ID No.: 2000HZ67006
NAME OF THE STUDENT: Anant Bhaskar Garg
DISSERTATION TITLE: The Concept of Information: A Critical Examination
ABSTRACT
This dissertation explores the concept of ‘information’ and bring into focus semantic aspects of information. We begin with an overview of the thesis in the introduction. In Chapter 1 the concept of information and various questions related to it are introduced. Then we review Norbert Wiener’s work on information and cybernetics. Subsequently, we examine Shannon’s information theory and Warren Weaver analyses of it. In Chapter 2 we examine the concept of information in consciousness studies, from the perspective of computer science, cognitive science, semiotics, molecular biology, and quantum information theory. In particular, we explore the notion of information in these fields of study from the perspective of information theory. Then in Chapter 3 we turn towards the currently unresolved problem of how we get meaning from information. In this context, we analyze Dretske’s informational semantics and Fodor’s informational atomism. In Chapter 4 we outline the problems with the information-based semantic theories discussed earlier. We then examine the prospects of introducing the notion of meaning within a formal account of information. Towards this end, Donald Mackay’s work on information and meaning is reviewed. The dissertation ends with concluding comments and argues for the need to re-examine the foundations on which the information theories of the past were built, thereby motivating the need for a new framework to understand the concept of ‘information’ in a better way.
