandon it to the whims of the current. One way or another, my message will have to overcome a certain number of obstacles before it reaches its destination; in information theory, all these obstacles fall under the rubric "noise." page 51

• "A piece of information, in order to contribute to the general information of a community, must say something substantially different from the community's previous common stock of information." To illustrate this point, he cites the example of great artists, whose chief merit is that they introduce new ways of saying or doing into their community. He explains the public consumption of their work as the consequence of the work's inclusion within a collective background—the inevitable process of popularization and banalization that occurs to any novelty, any original work, the moment people get used to it.' page 53

• Thus, the larger the amount of information, the more difficult its com-munication; the clearer the message, the smaller the amount of information.

• Warren Weaver makes this particularly clear in an essay aiming at a wider diffusion of the mathematics of information: "The word information, in this theory, is used in a special sense that must not be confused with its ordinary usage. In particular, information must not be confused with meaning . . . To be sure, this word information in communication theory relates not so much to what you do say, as to what you could say. That is, information is a measure of one's freedom of choice when one selects a message . . . Note that it is misleading (although often convenient) to say that one or the other message conveys unit information. The concept of information applies not to the individual messages (as the concept of meaning would), but rather to the situation as a whole . . . [A mathematical theory of communication] deals with a concept of information which characterizes the whole statistical nature of the information source, and is not concerned with the individual messages . . . The concept of information developed in this theory at first seems disappointing and bizarre—disappointing because it has nothing to do with meaning, and bizarre because it deals not with a single message but rather with the statistical character of a whole ensemble of messages, bizarre also because in these statistical terms the two words information and uncertainty find themselves to be partners." page 57

• The undetermined field of stimuli that can yield various forms of redundant organization is not the opposite of the "right form," just as a nonperceivable, amorphous whole is not the opposite of the percept. The subject chooses the most redundant form out of a particular field of stimuli when he has reasons to do so, but he can disregard the "right form" in favor of other patterns of coordina-tion that have remained in the background. According to Ombredane. it should be possible to characterize different ways of exploring the field of stimuli from both an operational and a typological standpoint: "There are those who cut their exploration short and opt for a particular structure before having a chance to use all the information they could have gathered; there are those who prolong their exploration and refuse to adopt any structure; and then there are those who reconcile the two attitudes and try to be aware of several possible structures before they inte-grate them into a progressively constructed unitary percept. There are also those who slide from one structure to the next without being aware of the incompatibilities between them. This is what happens in people suffering from hallucinations. If perception is a form of 'commitment.' there are different ways in which one can commit oneself, or refuse to commit oneself, to seeking useful information." page 82