Customer Reviews

Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language and Life

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Jeremy Campbell performs an absolutely brilliant work, linking and polishing all the important concepts about every level of the universe, in such a way that even when they are the most arcane and "for-initiated-only" in their respective fields, they become crystal clear and ebulliently alive through the pages. I actually HAD to take notes carefully quoting him, in order to preserve the understanding and the wonder conveyed by the exact writing. An invaluable piece on the uniqueness of information that is a truly unique piece of the richest information itself. A book to be read many times, especially good if you are a scientist battling with specific facts every day and would appreciate to refresh your perspective of what is the universe all about.

This book succeeds in its stated intention of giving an overview of the development of information theory. Human beings are "decoders" who interpret information. Scientific theories are human creations seeking to enlighten. The author explains a basic explanation from information theory, i.e., that "in an ordinary conversation, information is conveyed when the speaker says something that changes the listener's knowledge."

Campbell attacks Darwin's theory, writing, "One major difficulty is that the central argument of Darwinian theory circles back on itself, explaining nothing." He goes into detail on why evolution is unscientific.

The brain makes decisions along the way as to what information it will process and how it will interpret what it takes in. "All seeing is interpretation" he writes. He describes the "editing" process of the brain: "...that does not imply that memory necessarily preserves the original meaning intact. The brain goes to work on information while it is being stored in memory,interpreting, drawing inferences, making assumptions, fitting it into a context of past experience and knowledge already acquired."

This is a helpful book on information theory, the workings of the brain, and the process of interpreting what one sees. It will open the mind of the nonjudgmental reader.

A vivid, rigorous, yet accessible scientific support for what we know intuitively is true-- that there is a force for order and creation in the universe, and that humans are by nature in tune with it. The implications are wide-ranging and profound, yet applicable on a day to day basis; there is more to the universe than the simple winding down of entropy, and disorder and chaos are not necessarily the enemy

This is one of the most interesting books I've read since Godel Escher & Bach. This was better, in that it didn't spend time constructing verbal parallels to Bach's very interesting musical structures.

Grammatical Man opens your brain to a bunch of ideas about what exactly is meant by "information". Very nice intro to the formal aspects of info theory a la Claude Shannon, but with an amazingly approachable way of talking about it. Not at all condescending, and technically interesting. You could build a PhD from the ideas that this book lays out for you. PhD not your inclination, OK. You could build an interesting life investigating what Campbell lays out for you.

The grammatical man has been highly recommended by some of the icons of popular science including Martin Gardner (Intellectual Journey of the highest sort) This is however a book that makes that journey too circuitous, sometimes even tortuous, to complete. For a book on information theory it is quite ironic that the average sentence in the book has brain-numbingly little information. Some examples: 'The pioneers of communication theory, cybernetics, and intelligent machines came to recognize that they were dealing with a new set of concepts and a new vocabulary unlike any that the science had previously known' Another hollow pearl 'On this issue, researchers tend to be divided along Chomskyan and anti-Chomskyan lines, some at the extreme edges, others somewhere in no man's land, being shelled by both sides' Fine lines, but vacuous if entire chapters are filled with them. Definitely not a book for the impatient reader or one with a reasonable mathematical aptitude. The book tires itself out after the first five or six chapters by needlessly running around the same Chomskyan and shannonian bushes. You (a person with a little exposure to either of the fields) would find that the same theory is phrased and rephrased in words. I do agree that popular science books need to assume little prior knowledge on the readers part, but that should not mean that a point has to belabored and hammered (eloquently...have to give him that) in. I gave the book three stars because of the the first few chapters. It is a steady boring downhill intellectual journey after that.
Sai

A fascinating introduction to Information theory. And we need it too. Information theory is still unfortunately largely unknown, even amongst the generally well educated classes of society. An educated person today needs, at least a rudimentary understanding of evolution, plate tectonics, genetics and the big bang. Information theory really should be in this short list too. Campbell helps bridge this gap.

A classical one in the language and information theory. Easy to read for a undergraduate physicist/chemist/anthropologist and a first hand reference.

Explore the relationship between Shannon's communication theory, entropy, DNA coding, cell development and the evolution of intelligence as suggested by Dyson in "Darwin among the Machines".