5/17/2023 0 Comments Semantic notion definition![]() ![]() Such a definition could be used to analyse and clarify issues concerning semantic information in a variety of fields, and possibly to uncover novel connections between those fields. 1 Given the ubiquity of this concept, an important question is whether it can be defined in a formal and broadly applicable manner. It plays an important role in many fields, including biology , cognitive science , artificial intelligence , information theory and philosophy . The concept of semantic information refers to information which is in some sense meaningful for a system, rather than merely correlational. It leads to formal definitions of several concepts that have been intuitively understood to be related to semantic information, including ‘value of information’, ‘semantic content’ and ‘agency’. Our framework is grounded in the intrinsic dynamics of a system coupled to an environment, and is applicable to any physical system, living or otherwise. We also use recent results in non-equilibrium statistical physics to analyse semantic information from a thermodynamic point of view. ‘Causal necessity’ is defined in terms of counter-factual interventions which scramble correlations between the system and its environment, while ‘maintaining existence’ is defined in terms of the system's ability to keep itself in a low entropy state. We define semantic information as the syntactic information that a physical system has about its environment which is causally necessary for the system to maintain its own existence. In this paper, we introduce such a theory. Semantic information plays an important role in many fields, including biology, cognitive science and philosophy, and there has been a long-standing interest in formulating a broadly applicable and formal theory of semantic information. ![]() By contrast, the concept of ‘semantic information’ refers to those correlations which carry significance or ‘meaning’ for a given system. Shannon information theory provides various measures of so-called syntactic information, which reflect the amount of statistical correlation between systems. ![]()
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