Re: [design] some beginnings of reenactment season

what?

contingency!-

jan-ez

In philosophy and logic, contingency is the status of facts that are not logically necessary. In colloquial English, a contingency is something that can happen, but that generally is not anticipated

...Information in the first instance presupposes not some medium of communication, but contingency. Robert Stalnaker (1984, p. 85) makes this point clearly: "Content requires contingency. To learn something, to acquire information, is to rule out possibilities. To understand the information conveyed in a communication is to know what possibilities would be excluded by its truth." For there to be information, there must be a multiplicity of distinct possibilities any one of which might happen. When one of these possibilities does happen and the others are ruled out, information becomes actualized. Indeed, information in its most general sense can be defined as the actualization of one possibility to the exclusion of others (observe that this definition encompasses both syntactic and semantic information).

...To see why Complex Specified Information is a reliable indicator of design, we need to examine the nature of intelligent causation. The principal characteristic of intelligent causation is directed contingency, or what we call choice. Whenever an intelligent cause acts, it chooses from a range of competing possibilities. This is true not just of humans, but of animals as well as extra-terrestrial intelligences...

http://posh.roundearth.net/informat.htm



----- Original Message -----
From: lauf-s
To: design-l.v2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 5:24 PM
Subject: [design] some beginnings of reenactment season


11 July 2004
http://www.doesthisblogmakemybuttlookbig.com/2004/07/happy_bastille_.html

14 July 1789
Bastille Day

14 July 1976
John Sebastian Matta commits suicide by jumping out a window of his twin brother Gordon's studio.

15 July 1815
Napoleon was exiled to the remote tiny volcanic island of St. Helena, south of the Equator.

15 July 1930
birth of Jacques Derrida

15 July 1997
the murder of Gianni Versace

15 July 2005
Blobfest

16 July 1928
birth of Johannes, Baron von Ow

16 July 1940
birth of Steven Izenour

16 July 2005
http://www.easternstate.org/events/bastille.html


------------------------------------------------------------------------------


_______________________________________________
the design-list, version 2.0 ~ open forum, open ideas ~
http://mail.architexturez.net/mailman/listinfo/design-l.v2
Folow-ups
  • Re: [design] some beginnings of reenactment season
    • From: lauf-s
  • Replies
    [design] some beginnings of reenactment season, lauf-s
    Partial thread listing: