Dear FIS colleagues,
Thanks to Igor and Rafael for the further suggestions --I am including the
draft again, incorporating them and correcting a few other absences (e.g,
neurosciences!, mult.partitions, consilience). This sort of "roadmap" for
info science could also include somewhere a reference to those "intangible"
items that are so crucial (meaning, value, fitness, relevance, utility...)
and so densely interrelated within the vertical scheme of information flows.
-------------------------------------------
(after an initial draft by H.C. von Baeyer)
SOME SUGGESTED DESIDERATA FOR A SCIENCE OF INFORMATION
1. Incorporate and integrate parts of existing technical subjects which
currently are scattered among other disciplines:
-- Communication theory.
-- Complexity theory.
-- Probability theory.
-- Automata theory and cellular automata.
-- Networks and graphs.
-- Multidimensional partitions.
-- Semiotics.
-- "Natural Computer Science."
2. Make contact with well structured classical disciplines and recent
explorations such as:
-- Physics ("information physics", "quantum information").
-- Chemistry ("molecular recognition", "chemoinformatics").
-- Biology ("bioinformation", "bioinformatics", "biocomputing").
-- Neurociences ("neuroinformation": origins of NS, action/perception
cycle, consciousness).
-- Economics ("information economy", economic networks).
-- Social Sciences (socioinformation, "information society", sustainable
development).
3. Distil simple guiding principles (called "themata" by Gerald Holton)
such as:
-- Ockam's razor.
-- Data compression.
-- Universality (Turing machine, coding conventions).
-- Second law principles (Law of diminishing information).
-- Bayesian probability.
-- Zeilinger's principle (or alternatives).
4. Advancement of an informational philosophy:
-- Informational causation.
-- Externalism vs. internalism (& agency).
-- Reduction vs. integration (reductionism vs. wholism).
-- Multidisciplinary "consilience".
-- Information ethics.
-- Search for heuristic / predictive value in information science (or build
new bridges among disciplines).
-- Search for terminology unification (creation and maintenance of an
informational-interdisciplinary dictionary of terms which mean the same in
different theoretical fields & disciplinary areas (1 & 2)).
-----------------------------------
best wishes
Pedro
Received on Thu Jul 14 13:34:42 2005
