V) How do we know we made a reasonable judgement?

V) How do we know we made a reasonable judgement?

I was by my brother in NY, on my way to the airport, and I spotted a book by Umberto Eco on information and open systems.  I borrowed the book (and still have it -- sorry Jacob),  just on the whim that I would enjoy more Eco in my life.  I discovered much more, the book is Eco's earlier writing, semiotics mixed with art and science, and has had a profound affect on me.  Eco makes the argument that Shannon's description of information, a measure of the communicability of a message, provides for a measure of art.

If it helps think about 'On Interpretation' by Susan Sontag, experience art without interpreting it.  There is no message not even one that we the viewer creates.   There is no meaning to be had, just an experience.  The flip side of this argument is that when there is interpretation there is meaning.  This view, proposed by Semiotics, states that when two closed systems meet and are mapped to each other we create meaning  (me and the work of art) .  The meeting and mapping is an interpretative process, how I map to the work of art is different than another person, I interpret the sensory perceptions uniquely.  Hence, the experience is meaningful precisely because there is an interpretation, the interpretation is not a hinderance to the experience it provides the mapping between the two closed systems.

[wow, seems like a dense paragraph....sorry]

So what Eco argues is that an artist leaves their art open to provide for multiple interpretations.  This facilitates our ability to map ourselves to the work of art, we have many choices of interpretation to an open work.  The beauty in Eco's argument is in his incorporation of Shannon's Information into the discussion.  Eco argues that Shannon teaches us to measure information and the more information found in a message the clearer the interpretation of the message.  This direct relationship between information and clarity of the message enables us to quantify and measure the number of interpretation in a work.

Stated simply (I hope): the number of ways different people can potentially understand something is a function of the amount of information in that something. And, here is the kicker, we can objectively measure how much information there is in that something, so we can objectively measure how many interpretations are possible.  Post-modernism which allows everyone to have their own interpretation of reality is limited objectively by the amount of information in the reality being interpreted.

Now Information is the kind of thing that we can increase through work (I am using the capital 'I' type of information, the technical term, which is not synonymous with data).  So if we invest energy, we work at studying something, we increase the Information and reduce the number of potential interpretations.

I was participating in a seminar at Bar Ilan University under the auspices of Rabbi Shabbtai Rappaport when I discovered all of that.  Under continued discussion within the other participants, in particular Daniel Reifman a Phd candidate studying Semiotics, I realized something neat.  We can now measure the distance between earth and heaven, between a fact and a value (as Sam Harris would say), between a truth/falsity and a good/bad statement. 

Following Maimonidies' definition found in the opening chapters of The Guide,  facts become values when the public accepts the facts to be a moral good.  If there is a lot of Information in the system, it becomes obvious to the public what the common interpretation is to that set of facts.  If however, there are very few facts or they are disjoint, there is very little Information in the system and many interpretations are possible.  Morality in a situation with little Information is subject to interpretation.

Another way of saying this is that we all make judgments, at some point we need to make a decision, so we gather up the facts and then make a decision.  What is the distance between the facts that we gather and the decision?  How can we objectively measure if we made a reasonable decision?

We can measure the Information in the closed system of facts, then we can state that a reasonable judgment is one where the Information is large, so large that there are very few other interpretation/decisions possible.

This works wonders, but only if we have a closed system.  Once we open the door to other systems it becomes very difficult to measure the Information in the plurality of systems.  This technique is often known as "What about'isms".

A conversation can go like this: Lets look at the facts, lets connect the dots, see how the Information increases, a clear picture begins to emerge, we are about find the common single Interpretation possible. At this point someone may inject, 'What about...', opening the conversation to a whole new set of facts.  These new facts dilute the Information in the system.  Instead of having a conversation that increases Information we now start diluting Information, whole sets of new interpretations become possible.

So here is an example, lets say we are talking about diet, or more specifically weight as a function of caloric intake.  I eat more I gain weight.  Now, I have been weighing myself pretty much daily for years, I can tell you with a fair amount of accuracy how much I will weigh based on my eating habits in the past three days.  I have lots of facts and data, if I tell you what I ate, we will both come to the same conclusion, the interpretation of these facts is very limited.  And then you say, but one second, how about exercise.  Argggg.... you just opened the conversation. I now need to gather all my exercise data, which I could do, I track that as well.  But wait, that is not enough, since there is a connection between exercise and diet, a complex relationship, so we need all the possible combinations of what I ate and what exercise I did, carbs with aerobic, protein with resistance, before after, morning, evening etc.  The Information drops exponentially with the introduction of a new system.

Here is my advice: look out for conversations that combines facts from multiple systems and dilute Information!