The question of "a Unified Theory of Information" is addressed from the
logical position of many-valued ontologies. Information is described as an
operational factor which forms a trans-contextural bridge between disjunct
ontological systems (or monocontextures).
This
contribution will amplify on Pedro Marijuan's statement about information and
society (FIS 1996, p. 90). He says: "It can be argued that the existence of
societies is dependent on the generation, exchange, and processing of
meaningful information amongst their constituent members."
It can also be argued that almost everything in this universe (except maybe
industrially extracted and refined material substances) can be viewed as
society of some kind, as Whitehead does (Whitehead 1934, p. 33): "There is the
animal life with its central direction of a society of cells, there is the
vegetable life with its organized republic of cells, there is the cell life
with its organized republic of molecules, there is the large-scale inorganic
society of molecules with its passive acceptance of necessities derived from
spatial relations, there is the inframolecular activity which has lost all
trace of the passivity of inorganic Nature on a larger scale."
Society is in this context defined as a generic term for a "relation
and transaction system between acting entities (or agents)". A
transaction is defined as a specific kind of process between
agents involved in a energy/matter exchange. Transactions can only occur along
the path of a relation. This definition makes society functionally
equivalent to a thermodynamically open system of dissipative flow, regardless
of whether the constituent members are human, organic, or purely physical, like
for example a turbulent flow in a hurricane. "Biological systems are only more
complicated because of their relative stability, achieved through genetic
information - we are especially stable dissipative structures". (Salthe 1992,
p. 34, 38). Barham (FIS 1996, p. 238) notes another vital difference: "One of
the chief properties distinguishing biological systems from inorganic ones is
their limited autonomy from local energy potentials... by actively seeking out
more favorable conditions."
Now the argument will be that a wider notion of the concept of information as
discussed in many varieties on the FIS conferences (a Unified Theory of
Information) needs an enlargement of the logical base of our enquiry. It will
be argued that societal information is logically dependent on the positioning
of society in the Peircean ontological category of thirdness. Because of
stringent space limitations, the necessary philosophical discussions have to be
drastically reduced to a few paragraphs. Marijuan notes (1996-1): "the
archetypal notion of state and of separated (external) dynamical laws, so
incardinated [?entrenched? A.G.] in natural science". Elsewhere he stresses
"the fluid nature of life" (Marijuan 1996-2), with Whitehead and his philosophy
of process as main contemporary philosophical proponent of the issue. Whitehead
(1957), p. 27: "... the actual world is a process, and ... the process is the
becoming of actual entities." These issues touch the very foundations of
western thinking since Parmenides set the cornerstone 2500 years ago with:
"esti gar einai" - "indeed, being is" (Parmenides, fragment B6). Whitehead had
to make it explicit: "the philosophy of organism is apt to emphasize just those
elements in the writings of these masters which subsequent systematizers have
put aside" (Whitehead 1957, p. v). In the pre-socratic philosopher wars, the
schools of Parmenides (most notably Zeno with his paradoxes that refuted motion
categorically) and of Heraklit (panta rhei) battled the issue out and Plato
shoved the heavy lid over the issue in favor of Parmenides with his "final
solution" of the "eternal, unchangeable idea". This is where western thinking
has rested more or less firmly ever since. Whitehead
accentuates: "The safest general characterization of western philosophical
tradition is that it consists of a sequence of footnotes to Plat
o"
(Whitehead 195
7,
p. 53).
In a different work (Goppold, 1997-1), it is argued that this development was
greatly influenced, if not decided, by the tradeoffs of the technology of
alphabetic writing which became the universal cultural memory system of western
civilization. (See also Kerckhove 1988). To use Marijuan's diction, the
tradeoffs of the "infostructures" and "infrastructures" (Marijuan, 1996-1) of
alphabetic writing have forced humanity to specific modes of mental functioning
to the exclusion of others. Since then, the issue of being, and its
philosophical treatment, ontology, has become a matter of state.
In a perspective of cultural evolution this may seem necessary when considered
under the processing necessities of the dominant cultural memory system, which
was static. Only today, with computerized multi-media, have fully dynamic
notation systems reached technological feasibility (Goppold, 1997-2). A
sideways glance to another part of the planet shows us that at the same time,
when the Greeks laid down the ontology of the western world, an ontology of
process and relation sprung into existence with the "pratitya samutpada"
(paticca-samuppada in Pali) as it was laid down in the teachings of the Buddha
(Nyanatiloka, Ratnagotravibhaga, Prajnopayaviniscayasiddhi). With his concept
of the "axial age", Jaspers had already marked a decisive focus epoch in the
mainstream developments of the major civilization centers of humanity at the
time between 600 B.C. and 300 B.C. (Jaspers, 1955, p. 58). His view may today
be reformulated as an early view of an essential bifurcation in the planetary
cultural evolution (Abraham 1994, p. 168-175, 208-220).
Peirce
has described the ontological categories of Firstness, Secondness, and
Thirdness as "a table of conceptions drawn from the logical analysis of thought
and regarded as applicable to being". (Peirce, CP 1.301-1.353). An essential
characteristic of category is its non-conversibility (with other categories),
or as it will be called further down, its mono-contexturality. The examples of
entity, process, and relation, give a primary triadic
categorization of being (i.e. a many-valued ontology), even though western
philosophy would refrain from admitting at all that relation and process can be
ontological categories. As the discussions between the Parmenides and Heraklit
schools show, anything in the world can be perceived either as state (entity)
or in flow (process), and it was noted in the beginning (and by the Buddhist
philosophy), that the world can also be perceived as a system of relations,
thus showing that non-entity oriented systems of ontology are entirely
feasible, and whole civilizations have been built on these foundations. The
design of the holon as given by Ian Smuts and Arthur Koestler
corresponds closely to the positioning of entity as ontological
category. The categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness appear under a
different naming as popular philosophical themes throughout the millennia. The
diagram given here is adapted from Popper and Eccles (1977), and Penrose
(1994). The first ontological place (Firstness) is SUB. The second (Secondness)
is OBJ. The third (Thirdness) is SEM. This can most closely be related to the
category of relation, OBJ is in the modern physical view a system of
process, and the entity or holon category remains for SUB.
(Even if it doesn't fit comfortably at this point, the issue of subjectivity
proves an obstacle for application in the non-human domain).
Wittgenstein
said in aphorism 1. of his famous Tractatus: "Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall
ist." (The world is everything that is the case). To decide what is the case is
the task of logics. In a monocontextural system, the Aristotelian logics with
their binary values of "yes" and "no" and the "tertium non datur" are entirely
sufficient. To make the world fit this logical model, it had to be reduced to a
monocontexture. Consequently most of the heat of the philosophical debate of
the last 2500 years has gone into trying to decide which ontological center is
"the real one-and-only reality". Mainly this has been a debate between two
sides only: idealism and objectivism.
As the present argument goes, the concept of information may turn out to force
us out of this monocontextural view. To use Marijuan's diction: the
"infostructures" and "infrastructures" (Marijuan, 1996-1) belong to different
ontological domains. In certain applications in the scientific and technical
world of OBJ, our requirements can be adequately treated with the dualistic
formalisms of binary Boolean logics of this domain. But information has also an
essentially extra-physical aspect. (This is a more neutral wording than the
term "meta-physical" whose bad associations for scientific discourses result
from the subjectivistic problematic of idealism which we have no space to
discuss here). Norbert Wiener had hinted at this when he said: "Information is
neither matter nor energy". Now the physical universe is exactly made up of
matter and energy and these are convertible into each other by Einstein's
formula e=mc2. Their convertibility is equivalent to their belonging
to the same contexture in Günther's sense. (Günther 1979, 283-306).
The thermodynamic treatment of information by Brillouin (1962) gives the
physical aspect of information. (See also Barham, FIS 1996, p. 235-236). There
is a thermodynamic threshold required over random noise which is needed for any
receiving system to discern an input as signal. The extra-physical component is
the sign as given by Peirce or Marijuan's "catastrophe of meaning" (Marijuan,
1996-2). Inherently there is no need for any receiving system to treat any
input as a sign unless it is cued to do so. In the machine case, this is
effected by built-in or programmed threshold values. (The Telos of the machine,
see Polanyi 1985, p. 40-42, also Barham, FIS 1996, p. 236-237). The technical
signal is a very special case of sign being a selection from an available range
of physical parameters which have the power of activating internal processes of
a mechanism via these threshold values. The vexing and tempting property of
information is its ontological trans-contexturality, bridging an essential
non-convertibility. Once the viewpoint of trans-contexturality is accepted, it
is clear that this cannot be proved within a monocontextural logical system as
present science is. So information has become "the phlogiston of our time"
(Marijuan, FIS '96). The infinite regress of the interpretant given by Peirce
concerning the processing of the sign (CP 1.340) can only be interpreted as
admission of this logical impossibility of proof. (See Barham, a.a.o.). Figge
(1994) has given a reverse demonstration by stating that in the purely physical
universe, the only means of exchange of a system with its environment are
matter and energy. The brute fact that the system "actively selects" a certain
matter/energy configuration as a sign, and reacts upon it, indicates that there
must be something going on which cannot be entirely explained within this frame
of reference, or as we call it here, in the monocontexture of the physical
world OBJ.
The salient question of introducing the issue of polycontexturality into the
discussion of information is, by Occam's razor: "entia non sunt multiplicanda
preter necessitatem". What good does it do to add a whole new logical
dimension? First, it allows us to catch up with actual practice. In the social
sciences, certain aspects of society are since a long time being treated
informally as having their own ontological place. W.v. Humboldt attributes to
language the status of energeia, and not of ergon. (Humboldt
1963, p. 418) The philosophical difference between energeia and ergon
is that of act and potence (See also Marijuan, FIS 1996, p. 88). The
interpretative method of hermeneutics (Dilthey) and the derived sociological
and anthropological methods, as well as the radical constructivism of
Watzlawick advocate the social construction of reality. The next question would
be why Gotthard Günther was not able to install his method while he worked
in the 60's at that proverbial germinating nucleus of cybernetics, the
Biological Computers Laboratory in Urbana, that had been founded by McCulloch
and was at the time directed by Heinz v. Foerster. This question can probably
only be answered by those who were present. Perhaps the time was not ripe yet,
and perhaps Gotthard Günther had tried it the wrong way. He had himself
stated (Günther 1979,
p. 184): "Um einen neuen, echten Formalismus an die Stelle eines alten zu
setzen, muß man vorerst ein neues ontologisches Wirklichkeitsbild
besitzen. Die Formalisierung eines solchen Wirklichkeitsbildes gibt dann
automatisch eine neue Logik als sekundäres Derivat. Der umgekehrte Weg ist
nicht möglich." - (translation:) "To put a new, true formalism in place of
an old one, one has to first have a new ontological world model. The
formalization of such a world model results in a new logics as secondary
derivation. The reverse approach is not possible". The present contribution is
aimed to supply that ontological world model.
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1929