Dear FIS colleagues,
First of all, a reminder about the GIT (General Information Theory)
Conference, this June in Varna (www.ithea.org <http://www.ithea.org>).
Joseph Brenner and me are trying to organize some decent fis session
there: list people are cordially invited to accompany us in the event
(participants may email us, preferably to Joseph, at:
joe.bren...@bluewin.ch). The deadline for the contribution is at the end
of this month, but we could make arrangements. All the publishing,
registration and travel info is in the above web.
---
Briefly returning to the ongoing discussion, the law of Information
Conversion that Yixin postulates might have some clutch in
historical-epochal changes of science. For instance, in the exchanges
about the limitations of Ancient science and the Modern one (James vs.
Jerry): could it be taken as an instance that by changing the knowledge
support (handwritten codices versus printed books), and thus
accelerating at least one order of magnitude the circulation of
information around individual scientists and scholars, then the
corresponding "ratio of information conversion to knowledge" was
dramatically increased?
The creation of new knowledge mostly occurs by pre-existing knowledge
"recombination" (at least, this is my thesis; it was inspired on a great
book by James Scott, 1998, "Seeing like a State"). It makes sense that
by accelerating info-knowledge circulation, creation of new knowledge
also increases in the long run. But it needs important social and
institutional changes. The medieval "studia generalia" or "universitas"
could be seen as the historical means of socially recombining the
Trivium and Quadrivium disciplines. It was quite advanced, but
insufficient for the new "revolutionary" times. Along the scientific
revolution, new recombining sites emerged better suited for the
cognitive demands of the epoch: learned societies and journals,
academies, even pioneering "labs" by individual amateurs and within
arsenals and weapon factories (motion of projectiles), and of course a
"cloud" of printed books around.
After the industrial revolution, and another scientific revolution (or
better a couple of them), we are now caught in a "info society" time
when the new circulation of info/knowledge has so dramatically
increased, so unprecedented a way, that it takes us institutionally and
conceptually ill-prepared to properly handle the knowledge recombination
processes. The problem is not of technological fixtures for coping with
"data deluge", "data integration", or new "cloud computing" tools.
Rather, it is a "meaning crunch" --failure to produce meaningful social
responses at many scales, particularly at a planetary scale where our
most pressing needs occur. For the advancement of a "collective
intelligence" there are many knowledge myths to debunk, one of them the
inter-multi-pluri-trans-disciplinary fashionable discourse... But that
is another story (and easy said than done!!)
Could information science produce a new exciting perspective on the
history of science, on the social accumulation of knowledge, and help us
a little bit in the social cognizing troubles of today?
best wishes
---Pedro
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Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Avda. Gómez Laguna, 25, Pl. 11ª
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Telf: 34 976 71 3526 (& 6818) Fax: 34 976 71 5554
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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