On the Nature of Information: the Physicosemantic Approach

The information as a scientific category is a primary notion which can not be defined. The information is not a material metric but is an intellectual one, because it can arise only as a result of intellectual activity. In practice the information can be found as data, algorithms and goal-vectors. The information has five levels: statistics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and apobetics. The information is a way to depict existing things, and so it can substitute them. Hence, any information, which is stored on Earth, can be viewed as the global model of the real world. Considering the properties of information we can solve one of the basic question of philosophy: "What was first: the intellection or the material?". The answer of informatics for this basic question is that the primary one is the intellection.

Proceedings, 2017

For an universal and scale-invariant definition of information the idea of a "smallest" information is discussed. Elementary information is defined. For the utilization of this approach the question of the further emergent development of elementary information is analyzed, a scheme for scale dependent emergence processes of information is suggested.

Creating Information System Ecology

In the chapter, a proposition of so-called infological interpretation of information is presented. The concept was formulated by Bo Sundgren (1973) in his publication devoted to data bases. Sundgren developed a consistent theory of a model of data base based on the concept of message as a specific set of data. The model inspires not only a new interpretation of information but also is a good base for manifold analysis of the concept. In the chapter, the following basic concepts are disused: properties of information, diversity of information, and information space.

Annual review of information science …, 2003

The most fundamental question in the philosophy of information "What is information?" has not received yet a definite answer free from commonly recognized deficiencies. In my earlier work I have proposed a definition of information as an identification of the variety. The definition is based on the concept of the one-many relation, a philosophical theme as old as philosophy itself. The rich tradition of the theme established through the centuries of philosophical discourse is in a clear contrast to the common sense concepts such as "uncertainty" usually utilized in attempts to set foundations for the concept of information. An identification of the variety can have two basic forms of a selection of one out many in the variety, or of the structure uniting the variety (many) into one. The distinction of the forms of identification leads to the distinction between the selective and structural information. However, since every occurrence of one type of information is always accompanied by the other, selective and structural information can be considered just different manifestations of the uniform concept of information. The selective information can be easily identified with the concept of information in its usual understanding. The structural manifestation of information has been considered usually in the context of integration of information. In the present paper the analysis of the concept of information based on the one-many relation is being carried out in the three perspectives. First, the philosophical aspects of information are considered. Then, the concept of information is being identified in a selection of very different domains. For instance, Hutcheson's concept of beauty dominating classical aesthetics since 18 th century, understood as "unity in variety," provides an example of an idea very close to structural information. Integration of the neuronal activity in the brain considered as a basis for consciousness by Edelman and his collaborators can be also viewed as an example of structural information in a different domain. Finally, an attempt is being made to identify a mathematical formalism which reflects the distinction of the selective and structural information. of the numerous former attempts to define the meaning of this uniform concept of information. In particular, I cannot accept the two most popular formulations of the definition of information as a "resolution, reduction of uncertainty" or as a "difference which makes a difference" [3], as their logical status and explanatory value are not much different from the expressions of desperation in dozens of other attempts to grasp the meaning of information such as "We conclude that we are not able to say confidently of anything that it could not be information" [4], or "Information is anything that we can count or use as information" .

Foundations of Science, 2004

The main aim of this work is to contribute to the elucidation of the concept of information by comparing three different views about this matter: the view of Fred Dretske's semantic theory of information, the perspective adopted by Peter Kosso in his interaction-information account of scientific observation, and the syntactic approach of Thomas Cover and Joy Thomas. We will see that these views involve very different concepts of information, each one useful in its own field of application. This comparison will allow us to argue in favor of a terminological 'cleansing': it is necessary to make a terminological distinction among the different concepts of information, in order to avoid conceptual confusions when the word 'information' is used to elucidate related concepts as knowledge, observation or entropy.

In this first part of the paper, the category of meaning is traced starting from the origin of the Universe itself as well as its very grounding in pre-geometry (the second part deals with an appropriate bottom-up approach). In contrast to many former approaches in the theories of information and also in biosemiotics, we will show that the forms of meaning emerge simultaneously (alongside) with information and energy. Hence, information can be visualized as being always meaningful (in a sense to be explicated) rather than visualizing meaning as a later specification of information within social systems only. This perspective taken has two immediate consequences: (1) We follow the GDI as defined by Floridi, though we modify it somehow as to the aspect of truthfulness. (2) We can conceptually solve Capurro's trilemma. Hence, what we actually do is to follow the strict (i.e., optimistic) line of UTI in the sense of Hofkirchner's. While doing this, we treat energy and information as two different categorial aspects of one and the same underlying primordial structure. We thus demonstrate the presently developing convergence of physics, biology, and computer science (as well as the various theories of information) in some detail and draft out a line of argument eventually leading up to the further unification of UTI and biosemiotics.

Information Systems Frontiers, 2001

The term ‘Information’ is widely used in the rhetoric of the Information Society, a rhetoric which some critics have judged to be empty, at least in part because of the overextension and inconsistent use of this word. We review the emergence of the concept of Information, identify a number of dimensions of similarity and difference in the way that the

Synthese, 2010

In “General Information in Relevant Logic” (Synthese 167, 2009), the semantics for relevant logic is interpreted in terms of objective information. Objective information is potential data that is available in an environment. This paper explores the notion of objective information further. The concept of availability in an environment is developed and used as a foundation for the semantics, in particular, as a basis for the understanding of the information that is expressed by relevant implication. It is also used to understand the nature of misinformation. A form of relevant logic—called “LOI” for “logic of objective information”—is presented and the relationship between the justification of its proof theory and the semantics is discussed. This relationship is rather reciprocal. Intuitive features of the logic are used to interpret and justify aspects of the model theory and intuitive aspects of the model theory are used to interpret and justify features of the logic. Information conditions are presented for the connectives and the way that they fit into the theory of information is discussed.