Re: information

Dear Mark Burgin,

>With a great interest I have read the Trialogue "Is a unified theory of
information feasible?" Your lemma is especially interesting to me because
I also research these problems...>

this is fine, thanks. I will take a look at
your paper. I believe, indeed, that we can
understand information as a second order
category (not as quality of things, but a
quality we (!) adscribe to relationships between
things) in the sense of *selection* that takes
place when systems interact and choose
from what is being offered (Luhmann). In this sense the
classical concept of 'cause' (in a deterministic
sense) is a special *effect* of *informational
causation* in the sense of *to give rise to*. This is
evident in the case of the *interpretation* of
a text (with different possibilities of understanding
its meaning) but it seems to be the case also
in non-human levels of reality that were supposed
(since modernity) to be only (!) related within
a deterministic (clockwork-like) manner. This is
what Hofkirchner and Fleissner call *actio non
est reactio*.
Birger Hjoerland (a Danish colleague) and myself
suggest this view in a state-of-the-art
"The Concept of Information" that will be published
this year in the Annual Review of Information Science
and Technology (ARIST).
We should not forget that the *advancement
of science* is sometimes due to the application of
metaphors i.e. of similar concepts from other fields,
using sometimes the same token. In this sense I
advocate for a network of *familiy ressemblances* with regard
to the uses of the information concept in different
areas. This may sometimes not be necessary or useful
(if we think, for instance, about concepts such as
*mass*, *work*, *energy* etc.), but the plasticity of
language allows us to make differences as well as to
surpass them, when we think this may open new insights.

kind regards

Rafael
Received on Sat Jun 15 13:59:08 2002