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.That was not an unreasonable assumption to make for the purpose of informationmeasurement, but it participated in the major leap in measurement made by Boltzmannof using the third world in new ways for measuring that which was actual.82 3 On Interpretation of MindThe great contribution of Szilard to this set of developments was to have indicatedthat there were two entropy values which were in fact united,  To put it precisely:we have to distinguish here between two entropy values. And that the total entropyof a system cannot stop with just the physical system, but must indeed entail simul-taneously an intelligence system; for without the two systems, the second law ofthermodynamics was just untenable.Shannon s use of these developments in connection with a mathematical theoryof communication is hardly merely fortuitous; neither is the intuition of many thatthere is something lodged in these considerations which can have widespread impli-cations so misguided.Where there is misguidance is in the over-concretization, andthe failure to realize the implicit recognition of the role of the third world in the realworld that is involved.It is evident that we are, at the very least, straining the bonds of Haeckelism.Perhaps, one of the most sophisticated versions of Haeckelism in a large part of thetwentieth century has been the physicalistic thesis associated with Logical Positivismand its various versions.It essentially is the view that all meaningful language mustultimately be based on the language of the physical sciences, most notably the lan-guage of physics (although possibly allowing an exception for formal languagessuch as mathematics and logic).Behind this is the assumption that ultimately thereal world is the world of small irreducible unit of the kind originally proposed byDemocritus, celebrated by Lucretius, brought up to date for the modern world byGassendi and Hobbes, and onward.Unfortunately for the view, the development ofmodern physics has thrown great doubt on any ultimate  hard units.There are suchof course, electrons, protons, mesons, neutrons, and a multiplicity of particles,including the  strange particles said to be possessed of  strangeness, perhaps evenanother universe somewhere consisting of antimatter, antigalaxies, antistars, andantiplanets which, should they ever come into contact with matter, would result inannihilation and the release of large quantities of energy; and especially, of the dis-solution possibilities of matter into energy, which comprised the long-standing prin-ciple of the conservation of matter.There is yet a further a fortiori argument inherent in the Szilard paper against anyform of Haeckelism.By a very complex set of arguments which allude to the mostsubtle aspects of theoretical physics, which very few people could appreciate with-out much study, Szilard demonstrates, as the title of his paper indicates, that therecan be a  decrease of entropy in a thermodynamic system by the intervention ofintelligent beings. The extended argument deals with hypothetical demons insidegas chambers, gases consisting of single molecules, thought experiments whichcould never be conducted in actuality, abstruse mathematical considerations, writ-ten by a Hungarian who never quite mastered his German, the paper which remaineduntranslated until 1964 in any known published form, and then when translated intoEnglish, some of the basic points were missed by the translators  if this authorindeed be very pretentious in making this last claim might be right nonetheless.Itall adds up to powerfully little cogency, it would seem.But a fortiori, if there is reason to believe that intelligent beings can intervene inthermodynamic systems to produce an entropy decrease, certainly intelligent beingsLogic of Interpretation 83can intervene in other physical systems toward making energy available for work inother ways.Having said even so much, we might even choose to ignore the argument com-pletely and turn to other more empirical, more obvious types of observations.Indeed, except for the odd condition of our theoretical orientations on which theSzilard argument might bear, there is really no need for any great proof that theintervention of intelligence may certainly have an effect on physical systems.Ihave but to look directly in front of me at the typewriter to see the way in whichintelligence played a role in the fashioning of metal and rubber to make thismachine.That is evidence enough that intelligence can have an effect on physicalsystems.Logic of InterpretationInterpretation is a psychological process.It is essentially a process associated witha being who is possessed of intelligence.Insofar as the human being is not onlybeing possessed of intelligence, but perhaps has more of the trait than other animals,nonetheless, at least to that extent, the human being is certainly the leading inter-preter on the face of the earth.Interpretation is then a process to be identified with Popper s second world, theworld of  states of consciousness, or mental states, or perhaps dispositions to actas Popper writes.As a human activity, it is certainly one which is subject to extremevariation.As a consequence, given the importance of interpretation to human exis-tence, survival, and social, political, and economic interactions, the matter of inter-pretation has often become inextricably enmeshed in questions of human authority,in both sense, of who is to be believed and who is to be obeyed.One place where the deep uneasiness of humankind in connection with interpre-tation is to be found is in the historical conflicts surrounding the literalist, the fun-damentalist, interpretation of the Bible.In a world in which the authority of theBible was taken for granted, a Bible which had to be interpreted placed people at themercy of the interpreters.If, on the contrary, one would make the assumption thatthe Bible was to be read literally, then the need for any extensive reliance on otherswas considerably decreased.In this sense, fundamentalism and democracy had acertain intrinsic relationship.A dread of interpretation may lie deep in the very nature of the human minditself.Freud, for example, identified the mechanism of resistance in connectionwith the interpretation of psychological phenomena.Yet, placing the general his-torical resistance against all interpretation, including say, the kinds that Galileomade and which were deeply resisted by his opponents, together with Freud s obser-vations, would suggest that we are dealing with a very general phenomenon.One  treasure exemplifying an aversion to induction that I would cite is a set ofcomments to be found in the 14th edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica (1929) byAbraham Wolf, Professor of Logic and the Scientific Method at the University of84 3 On Interpretation of MindLondon, and editor of the Philosophy and Psychology section of the Encyclopedia.The article is entitled  Induction, but it virtually denies the legitimacy of induction.He introduces the topic by identifying induction as generalization.Thus, we see that interpretation has had a bad name, at best a begrudging one.It is of interest that when R.A.Fisher (1925; 1935), who was associated with anumber of new methods of statistics of small samples, began to promulgate them,he openly indicated that these methods provided a mathematics of induction, andthat any other way of doing induction would no longer be necessary [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]