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Robert K. Logan, What Is Information?: Why Is It Relativistic and What Is Its Relationship to Materiality, Meaning and Organization, in https://www.mdpi.com/journal/information 15 January 2012
Etymology, From latin through French: 1386 by Chaucer: “Whanne Melibee hadde herd the grete skiles and resons of Dame Prudence, and hire wise informacions and techynges.”
Not all of the members of the information science community were happy with Shannon’s definition of information. Three years after Shannon proposed his definition of information Donald Mackay [4] at the 8th Macy Conference argued for another approach to understanding the nature of information. The highly influential Macy Conferences on cybernetics, systems theory, information and communications were held from 1946 to 1953 during which Norbert Wiener’s newly minted cybernetic theory and Shannon’s information theory were discussed and debated with a fascinating interdisciplinary team of scholars which also included Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts, Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, Heinz von Foerster, Kurt Lewin and John von Neumann. MacKay argued that he did not see “too close a connection between the notion of information as we use it in communications engineering and what [we] are doing here… the problem here is not so much finding the best encoding of symbols … but, rather, the determination of the semantic question of what to send and to whom to send it.” He suggested that information should be defined as “the change in a receiver’s mind-set, and thus with meaning” and not just the sender’s signal [6]. The notion of information independent of its meaning or context is like looking at a figure isolated from its ground. As the ground changes so too does the meaning of the figure.
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8. Life as Propagating Organization
Stuart Kauffman [15] defined an autonomous agent (or living organism) acting on its own behalf and propagating its organization as an autocatalytic system carrying out at least one thermodynamic work cycle. The relationship of the information found in living organisms to the kind of information treated in Shannon information theory was not clear even though a lot of attention has been given in recent times to the notion of information in biotic systems by those pursuing systems biology and bioinformatics. It was to examine this relationship that a group of us undertook a study to understand the nature and flow of information in biotic systems. This led to an article entitled Propagating Organization: An Enquiry (POE) authored by Kauffman, Logan, Este, Goebel, Hobill and Shmulevich [1] in which we demonstrated that Shannon information could not be used to describe information contained in a biotic system. We also showed that information is not an invariant independent of its frame of reference.
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Instead of Shannon information we defined a new form of information, which we called instructional or biotic information, not with Shannon, but with constraints or boundary conditions. The amount of information will be related to the diversity of constraints and the diversity of processes that they can partially cause to occur. By taking this step, we embed the concept of information in the ongoing processes of the biosphere, for they are causally relevant to that which happens in the unfolding of the biosphere.
We therefore conclude that constraints are information and… information is constraints… We use the term “instructional information” because of the instructional function this information performs and we sometimes call it “biotic information” because this is the domain it acts in, as opposed to human telecommunication or computer information systems where Shannon information operates [1].
10. Information and Its Relationship to Materiality and Meaning
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt—Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Act 1, Scene 2)
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?—TS Eliot
Where is the meaning we have lost in information?—RKL
To drive home the point that information is not an invariant but rather a quantity that is relative to the environment in which it operates we will now examine the relationship of information to materiality and meaning drawing on the work and insights of Katherine Hayles [6]. She points out that although information is used to describe material things and furthermore is instantiated in material things information is not itself material. “Shannon’s theory defines information as a probability function with no dimension, no materiality, and no necessary connection with meaning. It is a pattern not a presence [6]”.
Katherine Hayles is a professor of English at UCLA. See How We Became Posthuman and Ian Grant's Weather Report 8/29/22.
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