Re: social and/or general information?

Dear Wolfgang and colleagues,

The sentence below in your opening text (thanks for the stimulating
comments) is quite intriguing:

>in my view, the quest for a unified theory of information is inextricably
>linked to the reflection of complex problems as they have been arising in
>the course of human evolution.

On the one side I strongly concur with your point. In some old messages and
in an intro to FIS papers I vaguely remember having written about the
historical succession of 'informational' inventions that have made possible
the emergence and development of complex societies: numbers, writing,
money, books, clocks, printing press, accounting practices, electricity,
radio, etc., culminating in computers of course (and including the social
practice of 'arts' almost everywhere: information is almost the only
'matter' of art). These informational inventions were motivated by social
needs, or complex social problems. As the saying more or less goes:
'necessity, the mother of all inventions'. (A very lateral comment is that
this historic 'informationalism' seemingly runs against the historical
materialism so dear to 19th and 20th century thinkers.)

But, on the other side, when we jump to information processes in the social
sphere, we find that all our inconsistencies, all our hidden weaknesses and
paradoxes surrounding information conceptualizations are somehow
incorporated and reflected there. So, my point is that at the time being we
cannot make any serious 'socioinformation theorization'. Apart from too
general and useless characterizations, all we can do, in my opinion, is to
take some concrete area --firms and markets for instance-- and make some
info speculations relating the observable practices and dynamics to other
informational dynamics in cells and nervous systems --power laws,
partitions, etc. And that's all, unfortunately. Perhaps, remembering the
VEMs hypothesis (Bob Artiguiani in fis 98), we can also make interesting
inroads on the moral side of human evolution, contemplating it as another
info potential area that (in my interpretation) relates to enlarged
biological fitness at the scale of social groups...

So, my contention is that we cannot jump easily to connect our previous
discussions with social matters. Or conversely, some fisers prefer to keep
themselves just arguing from social and political perspectives without
involvement in the philosophical and natural science info problems. Maybe a
mature info science would be able to provide meaningful anticipations on
social, cultural, political, and environmental concerns within a coherent
perspective from the two sides. But right now within FIS we may be
suffering pretty much the same gap than the infamous historical breach
between natural and social science camps... Am I too wrong?

all the best

Pedro
  
Received on Fri Nov 15 14:23:58 2002