Dear MEA Colleagues and Friends
I have been invited by Mark Burgin editor of the electronic journal Information (ISSN 2078-2489;http://www.mdpi.com/journal/information) to guest edit a special issue of the journal. The objective of the special issue entitled «Information: Its Different Modes and its Relation to Meaning» is to explore the nature of information in the wide variety of forms that it takes and answer the following questions:
What is information?
Does the nature of information change depending on the context in which it is employed? For example is the information stored in DNA or on a computer the same?
Is there a difference between symbolic information like that stored in a book or on a computer and DNA which is not symbolic of RNA but catalyzes its production.
What is the relationship of information to the medium in which it is stored or instantiated?
What is the relation of information to any of the following, i.e. to meaning, to data, to knowledge, to wisdom, to science, to physics, to chemistry, to biology, to medicine, to neurophysiology, to neural networks, to psychology, to psychiatry, to evolution, to mathematics, to philosophy, to technology, to computers, to engineering, to design, to economics, to complexity, to chaos, to emergence, to commerce, to business, to knowledge management, to culture, to history, to art, to music, to the sender, to the receiver, to the channel, to systems theory, to cybernetics, to ontology, to epistemology, to consciousness, and to x where x is some other topic of interest to you.
What role did the concept of or role of information play in the work of some scholar such as Shannon, Weaver, Kolmogorov, Chaitin, McLuhan, Innis, Plato, Aristotle, Newton, Freud, Jung, Kant, Descarte, Russell, Whitehead, Pierce, Bateson, Turing, Gödel, von Neumann or any other scholar of interest to you?
Other questions that can be addressed are those raised in my paper What is Information?: Why is It Relativistic and What is Its Relationship to Materiality, Meaning and Organization, which will appear in the special issue of the journal that I am guest editing. The abstract of and introduction to the paper appears below.
I have invited a large number of my colleagues, many more than the number of articles (10) that I can accept and will find their way into the special issue of the journal. If you are interested in being part of this project please let me know as soon as possible for planning purposes. The deadline for a letter of intent will be February 3, 2012. The deadline for an abstract will be March 1 with a deadline of July 6, 2012 for the final article once the abstract has been accepted.
I look forward to your responses whether or not you wish to participate in this project. My best wishes to each of you. – Bob Logan
What is Information?: Why is It Relativistic and What is Its Relationship to
Materiality, Meaning and Organization
Robert K. Logan
Abstract
We review the historic development of concept of information including the
relationship of Shannon information and entropy and the criticism of Shannon
information because of its lack of a connection to meaning. We review the work
of Kauffman, Logan, Este, Goebel, Hobill & Shmulevich [1] that shows that
Shannon information fails to describe biotic information. We introduce the notion
of the relativity of information and show that the concept of information depends
on the context of where and how it is being used. We examine the relationship of
information to meaning and materiality within information theory, cybernetics
and systems biology. We show there exists a link between information and
organization in biotic systems and in the various aspects of human culture
including language, technology, science, economics and governance.
Key Words: information, language, Shannon, biology, relativity, meaning, organization
1. Introduction
We have represented a discrete information source as a Markoff process. Can we define a
quantity, which will measure, in some sense, how much information is ‘produced’ by
such a process, or better, at what rate information is produced? – Shannon [2]
To live effectively is to live with adequate information – Wiener [3]
Information is a distinction that makes a difference – MacKay [4]
Information is a difference that makes a difference – Bateson [5]
Information… arises… as natural selection assembling the very constraints on the release
of energy that then constitutes work and the propagation of organization – Kauffman,
Logan, Este, Goebel, Hobill & Shmulevich [1]
We live in the Information Age and we are surrounded by information. Thanks to “new
media” like the Internet, the Web, blogs, email, cell phones, iPods, iPads, eReaders,
Blackberries and iPhones we are blanketed in information—drowning in information
according to some.
In addition to this everyday interaction with information by the users of computer-based
digital “new media” there is the role that information plays in the sciences of artificial
intelligence (AI) and artificial life (AL). In AI intelligence is posited to be a form of
information that can be downloaded from the human brain onto a computer. In AL life is
posited to be a form of information that first became embodied in carbon-based
chemicals but now can exist in silicon-based computers. Some AL scientists like Edward
Fredkin [6] insist that the universe is a computer and that life including human life is
merely a programme running on that computer.
The irony of our total immersion in information as well as the prominent role it plays in
AI and AL is that for the most part we do not really have a clear understanding of exactly
what information is. Information is not a simple straightforward idea but rather it is a
very slippery concept used in many different ways in many different contexts.
Linguistically and grammatically the word information is a noun but in actuality it is a
process and hence is like a verb. A consideration of the concept of information gives rise
to a number of interesting questions.
Is there only one form of information or are there several kinds of information? In other
words is information an invariant or a universal independent of its frame of reference or
context?
What is the relationship of information to meaning and organization?
Is information a thing like a noun or a process like a verb?
Is information material or is it a form of energy or is it just a pattern?
Is information a uniquely human phenomenon or do non-human forms of life contain
information?
What is the relationship of energy and information?
These are some of the questions we will address in this article as we try to flesh out our
understanding of exactly what it is that we call information. We will consider the historic
development of the concept of information to get a handle on the exact meaning of this
thing or process that defines our age and is also the engine of economic growth. We trace
the development of the concept of information from the earliest uses of the word to the
beginning of information theory as formulated by Shannon and Wiener, to MacKay’s [4]
critique of Shannon information [2], to Bateson’s [5] formulation of information as the
difference that makes a difference to the inclusion of information in biotic systems. We
also examine the relationship of information, energy and entropy arguing as have many
physicists before us that information and entropy are opposites and not parallel as
suggested by Shannon.
In attempting to answer the questions we have formulated above, we will review the
work of Kauffman, Logan, Este, Goebel, Hobill & Shmulevich [1] that demonstrated that
Shannon information does not fully describe the information contained in a living
organism. Shannon information was developed to deal with how to transmit information
with as few errors as possible and not with such concerns as meaning or evolution. We
next introduce the notion of the relativity of information and show that the concept of
information depends on the context of where and how it is being used. Next we will
examine the relationship of information to meaning and materiality within information
theory, cybernetics and systems biology. And finally we examine the link between
information and organization showing that in biotic systems that information and
organization are intimately linked. We will also identify a similar link between
information and organization in the various aspects of human culture including language,
technology, science, economics and governance.
The literature on information theory is vast and it would be impossible to survey all of it.
Two recent books that came out after the research reported here was completed is worth
mentioning and that is The Theory of Information by Mark Burgin published in 2010 that
provides an encyclopedic survey of information theory. The book A Brief Review of
Molecular Information Theory by T. D. Schneider requires special mention because of
the way in which Shannon information theory is used to study genetic systems and
precisely characterize the sequence conservation at nucleic-acid binding sites. This seems
to contradict our assertion that biotic information is different than Shannon information
but as the reder will discover we are talking about different forms of information. The
reader is also referred to this book that decribes a relationship between energy and
information.
______________________
Robert K. Logan
Chief Scientist – sLab at OCAD
Prof. Emeritus – Physics – U. of Toronto
www.physics.utoronto.ca/Members/logan
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