Rafael Capurro wrote: Bob, very exciting! please send me a copy of your book once it is printed. The fact that in early English information was use in the plural maybe means that only the processes were meant not the idea of "pieces" of information. What is your impression (!) on this? kind regards Rafael
Hi Rafeal - I will send the entire book once we can resolve a mail problem that the U of Toronto mail server is having. I agree with you information is really a process and behaves more like a verb than a noun despite the "ation" ending. To better respond to your question here is an excerpt from Chapter 2 again where POE refers to the paper Propagating Organization: An Enquiry by Kauffman, Stuart, Robert K. Logan, Robert Este, Randy Goebel, David Hobill and Ilya Shmulevich. 2007. Biology and Philosophy 23: 27-45. We discovered in our review of POE that Shannon information and biotic or instructional information (contained in DNA, RNA etc.) are quite different. Information is not an absolute but depends on the context in which it is being used. So Shannon information is a perfectly useful tool for telecommunication channel engineering. Kolomogorov (Shiryayev 1993) information, defined as the minimum computational resources needed to describe a program or a text and is related to Shannon information, is useful for the study of information compression with respect to Turing machines. Biotic or instructional information, on the other hand, is not equivalent to Shannon or Kolomogorov information and as has been shown in POE is the only way to describe the interaction and evolution of biological systems and the propagation of their organization. Information is a tool and as such it comes in different forms just as screwdrivers are not all the same. They come in different forms, slot, square, and Philips---depending in what screw environment they are to operate. The same may be said of information. MacKay identified two main categories of information: selective information not necessarily linked to meaning and structural information specifically linked to meaning. Shannon information was formulated to deal with the signal to noise ratio in telecommunications and Kolomogorov information was intended to measure information content as the complexity of an algorithm on a Turing Machine. Shannon and Kologomorov information are what MacKay termed selective information. Biotic or instructional information, on the other hand, is a form of structural information. The information of DNA is not fixed like Shannon selective information but depends on context like MacKay structural information so that identical genotypes can give rise to different phenotypes depending on the environment or context. Although we introduced the notion of the relativity of information in POE we were unaware at the time of the formulation of a similar idea long ago by Nicholas Tzannes (1968). He ?wanted to define information so that its meaning varied with context? [and] pointed out that whereas Shannon and Wiener define information in terms of what it is, MacKay defines it in terms of what it does (Hayles 1999a, p. 56).? Both Shannon and Wiener?s form of information is a noun or a thing and MacKay?s form of information is a verb or process. We associate instructional or biotic information with MacKay as it is a process and not with Shannon because DNA, RNA and proteins are not informational ?things? as such but rather they catalyze ?processes? and actions that give rise to the propagation of organization and hence the transmission of information?information with meaning at that. Put simply instructional information is structural information as the root of the word instructional reveals. ---------------------------------------------------------------- UTPHY webmail _______________________________________________ fis mailing list [email protected] https://webmail.unizar.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fis
