Re: OPENING SESSION

(Below a mess. from Javorszky. There have been bugs in the list; I am
trying to reintroduce the rejected messages --Pedro)
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Dear colleagues,

Ted's overall comments have provoked me the following reflection:

We seem to be working collectively on a puzzle, namely what is information?
We experience it as a specific carrier of tension. In general, when we are
caught into a communication process, the tension generated by any news is
solved as we understand that what has been in a deviation to our
expectation. But what we are now trying to understand is precisely the
nature of what we experience as 'news'.

There is a shift in perception as one experiences the lack of excitement
while understanding something. A connex I understand and have understood
long ago does not have any thrill any more. The absence of thrill is more
marked if I have had great expectations. But the two questions have nothing
in common: how much am I no more surprised (to which extent am I blasé) and
how practical is that which does no more surprise me. I may very well know
the function of a compass and be no more surprised that it turns always
towards North, and still I may find it extremely practical.

The same holds true about a rational access to Information and Life in
general. Once I have figured out how the two aspects are interlocked, then
two things happen: a) the fascinating puzzle is neither a puzzle any more
nor fascinating any more; b) I can use this insight for a lot of practical
purposes.

So it shouldn't come as much of a surprise were we to discover that a
successful formalization of information be almost useless from a practical
point of view, yet equally profound from the standpoint of setting the
foundations for a general theory of modelling relations.

I would be very happy if FIS discussions could contribute to grasp in a
rational way our concepts about systems that change in time and show a nice
interaction between cross-sectional and longitudinal ways of containing
information. Let me propose for the New Year that we achieve ourselves a
great experience of dis-illusionment.

best regards

Karl
Received on Wed Dec 18 10:30:00 2002