some comments

dear colleagues, dear friends,

some comments on the ongoing session.

pedro in his message from 15th nov was wondering whether the divide between
the two cultures (natural and social sciences) may easily be overcome. he
and me and maybe many of us (like heiner in his mail) feel that this
situation is an expression of still immature science and that a fully
fledged information science should be able to bridge the gap.

my own considerations and the considerations of my vienna group (thanks to
the interventions of godó and christian) which deals with presuppositions
of an as-yet-to-be-developed unified theory of information advocate to take
the concept of self-organisation as background to which the information
concept can be linked. in doing so, a deep unity of social and non-social
systems can be envisaged: both are just different types of self-organising
systems. thus, investigations into social self-organising systems (= social
sciences) and non-social ones (= natural sciences) are not so different as
they appear in the history of science. they have something in common, and
on the basis of this commonality they differ. we have to elaborate a
conjecture of a social theory which hypothesises the differentia specifica
of the social while having in mind the genus proximum: self-organisation.

so i am not as pessimistic and would like to encourage directing research
towards accounts of the generic and the particular in one. this is in line
with christophe who proposes to focus on the evolution underlying the
generation of information. for looking at evolution means to filter out
what is continuous (that is the general) and what is discontinuous (that is
the particular). i think it is the nature of (not only) scientific
endeavour to construe generalisations. therefore we are striving for some
kind of a grand theory (and what john h. suggests when he talks about what
we term "information" - is'nt this too a generalisation, is it?).

pedro introduced the distinction between endo- and exoinformation. this is
certainly an important issue when trying to find out the difference between
natural information-generating systems and social ones (the endo-side - an
engine that generates information transformations (by self-organising
processes?) - being something that links us with the biotic realm).

pedro uses this distinction at the same time to ask whether or not here
lies the ground for problems of present information society which he sees
in the exo-skeleton suffocating the endo-side. yes, there is a trend to
look upon the information processes going on in our societies only from the
technical perspective, that is, from the perspective of objectivated,
materialised exo-things. but isn't it worth trying to put the question
"what for?", to regain control over the means of communication, that is, to
make them instruments for implementing a humane society, for achieving a
sustainable society? that is what elohim seemingly intends to point out.

wolfgang

**43-1-58801-18733
Received on Mon Dec 2 12:05:08 2002