In many years of monitoring FIS, this is the most provocative and useful
statement of concepts I have seen.
Please consider my restatement of these.
Best, Ted
Qualities Characterizing an Approach to a Science of Information
1. Information is a first class agent (distinct from matter/energy) in the laws
which govern the universe.
(Pedro: Information is information, neither matter nor energy.)
2. As a first class agent, information forms essential structures unique to its
nature.
(Pedro: Information is comprehended into structures, patterns, messages, or
flows.)
3. Information is therefore a first class agent in a more complete science,
implying that there are or will be robust means of observation and measurement.
Models employing these means are or will be executable, supporting simulations,
predictions and suitable expansion of theory.
(Pedro: Information can be recognized, can be measured, and can be processed
(either computationally or non-computationally).)
4. A science including information as a first class agent can usefully model
organization among and transformations among matter and energy in phenomenon we
characterize as living systems
(Pedro: Information flows are essential organizers of life's self-production
processes--anticipating, shaping, and mixing up with the accompanying energy
flows.)
5. In particular, a suitably expanded science can express laws governing the
generation and character of systems by other systems. Some of these will be
characterized by scale and dependent nesting.
(Pedro: Communication/information exchanges among adaptive life-cycles underlie
the complexity of biological organizations at all scales.)
6. A complication/advantage of such an expanded science is that science (as a
social phenomenon) conveys insight into and laws about energy and matter
through symbolic language. This same class of symbolic languages is how
information transits, organizes and transforms in living systems.
(Pedro: It is symbolic language what conveys the essential communication
exchanges of the human species--and constitutes the core of its "social nature.”
7. A consequence of the above is that scientific insight of the kind noted here
is driven by the same forces that the insights describe. That is, the
“knowledge instinct” to expand and improve scientific insight is related to the
same forces that organize all information and incidentally, life.
(Pedro: Human information may be systematically converted into efficient
knowledge, by following the "knowledge instinct" and further up by applying
rigorous methodologies.)
8. Therefore, one can apply useful notions from existing workable scientific
conventions to expand the science. For example metaphors of interlinked
ecologies and evolution may be useful.
(Pedro: Human cognitive limitations on knowledge accumulation are partially
overcome via the social organization of “knowledge ecologies.”)
9. Further, since we observe decay, decomposition and transformation in the
world (as included in our phenomenon of focus), we may expect to find a ‘living
science’ to perform the unsettling behavior of ‘creative destruction’ of
paradigms and concepts.
(Pedro: Knowledge circulates and recombines socially, in a continuous
actualization that involves "creative destruction" of fields and disciplines:
the intellectual Ars Magna.)
10. The initial goal of an expanded science is to better understand
organization and systems in 'societies', but because of its dual-reflexive
nature we can anticipate better understanding and engineering of both
individual concept infrastructure and social behavior as governed by the laws
of information.
(Pedro: 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.)
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