Advice to get ecological psychology (8):
Information is a tricky notion, also in eco. psych. If you want to understand ecological information, you shouldn't ask the typical question regarding how to measure it or its content, but you should ask what makes it informative.🧵1/11

Namely, if we want to understand ecological information we *must* separate the concept of information from its measurements. Although he is often misread, Donald MacKay knew this when he proposed his notion of structural information: 2/11

"It also became clear that to avoid conceptual confusion it was not sufficient to preface the word 'information' with distinguishing adjectives such as 'selective', 'structural' and 'metrical'... 3/11

Our chief terminological need was for a way of keeping the notion of information per se distinct from all measures of 'amount-of-information'... 4/11

Rather than invent still more neologisms, I took to using 'information-content' (qualified as selective, structural or metrical) to denote the latter, leaving 'information' free to be used in its original everyday sense." (MacKay, 1969, p. 18). 5/11

With this separation in place, you can still use the measurements of information you prefer in different methodological contexts while still being able to ask: what makes *this* information (regardless of its measurement) informative? And this is the core question... 6/11

Because ecological information is informative in a way different from Shannon information and structural information, for instance. Shannon information is informative inasmuch there's a shared code between sender and receiver. Structural information is informative... 7/11

With respect to the set of all possible actions it can induce in the receiver. Ecological information is informative by virtue of the lawful-i.e., very stable-relationship between the energy arrays surrounding organisms (light, air...) and the layout of their environment. 8/11

This relationship is what make some aspects of these energy arrays informative to some organisms. No codes, no sets of possibilities... Just these stable relationships available in the environment. And this is precisely the aspect of ecological information that allows for... 9/11

A concise and concrete mathematical description of (perceptual) information by exploring the geometry and topology of those relationships. Those geometrical and topological properties are the variables of ecological information described in the ecological literature. 10/11

Automatically, the question is: but how are organisms sensitive to these variables? Well, you know I think organisms' perceptual systems resonate to those variables in a very concrete way. But that's a different question for a different advice. 11/11