Dear Colleagues,
Following this interesting and enlightening discussion I have got several thoughts that I would like to share with you. First of all it is a great pleasure to read variety of contributions, deep thoughts and insights, profound questions as well. This list so very often brightens my thoughts on information. I agree with Arturo that what we have today is not a science (of information), I also agree with Terry and Joseph that it might be rather seen as pre-science, and I would also propose a further view that we might be working on a new kind of science. It does not necessarily need to look exactly like the old science(s). It might be a new, not only in the sense of exploration of informational universe, but also because learning is interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and metadisciplinary, as we come from variety of backgrounds and information is becoming central to all of them (Søren has written extensively on the topic of transdisciplinarity in his Cybersemiotics research). Information is a very complex phenomenon, as it stands for the world and reality in all its richness – much more complex than matter-energy which is the physical basis in which it is cast. It always depends on the receiver which is as a rule implicit (like in Shannon and Kolmogorov-Chaitin information) but if receiver is explicated as in cognitive computing, a whole new world opens of relationships between the potential information of the world and perceived meaningful information in a cognizing agent. Complexity and transdisciplinarity (interdisciplinarity) are two important features that must be kept in mind when we embark on the project of <foundations of <information> <science>> (I put brackets around the terms that are not used as in common speech.) It is a huge project, unfinished, but truly important. That is why it is so attractive too. It reminds of old days Natural Philosophy, but this time with philosophy of human and other living beings and cognitive artefacts integrated into it. There is a strong need of philosophical perspective in this New Kind of Science, or New Kind of Natural Philosophy. This time we will not stop at physics, which provides basic building blocks for informational organization, but follow formation of increasingly more complex structures, morphologies and their mutual interactions – processes unfolding and enabling information to act in the world. There is a journal Philosophies http://www.mdpi.com/journal/philosophies with this ambition to build a new Natural Philosophy much broader than one Newton is representative of. That was about the research project, the need to endure even though we are far from finished with disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, transdisciplinary, meta-disciplinary explorations. Mark Burgin and I presented for this year’s is4si summit a Prolegomena to Information Taxonomy. It is just the very first attempt to position different pieces of knowledge into a common network. There is a lot of space for all knowledge we have and even more for knowledge we are going to acquire. Awareness of the legitimacy and necessity of different views of the complex phenomenon of information is refreshing and liberating. There is a lot of work to be done in the near future. We have an organisation dedicated to this project, http://www.is4si.org http://is4si-2017.org/is4si-organisation Now about ten propositions, "10 principles of information science" put forward by Pedro. Given the above complex picture of the present day research within <<information><science>> how can a finite number of principles be used? Put differently: can any axiomatic system after Gödel’s theorems be taken seriously? Well, obviously, yes! We have varieties of axiomatic frameworks today that are absolutely central for organisation of knowledge within different fields – logic, mathematics, parts of computing, parts of physics. Think Euclidean geometry. We know much more today and still its beauty and usefulness persists. It does not mean that the framework of 10 axioms will exhaust all that can be known about information, but it can help us as community to relate to it, and to each other. The better set of axioms, the more we can accommodate of our present and future knowledge within it. Now I am tempted to comment from my specific point of view on Pedro’s proposed 10 Points, and how the list might be made different – I will resist. Many excellent comments already made in that direction have been enlightening. In short: we have a job to do as community and we will not give up only because the job is right now unfinished. Perhaps as nature itself, it will always be incomplete (Terry’s book), but we can produce pretty nice pieces of common knowledge even within finite frameworks. The emphasis is on common. All the best, Gordana TEN PRINCIPLES OF INFORMATION SCIENCE proposed by Pedro 1. Information is information, neither matter nor energy. 2. Information is comprehended into structures, patterns, messages, or flows. 3. Information can be recognized, can be measured, and can be processed (either computationally or non-computationally). 4. Information flows are essential organizers of life's self-production processes--anticipating, shaping, and mixing up with the accompanying energy flows. 5. Communication/information exchanges among adaptive life cycles underlie the complexity of biological organizations at all scales. 6. It is symbolic language what conveys the essential communication exchanges of the human species--and constitutes the core of its "social nature." 7. Human information may be systematically converted into efficient knowledge, by following the "knowledge instinct" and further up by applying rigorous methodologies. 8. Human cognitive limitations on knowledge accumulation are partially overcome via the social organization of "knowledge ecologies." 9. Knowledge circulates and recombines socially, in a continuous actualization that involves "creative destruction" of fields and disciplines: the intellectual Ars Magna. 10. Information science proposes a new, radical vision on the information and knowledge flows that support individual lives, with profound consequences for scientific-philosophical practice and for social governance. ______________________________________________ Gordana Dodig Crnkovic, Professor of Computer Science Department of Computer Science and Engineering Chalmers University of Technology School of Innovation, Design and Engineering, Mälardalen University http://www.mrtc.mdh.se/~gdc/ General Chair of is4si summit 2017 http://is4si-2017.org<http://is4si-2017.org/> From: Fis <fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es<mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es>> on behalf of "Pedro C. Marijuan" <pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es<mailto:pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es>> Date: Thursday, 5 October 2017 at 14:33 To: "fis@listas.unizar.es<mailto:fis@listas.unizar.es>" <fis@listas.unizar.es<mailto:fis@listas.unizar.es>> Subject: Re: [Fis] Fwd: Re[2]: Heretic Dear FIS Colleagues, There is no problem with heretics in this list. They are very welcome as they make us think on our favorite ideas in a different way or even from an opposed angle. We must always maintain the scholarly tone, that's the only condition! (well, apart from the "two messages per week" sacred rule)... From the many --exciting-- recent exchanges, let me pick from Lars: "assuming that Information is a property, an entity is not necessary. We can proceed with scientific research, using any information concept we think useful, without assuming it refers to anything." Something similar but perhaps less clearly formulated was in my proposal of the indefinability of information and the reference to notions such as "propagating influence" and "distinction on the adjacent." Therefore I friendly disagree with Yixin below: "the definition of information is the real foundation of information science", although I acknowledge the value and interest of his whole approach from the background of formal/computational approaches to our problem/field. Somehow, defining information universally is like looking for the "red herring", but it doesn't mean that we must condemn the term to obscurity. We can develop the foundations of information science without that definition, and indeed the advancement during last ten years has been promising. My personal strategy, beyond the 10 public points I formulated, consists on theoretical/empirical work about "informational entities". Those entities, the existence of which depends on a special relationship with the environment, are able to continuously distinguish - say - energy flows from information flows, intertwining both kinds of flows with their own survival and maintenance processes. An excellent parallel can be made with Harold Morowitz on the energy flow and Geoffrey West on scaling entities. The former for the micro-perspective (& ecological perspective) and the latter for the macro-perspective on the organizational dynamics of cells, organisms, enterprises, cities... The closest realm we can consider, and acknowledge almost completely at the molecular scale, is the living cell. That's the most strategic theater where we can define a series of essential concepts: first the information flow, then the signaling system, the life cycle, the cell-cell communication, the complexity growth, etc. etc. This was the origins of the genuine existential openness to tiny informational signals from the environment. I bet that there is something fundamental to learn about this bio-informational way of existence that can be usefully carried on to physical quarters and also to the social. There is a common informational philosophy of organization, e.g. reminding Joseph Brenner's LIR, that at the time being we don't recognize basically for two reasons: first the dogmas around the reductionist physical approach (the imperialism of physics), and second the relative poverty of theoretical biology (the Darwinian organizational blindness)... Anyhow , in a few weeks I will publish a rather complete description of the prokaryotic information flow. I hope it will stimulate reflections from other FIS parties. As I have often cited Michael Conrad in this list: "when we look at a biological system, we are looking at the face of the underlying physics of the universe". Best--Pedro El 05/10/2017 a las 12:03, 钟义信 escribió: Dear friends, The debate on the definition of information is of significance because the definition of information is the real foundation of information science. It is noticed that many contravercies in information science either in the past or at present time are more or less related to the different understandings of the concept of information. It is not difficult to accept that there are two concepts of information, related and also different to each other. The first one is the information presented by the objects existed in environment before the subject's perceiving and the second one is the information perceived and understood by the subject. The first one can be termed the object information and the second one the perceived information. The latter is perceived by the subject from the former. The object information is just the object's "state of the object and the pattern with which the state varyies". No meaning and no utility at the stage. The perceived information is the information, perceive by the subject from the object information. So, it should have the form component of the object (syntactic information), the meaning component of the object (semantic information), and the utility component of the object with respect to the subject's goal (pragmatic information). Only at this stage, the "meaning" comes out. What is new, we discovered that the meaning (semantic information) is the 'function' of the union of the syntactic information and the pragmatic information. This can be understood as the definition of the meaning/semantic information and the relation among them. In othr words, "meaning (semantic information)" cannot be understood arbitrarily. Comments are welcome. -- Prof. Y. X. Zhong （钟义信） Center for Intelligence Science Research University of Posts & Telecommunications Beijing 100876, China ----- 回复邮件 ----- 发信人:Lars-Göran Johansson<lars-goran.johans...@filosofi.uu.se><mailto:lars-goran.johans...@filosofi.uu.se> 收信人:foundationsofinformationscienceinformationscience <fis@listas.unizar.es><mailto:fis@listas.unizar.es> 时间:2017年10月05日 16时45分39秒 主题:Re: [Fis] Fwd: Re[2]: Heretic Dear all It seems to me that the heat in the debate about the definition of the concept of Information is fuelled by deep metaphysical feelings: different people have different views about what is REALLY Information. Metaphysical debates can never be resolved. May I suggest that we agree on this: there are several different concepts, such as Shannon Information, Semantic Information, etc.. Each Information concept has its own distinct definition and each one may use whichever he/she finds useful. Whether any of these concepts refers to any real thing, INFORMATION, cannot be determined by any empirical research. The reason is that empirical research can sometimes decide the truth of a sentence, but never whether the predicate in that sentence refers to anything. Suppose we have found, empirically, that a sentence of the form ’ X is information’ where ’information’ has a clear definition. (Chose anyone you like.) The truth of this sentence entails that the object referred to by ’X’ must exist; this is a truth condition for any declarative sentence. But it does not follow that the predicate ’Information' refers to something. It suffice that the object X belongs to the extension of the predicate. This is the nominalist position. Since 1000 years the core debate in metaphysics has been whether there are universals, i.e., properties and relations. The debate aboutInformation is a debate about the existence of a property. I am an empiricist and nominalist, accepting Occam’s razor: one should not assume more entities than necessary. And assuming that Information is a property, an entithy, is not necessary. We can proceed with scientific research, using any information concept we think useful, without assuming it refers to anything. Metaphysical issues can safely be put to rest. Lars-Göran Johansson -- ------------------------------------------------- Pedro C. Marijuán Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA) Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta 0 50009 Zaragoza, Spain Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818) pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es<mailto:pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es>http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/ -------------------------------------------------
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