*
The informational foundation of the act*
*Fernando Flores*
Lund University
fernando.flo...@kultur.lu.se
*Luis de-Marcos*
University of Alcalá
luis.demar...@uah.es
/See the whole text at: http://fis.sciforum.net/resources//
Our introducing paper (35 pages) presents a theory that quantifies the
informational value of human acts. We argue that living is functioning
against entropy and following Erwin Schrödinger we call this tendency
"negentropy". Negentropy is for us the reason behind "order" in social
and cultural life. Further, we understand "order" as the condition that
the world reaches when the informational value of a series of acts is
low. Acting is presented as a set of decisions and choices that create
order and this is the key concept of our understanding of the variation
from simplicity to complexity in human acts. The most important aim of
our theory is to measure non-economic acts trying to understand and
explain their importance for society and culture. In their turn such a
theory will be also important to understand the similarities and
differences between non-economic and economic acts.
We follow the classical concept according to which informational value
is proportional to the unlikelihood of an act. To capture the richness
of the unlikelihood of human acts we use the frequency theory of
probability developed by Ludwig von Mises and Karl Popper. Frequency
theory of probability allows us to describe a variety of acts from the
must most "free" to the least "free" with respect to precedent acts. In
short, we characterize human acts in terms of their degree of freedom
trying to set up a scale of the information and predictability carried
out in human decisions. A taxonomy of acts is also presented,
categorizing acts as destructive, mechanical, ludic or vital, according
to their degree of freedom (complexity). A formulation to estimate the
informational value in individual and collective acts follows. The final
part of the paper presents and discuss the consequences of our theory.
We argue that artifacts embed information and that modernization can be
understood as a one-way process to embed acts of high levels of
complexity in simple devices. However, our theory assumes that the total
amount of information in the social and cultural world is constant and
that Modernity only enables us to redistribute our informational
potential. We also advocate for the development of a new science named
"agnumetry", the science that quantify Modernity, measuring the
obsolescence of an environment (from agnumy the Greek word for "break").
In our study of human acts we found that acting can also be classified
as productive, consumptive and as acts of exchange or economical. The
informational value of acts can be the expression of any or all of these
acting forms. We outline the relation between the informational value of
production and the informational value of consumption (which we call
"operative information"), and conclude that these acts define the
non-economic value. Sometimes, and depending on the social level of
informational value, the acts of exchange emerge defining the
informational value of an item at the market, an informational value
that assumes the shape of "price" justifying the use of money.
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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 X
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
pcmarijuan.i...@aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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