Ø Would we risk political persecution if we modified the group's name from "Foundations of Information Science" into "Foundations of the Science of Order"? (Not that I propose such.)
I would no longer participate. But that can be considered as an advantage! > The interplay between order and disorder is what underlies information. What worries me about these rather philosophical discussions is the confusion. In my opinion, order and disorder can be analyzed in terms of information (entropical) processes. One can formulate the cybernetic mechanisms that may lead from uncertainty (entropy) to organization and self-organization. I would formulate this as follows: the uncertainty contained in a probability distribution contains an expected information content. This can also be considered as a variation. From another perspective, this same variation (probability distribution) can be considered as a selection, namely, as the case which was deselected from the possible distributions. In other words, a variation provides observation material with reference to an expectation. The observable variation remains in the res extensa, but the selection on the basis of expectations is res cogitans. Unlike variation, selection is deterministic. Thus, order can be generated by selections operating upon selections. Some selections can be selected for stabilization, and some stabilization can be selected for globalization (meta-stabilization). Thus, one can remain firmly on the Shannon-base of information theory for explaining order and disorder. The in-between step is evolutionary theorizing about variation and selection. When one reverses the reasoning and wishes to explain uncertainty from order, one needs a lot of philosophy in order to obscure the confusion. Best wishes, Loet _____ Loet Leydesdorff Professor, University of Amsterdam Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR) Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam. Tel. +31-20-525 6598; fax: +31-842239111 <mailto:l...@leydesdorff.net> l...@leydesdorff.net ; <http://www.leydesdorff.net/> http://www.leydesdorff.net/ Visiting Professor, ISTIC, <http://www.istic.ac.cn/Eng/brief_en.html> Beijing; Honorary Fellow, SPRU, <http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/> University of Sussex
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