Information and Meaning

Author(s):  
Wendy Wheeler

Since the publication of Claude Shannon’s groundbreaking paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” in two parts in the Bell Laboratory journal in 1948, understanding and research concerning communication and information has received a technicized treatment. As biosemiotics has been at the forefront in arguing, all living organisms communicate, but they do not do so in the digital mode used in information technology (IT) engineering. Life communicates in inherited, evolutionary ways that are traceable from single cells all the way to complex humans. What IT engineers call “redundancy” those studying living organisms call “meaning.” The trade between individual organisms and their environment takes place in the circulation, interpretation, and feedback loops of semiosis. In this way, organisms are able to maintain the features of adaptive, creative, and evolutionary learning systems by modeling their worlds in open, receptive fashion via the use of iconic and indexical signs. In other words, organisms make use of natural, then cultural metaphors and metonyms.

2017 ◽  
pp. 1414-1426
Author(s):  
Debarati Das ◽  
Prasenjit Maji ◽  
Goutami Dey ◽  
Nilanjan Dey

E-health is a rising star that marks the collaboration of medical science and information technology, a ray of hope promising a glorious future of health and prosperity, an easy solution to rely on when in need of medical assistance. But the question arises is E-health an absolute spotless option? In this paper we question the integrity with which e-health is being practised, is the code of ethics being diligently followed? And if not then is ethical e-health entirely impossible? It is of utmost importance to encourage the motivational thinkers who have taken the initiative to provide a better and quicker solution to all health problems by integrating health services and information technology. To do so it becomes necessary to remove the barriers in the way of ethical E-health.


Author(s):  
Debarati Das ◽  
Prasenjit Maji ◽  
Goutami Dey ◽  
Nilanjan Dey

E-health is a rising star that marks the collaboration of medical science and information technology, a ray of hope promising a glorious future of health and prosperity, an easy solution to rely on when in need of medical assistance. But the question arises is E-health an absolute spotless option? In this paper we question the integrity with which e-health is being practised, is the code of ethics being diligently followed? And if not then is ethical e-health entirely impossible? It is of utmost importance to encourage the motivational thinkers who have taken the initiative to provide a better and quicker solution to all health problems by integrating health services and information technology. To do so it becomes necessary to remove the barriers in the way of ethical E-health.


Author(s):  
Christopher Hanlon

Emerson’s Memory Loss is about an archive of texts documenting Emerson’s intellectual state during the final phase of his life, as he underwent dementia. It is also about the way these texts provoke a rereading of the more familiar canon of Emerson’s thinking. Emerson’s memory loss, Hanlon argues, contributed to the shaping of a line of thought in America that emphasizes the social over the solipsistic, the affective over the distant, the many over the one. Emerson regarded his output during the time when his patterns of cognition transformed profoundly as a regathering of focus on the nature of memory and of thinking itself. His late texts theorize Emerson’s experience of senescence even as they disrupt his prior valorizations of the independent mind teeming with self-sufficient conviction. But still, these late writings have succumbed to a process of critical forgetting—either ignored by scholars or denied inclusion in Emerson’s oeuvre. Attending to a manuscript archive that reveals the extent to which Emerson collaborated with others—especially his daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson—to articulate what he considered his most important work even as his ability to do so independently waned, Hanlon measures the resonance of these late texts across the stretch of Emerson’s thinking, including his writing about Margaret Fuller and his meditations on streams of thought that verge unto those of his godson, William James. Such ventures bring us toward a self defined less by its anxiety of overinfluence than by its communality, its very connectedness with myriad others.


Author(s):  
Mathilde Skoie

This chapter introduces yet another European ‘repossession’ of Virgil that generally remains outside the scope of most volumes on translation and reception. Skoie focuses on three Norwegian translations of Virgil’s Eclogues and analyses the way they exhibit tendencies towards two complementary processes that have been labelled, in recent theories of translation, as ‘domestication’ and ‘foreignization’; and they do so as the language of translation becomes politicized and engaged in debates about Norwegian identity. Skoie explores the use of Virgilian pastoral idiom in a foreign language and the juxtaposition between rural and urban voices in the context of language politics.


Author(s):  
Elana Zeide

This chapter looks at the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in education, which immediately conjures the fantasy of robot teachers, as well as fears that robot teachers will replace their human counterparts. However, AI tools impact much more than instructional choices. Personalized learning systems take on a whole host of other educational roles as well, fundamentally reconfiguring education in the process. They not only perform the functions of robot teachers but also make pedagogical and policy decisions typically left to teachers and policymakers. Their design, affordances, analytical methods, and visualization dashboards construct a technological, computational, and statistical infrastructure that literally codifies what students learn, how they are assessed, and what standards they must meet. However, school procurement and implementation of these systems are rarely part of public discussion. If they are to remain relevant to the educational process itself, as opposed to just its packaging and context, schools and their stakeholders must be more proactive in demanding information from technology providers and setting internal protocols to ensure effective and consistent implementation. Those who choose to outsource instructional functions should do so with sufficient transparency mechanisms in place to ensure professional oversight guided by well-informed debate.


Entropy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Pantelis Linardatos ◽  
Vasilis Papastefanopoulos ◽  
Sotiris Kotsiantis

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have led to its widespread industrial adoption, with machine learning systems demonstrating superhuman performance in a significant number of tasks. However, this surge in performance, has often been achieved through increased model complexity, turning such systems into “black box” approaches and causing uncertainty regarding the way they operate and, ultimately, the way that they come to decisions. This ambiguity has made it problematic for machine learning systems to be adopted in sensitive yet critical domains, where their value could be immense, such as healthcare. As a result, scientific interest in the field of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), a field that is concerned with the development of new methods that explain and interpret machine learning models, has been tremendously reignited over recent years. This study focuses on machine learning interpretability methods; more specifically, a literature review and taxonomy of these methods are presented, as well as links to their programming implementations, in the hope that this survey would serve as a reference point for both theorists and practitioners.


1992 ◽  
Vol 36 (14) ◽  
pp. 1049-1049 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxwell J. Wells

Cyberspace is the environment created during the experience of virtual reality. Therefore, to assert that there is nothing new in cyberspace alludes to there being nothing new about virtual reality. Is this assertion correct? Is virtual reality an exciting development in human-computer interaction, or is it simply another example of effective simulation? Does current media interest herald a major advance in information technology, or will virtual reality go the way of artificial intelligence, cold fusion and junk bonds? Is virtual reality the best thing since sliced bread, or is it last week's buns in a new wrapper?


2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-183
Author(s):  
Chung-ying Cheng

Abstract This article is to argue that virtue is experienced and understood in Confucian ethics as power to act and as performance of a moral action, and that virtue (de 德) as such has to be onto-cosmologically explicated, not just teleologically explained. In other words, it is intended to construct an integrative theory of virtues based on both dao (the Way 道) and de. To do so, we will examine the two features of de, as the power that is derived from self-reflection and self-restraining, and as the motivated action for attaining its practical end in a community. Only by a self-integrated moral consciousness can one’s experience, action and ideal remain in consistency and coherence, which leads us to the Aristotelian notion of virtue as excellence (aretê) and enables us to see how virtue as aretê could be introduced as a second feature of de, namely as the power for effective action in the whole system of virtues, apart from the first feature of de as self-restraining power. We will conclude that reason and virtue are practically united and remain inseparable, and that taking into account the onto-cosmological foundation of virtues, reason and virtue are inevitably the moving and advancing forces for the formation and transformation of human morality just as they are motivating and prompting incentives for individual moral action.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (Suppl. 1) ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denis Horgan

With modern-day medicine going the way it is - new developments, great science, the advent of personalised medicine and more - there's little doubt that healthcare can move in the right direction if everything is put in place to allow it to do so. But in many areas progress is being halted. Or at the very least slowed. Like it or not, many front-line healthcare professionals still do things the way they did things three decades ago, and are reluctant to adapt to new methods (assuming they are aware of them). Evidence exists that today's rapidly developing new medicines and treatments can positively influence healthcare in modern-day Europe, but a gap in education (also applying to patients and politicians), often exacerbated by “fake news” on the internet, is hampering uptake of new and often better methods, while even causing doubts about vaccines. More understanding at every level will inevitably lead to swifter integration of innovation into the healthcare systems of Europe. The time to look, listen and learn has come.


2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 393-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siegwart Lindenberg ◽  
Linda Steg ◽  
Marko Milovanovic ◽  
Anita Schipper

The most investigated form of moral hypocrisy is pragmatic hypocrisy in which people fake moral commitment for their own advantage. Yet there is also a different form of hypocrisy in which people take a moral stance with regard to norms they endorse without thereby also expressing a commitment to act morally. Rather they do it in order to feel good. We call this hedonic moral hypocrisy. In our research, we posit that this kind of hypocrisy comes about when people’s overarching goals are shifted in a hedonic direction, that is, in the direction of focusing on the way one feels, rather than on moral obligation. Hedonic shifts come about by cues in the environment. People are sometimes sincere when expressing a moral stance (i.e. they mean it and also act on it), and sometimes, when they are subject to a hedonic shift, they express a moral stance just to make them feel good. This also implies that they then decline to do things that make them feel bad, such as behaving morally when it takes unrewarded effort to do so. In two experimental studies, we find that there is such a thing as hedonic moral hypocrisy and that it is indeed brought about by hedonic shifts from cues in the environment. This seriously undermines the meaning of a normative consensus for norm conformity. Seemingly, for norm conformity without close social control, it is not enough that people endorse the same norms, they also have to be exposed to situational cues that counteract hedonic shifts. In the discussion, it is suggested that societal arrangements that foster the focus on the way one feels and nurture a chronic wish to make oneself feel better (for example, in the fun direction through advertisements and entertainment opportunities, or in the fear direction by populist politicians, social media, economic uncertainties, crises, or wars and displacements) are likely to increase hedonic hypocrisy in society.


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