Hi All, 

I'm starting a book club on Soren Brier's 'Cybersemiotics: Why Information is Not Enough' with a friend and thought this would be a good forum for inviting participants. 

The book aims to synthesize our concepts of information, cognition and communication at the physical, biological and social-cultural levels, so it will be interesting to see how compatible it is with UTOK. 

We are planning to meet weekly on zoom to discuss each of the 12 chapters - be warned, it is a dense tome! 

A digital copy can be downloaded from Scribd for free. 

Let me know if you are interested in joining or have any questions. 


From his summary:

"This book presents an analysis and discussion of the epistemological and ontological problems of attempts to found information concepts on the implicitly mechanistic idea that the physical sciences hold the key to the nature of reality and information. The phenomenological-cultural and the biological aspect of meaning must somehow be integrated. I will show the need to involve the area of biology if we wish to have a more comprehensive understanding of cognition and communication. 

The study of animal cognition in the ethological paradigm is producing important results. It is furthermore shown through an analysis of the ethological and the Batesonian understanding of cognition and behavior that it is impossible to remove the fundamental epistemological position of the observer through a definition of information as neg-entropy. I will show how the works of ethologists open towards an alternative scientific explanation of the nature of information and cognition. This work is an attempt to bring forth a new integrative and non-reductionist perspective of the apparent paradoxes of human knowing and to celebrate self-referential processes as basic to the understanding of our own foundations."

Regards, 

Derick

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