{"id":66,"date":"2008-08-17T15:15:50","date_gmt":"2008-08-17T15:15:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=66"},"modified":"2008-08-17T15:15:50","modified_gmt":"2008-08-17T15:15:50","slug":"complexity-of-communications","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/complexity-of-communications\/","title":{"rendered":"Complexity of communications"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, I posted<\/a> about probability theory, and mentioned its modern founder, Andrei Kolmogorov<\/a>.\u00a0 In addition to formalizing probability theory,\u00a0\u00a0Kolmogorov also defined an influential approach to\u00a0assessing\u00a0the complexity of something.
\nHe reasoned that a more complex object should be harder to\u00a0create or to re-create than a simpler object, and so you could “measure” the degree of complexity of an object by looking at\u00a0the simplest\u00a0computer program needed to generate it.\u00a0 Thus, in the most famous example used by complexity scientists, the 1915 painting called “Black Square” of Kazimir Malevich<\/a>, is allegedly very simple, since we could recreate it with a very simply computer program:
\nPaint the colour black on every pixel until the surface is covered<\/em>, say.
\n\"\"<\/a>
\nBut Kolmogorov’s approach ignores entirely the context of the actions needed to create the object.\u00a0\u00a0 Just because an action is simple or easily described, does not make it easy to do, or even easy to decide to do.\u00a0\u00a0 Art objects, like most human artefacts, are created with deliberate intent by specific creators, as anthropologist\u00a0Alfred Gell argued in his theory of art.\u00a0 To understand a work of art (or indeed any human artefact) we need to assess its effects on the audience in the light of its creator’s intended effects, which means we need to consider the intentions, explicit or implicit, of its creators.\u00a0 To understand these intentions in turn requires us to consider the context of its creation, what a philosopher of language\u00a0might call its felicity conditions<\/em>.
\nMalevich’s Black Sqare can’t be understood, in any sense, without understanding why no artist before him created such a painting.\u00a0 There is no physical or technical reason that Rembrandt, say, or Turner, could not have painted a canvas consisting only of one colour, black.\u00a0 But they did not, and could not have, and could not even have imagined doing so. (Perhaps only the 18th-century Welsh painter Thomas Jones could have imagined doing so, with his subtle paintings of near-monochrome Neapolitan walls.)\u00a0 It is not a coincidence that Malevich\u2019s painting appeared in the historical moment when it did, and not anytime before nor anyplace else.\u00a0\u00a0 For instance, Malevich worked at a time when educated people were fascinated with notions of a fourth or even further dimensions, and Malevich himself actively tried to represent these other dimensions in his art.\u00a0 To imagine that such a painting could be adequately described without reference to any art-historical\u00a0background, or socio-political context,\u00a0or the history of ideas is to confuse the syntax of the painting with its semantics and pragmatics.\u00a0 We understand nothing about the painting if all we understand is that every pixel is colored black.
\nWe have been here before.\u00a0 The mathematical theory of communications of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver has been very influential in the design of the physical layers of telecommunications and computer communications networks.\u00a0\u00a0 But this theory explicitly ignores the semantics – the meanings – of messages. (To be fair to Shannon and\u00a0Weaver they do tell us explicitly early on that they will be ignoring the semantics of messages.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Their theory is\u00a0therefore of no use to anyone interested in\u00a0communications\u00a0at layers above the physical transmission of signals, that is, anyone interested in understanding or using communication to communicate with other people or machines.
\nReferences:<\/em>
\nM. Dabrowski [1992]: “Malevich and Mondrian:\u00a0 nonobjective form as the expression of the “absolute”. ”\u00a0pp. 145-168, in: G. H. Roman and V. H. Marquardt (Editors): The Avant-Garde Frontier:\u00a0 Russia Meets the West, 1910-1930<\/em>. Gainesville, FL, USA: University Press of Florida.
\nAlfred Gell\u00a0[1998]: Art and Agency:\u00a0 An Anthropological Theory<\/em>.\u00a0 Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.
\nL. D. Henderson [1983]: The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art<\/em>.\u00a0Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press.
\nClaude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver [1963]: The Mathematical Theory of Communication<\/em>. Chicago,\u00a0IL, USA:\u00a0 University of Illinois Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently, I posted about probability theory, and mentioned its modern founder, Andrei Kolmogorov.\u00a0 In addition to formalizing probability theory,\u00a0\u00a0Kolmogorov also defined an influential approach to\u00a0assessing\u00a0the complexity of something. He reasoned that a more complex object should be harder to\u00a0create or to re-create than a simpler object, and so you could “measure” the degree of complexity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5,8,50,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-advertising","category-anthropology","category-art","category-mathematics","category-telecommunications","p1","y2008","m08","d17","h15"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}