Symposium: Philosophy of Information - The World as a Computer

Speakers: Pieter Adriaans, Keith Devlin, Tine Wilde, John McCarthy (Moderator: Jaap van den Herik)
Date and location: 11.03.2005, Cristofori, Amsterdam
Organized by the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) from UvA, the Human Computer Systems Laboratory (HCSL) and K.L. Poll-stichting voor Onderwijs, Kunst en Wetenschap

Visited by Katharina Schwarz

Pieter Adriaans:
The World as a Computer - Will Informatics Be the Science of Everything?

(I was distracted during this talk by having to search for a seat without disturbing the rest of the audience, so I didn't really get the gist of what he was saying) He showed us 3 pebbles in his hand and said, this is a computer. He explained how information can be defined mathematically. Shannon information can be computed, Kolmogorov information is there, but cannot be computed. Examples: people can see the face of Neptune in the spray caused by a wave breaking on rocks, or shapes in cloud formations.

Keith Devlin:
Does Information Really Exist?

His aim: make us doubt whether information exists at all, then present us with an exact definition of the word that nobody has ever heard before...
Review of the etymology of the word "information". A man of information was somebody considered to be knowledgable or learned in the 18th century, as shown in novels by Jane Austen (e.g. Emma). In the mid 19th century information was sth. conveyed to you via communication media. In the mid 20th century information was being processed, and produced by new technology. There was talk of information flow, meaning people communicating across space and time. A sea of information was available on the internet, search engines being the matchmaker between supply and demand. Finally Keith came to the following conclusion, derived from Marshall McLuhan:
When there's a medium, there's information.
And the exact definition, that nobody has ever heard before:
Information is the tennis ball of communication.

Tine Wilde:
Remodelling Reality

Tine is a conceptual artist who works at the UVA together with Pieter Adriaans. She makes art installations that incorporate the visitor and stimulate interaction. She read an essay about using art to help people find the answers to their questions by themselves, so they really understand, have better chance at remembering and have more faith in what they learned. This should be achieved by reducing the complexity of a domain to something more comprehensible and manageable, and by stimulating the power of the imagination. Terms she used were "Perspicuous Representation" (based on Wittgenstein, an example was the colour octahedron) and "Reflexive Dynamics". There was a cube on the podium. During the talk, she went to the cube and opened the top, she came back later to open a side, and finally she opened the front so people could see what was inside. This was a demonstration of how to intrigue and stimulate viewers/ visitors.

John McCarthy:
The past and present of the internet

Renowned researcher of Stanford University and guest of honour. His contributions to the internet were the time-sharing utility, the programming language Lisp and a representation of common sense and reasoning. He talked about the developments leading to the internet, starting with Turing's idea of the universal computer (can compute anything that other computers can, and more) in 1936, ending with the invention of Google in 1996 by Brin and Page. He was not too positive about the new plans of Tim Berners-Lee, but he didn't specify what exactly and why...