Memory transplant claimed in snails

I've already pointed out what is wrong... but you ignored it.

I'm talking about the explanation I just posted this morning. You said you thought something was wrong, but you didn't say what.

I would emphasise that all I'm talking about is a standard use of a control group to test whether the effect is due to the hypothesised cause (in this case RNA from trained snails) or whether it could be due to another cause.

What point was that?

#27

OK, so this is one of those times when I know what all the words mean - in a dictionary sense - but I understand none of it. Perhaps I am a non-starter because I can't yet grasp what you mean, exactly, when you use the word "information". Information, to me, is something about a thing - not the thing itself. Are you saying that there is no difference between the two? If so, I'm having a really hard time conceptualising that.

With respect, when you write these explanations I'm getting the impression that you have assumed a level of understanding in the reader. That may well be true for some here but, right now, not for me. I guess that, if I were as devoted to the subject as you are, I would have read and digested a lot more information about information but I have yet to find a good enough reason to delve into the science to any significant extent.

If you want to discuss the science behind memory then understanding information would be a prerequisite. Measuring information transfer is the only way quantify a memory event, other than believing the memory is the material.  The material transfer has its own units of measure.  Believing that the memory is the material is still a populist view - but in my humble opinion - as wrong as larger masses falling faster than smaller ones.

Understanding can be directly addressed by Shannon's equations of mutual information and the concept of database storage.  With sophisticated wrinkles, this is the approach of Tononi  et all, in tackling consciousness with IIT.

Information is famous for being not grasped in our times.  I see the term physical as equally misinterpreted. 
Like objects that are physical with mass and energy, information has two distinct components.  Information theory measures bits and bytes - that are purposely divorced from meaning - and can be tracked during communication.

When you say information is "about something" - you are referring to semantic information and meaningful conceptualization.  It is as different in Information Sciences from formal information, as is mass is from energy.

In have already cited L. Floridi as a leading scholar on the subject in my prior post.  Reading his article for the SEP will help immensely in understanding the subject of semantic information and how it differs from what is measured in Information science.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/infor...-semantic/

 Information is notoriously a polymorphic phenomenon and a polysemantic concept so, as an explicandum, it can be associated with several explanations, depending on the level of abstraction adopted and the cluster of requirements and desiderata orientating a theory. The reader may wish to keep this in mind while reading this entry, where some schematic simplifications and interpretative decisions will be inevitable. Claude E. Shannon, for one, was very cautious:

The word ‘information’ has been given different meanings by various writers in the general field of information theory. It is likely that at least a number of these will prove sufficiently useful in certain applications to deserve further study and permanent recognition. It is hardly to be expected that a single concept of information would satisfactorily account for the numerous possible applications of this general field. (italics added). (Shannon [1993], p. 180)

Thus, following Shannon, Weaver [1949] supported a tripartite analysis of information in terms of

(1) technical problems concerning the quantification of information and dealt with by Shannon's theory
(2) semantic problems relating to meaning and truth; and
(3) what he called “influential” problems concerning the impact and effectiveness of information on human behaviour, which he thought had to play an equally important role.

..................

Philosophical theories of semantic information have recently contributed to a new area of research in itself, the philosophy of information (Adams [2003], Floridi [2011]). The two special issue volumes of Minds and Machines on the philosophy of information (Floridi [2003c]) provide an overview of the scope and depth of current work in the field. Information seems to have become a key concept to unlock several philosophical problems. “The most valuable commodity I know of is information”, boldly declares Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's Wall Street (1987). Euphranor would probably have concurred. The problem is that we still have to agree about what information is exactly.

There are sections of the article that are gobblygook to me, as I do not have enough background or advance math skills to parse them.  However, the fundamentals are there.  Floridi cites Fred Adams paper a couple of times.  It is also highly recommended by me, as a place to feel the paradigm change in science.
http://www.uio.no/studier/emner/matnat/i...osophy.pdf

I seem to remember reading something about people having organ transplants and then finding they’d acquired certain characteristics of the donor. I wonder if this is similar?

Measuring information transfer is the only way quantify a memory event, other than believing the memory is the material.

That sounds more than a little like assuming a result because it suits the belief system of the one making that assumption.

I'd say the area is pretty much wide open and such narrow limiting descriptions as above, serve to obscure the nature of the phenomenon, rather than illuminate it.

In particular, in conscious beings the most fundamental part may be considered the experiencing.  This falls outside the material and information limitations in two ways (at least). One, the experience need not involve any transfer of anything. Two the experience may occur without any quantifiable associated elements, except possibly as results, caused by rather than causing the experience.  

I suspect that rather like consciousness itself, the problem is much more intractable than proposed by the easy solutions we so often see presented.

Like most lay people, I only have a superficial understanding of science and less so of information science. But from Stephenw's comments in this thread and others I'm inclined to think that all science has a tendency to be reductionist. There seems to be an obsession with measurement and breaking things down into units. As Stephenw says, Information Theory measures bits and bytes. But it seems to me that there's a kind of quantum mechanical dilemma with all measurement: you gain knowledge by measuring something but in doing so you lose understanding in another way.

By measuring, you are able to quantify but that tells you nothing about quality. I think that's what Typoz is saying by talking about experiencing.  Scientists find it useful and productive to measure because events can be quantified and reduced to mathematical formulae but looking at a sunset, one can imagine that image being reduced to bits and bytes - as in a Jpeg - but the jpeg cannot reproduce the feeling, the experience at that moment.

Thanks Kam for attempting to expand on what I wrote previously.

I'm well aware that I haven't here (and probably not in the past) explained myself very clearly when it comes to such matters. One of the problems in this particular thread is that the central topic is snails. In this case we can't really have any idea of a conscious state or experience as it applies to such creatures. Instead we are reduced to an observation of behaviour. That in itself leads to its own area of contention, there is a whole paradigm constructed around the idea of behaviour, one which is not without its critics.

But when it comes to memory, I'm  really talking mainly from my own experience - and herein lies a problem, each person is an individual, even placed in the same situation, the actual experience of each person will differ, perhaps slightly, perhaps to the extent of being unrecognisable. I'm wary of attempts to frame things in ways which may fit some experiences of some people, but fail completely to fit others. One might make an analogy with the dying-brain theory when attempting to explain NDEs, which fails to account for the phenomenon.