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III. Ecosmos: A Fertile, Habitable, Solar-Bioplanet LifescapeC. The Information Computation Turn Floridi, Luciano. The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. In this third work of his Information tetralogy after Philosophy (2013) and Ethics (2015), the Oxford University scholar (search) presses a constructivist view whence human beings, lately immersed in a global sensorium, seem made and meant to take up future material and organic cocreation. The informed content and consent of our cumulative knowledge store (library of cosmos) can be a resource for such intentional imaginations. (Floridi is also editor of the Springer journal Philosophy and Technology, whose June 2019 Homo faber issue (32/2) explores the subject.) What accrues is a lively naturalism with a computational source that advises the more we know and share, the more we can altogether achieve a better future. Thanks to Alan Turing, the Baconian-Galilean project of grasping and manipulating the alphabet of the universe has begun to find its fulfillment in the computational and informational revolution, which is affecting so profoundly our knowledge of reality and how we conceptualize it and ourselves within it. From this perspective, the philosophy of information can be presented as the study of the informational activities that make possible the construction, conceptualization and finally the moral stewardship of reality, both natural and artificial, both physical and anthropological. The philosophy of information enables humanity to give meaning to and make sense of the world and construct it responsibly. (213) Floridi, Luciano. The Philosophy of Information. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. The University of Hertfordshire Unesco Chair in Information and Computer Ethics continues his erudite advocacy of this “fourth revolution,” namely Alan Turing after Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud, to appreciate how our lives, now of worldwide extant, and the natural cosmos, are much more than material, they are primarily semantic and communicative. Check the author’s web page for more contributions. Table of Contents: 1: What is the Philosophy of Information? 2: Open Problems in the Philosophy of Information 3: The Method of Levels of Abstraction 4: Semantic Information and the Veridicality Thesis 5: Outline of a Theory of Strongly Semantic Information 6: The Symbol Grounding Problem 7: Action-Based Semantics 8: Semantic Information and the Correctness Theory of Truth 9: The Logical Unsolvability of the Gettier Problem 10: The Logic of Being Informed 11: Understanding Epistemic Relevance 12: Semantic Information and the Network Theory of Account 13: Consciousness, Agents and the Knowledge Game 14: Against Digital Ontology 15: A Defence of Informational Structural Realism. Floridi, Luciano, ed. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Information. London: Routledge, 2016. The Oxford University professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information is the main advocate of this conceptual movement. Here he gathers a luminous collection across four parts: Basic Ideas, Quantitative and Formal Aspects, Natural and Physical Aspects, and Human and Semantic Aspects. Chapters consider computations, mathematics, probability, algorithms, logic, processing, AI, data, quantum, teleology, communication, and a lot more. We especially note Information Metaphysics: The Nature of Reality by Terrell Ward Bynum (search).
Gershenson, Carlos.
The World as Evolving Information.
Arxiv:0704.0304v3.
The author is presently a postdoctoral fellow at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the New England Complex Systems Institute. I find this August 2007 paper to be a concise review of an innately semiotic cosmic and earthly milieu, with a sense of what deep revisions that would imply. In such regard, five ’laws’ are proposed of: information transformation, propagation, requisite complexity, criticality, and organization. This paper discusses the benefits of describing the world as information, especially in the study of the evolution of life and cognition. Traditional studies encounter problems because it is difficult to describe life and cognition in terms of matter and energy, since their laws are valid only at the physical scale. However, if matter and energy, as well as life and cognition, are described in terms of information, evolution can be described consistently as information becoming more complex. (Abstract) Ghavasieh, Arsham and Manilo De Domenico. Statistical Physics of Network Structure and Information Dynamics. Journal of Physics: Complexity. February, 2022. University of Trento and Padua theorists consider a deeper, physical basis for network topologies, and their active informative content. In regard, they note how ubiquitous these phenomena are being found across every scale and instance. See also Statistical Physics of Complex Information Dynamics by the authors at arXiv:2010.04014. Over the past decade, network science has well advanced the analysis of natural and social systems from quantum to deep learning phases. Specifically it allows one to define information-theoretic tools for use with a grounded physical basis in terms of a statistical field theory of computational dynamics. We discuss the some salient theoretical features of this framework and selected applications to protein–protein interaction networks, neuronal systems, social and transportation networks, as well as quantum network science and machine learning. (Abstract excerpt)
Gleick, James.
The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood.
New York: Pantheon,
2011.
In 1987 Chaos: Making a New Science by this science journalist told so well the cast of players and approaches beginning to engage nature’s complexities that the endeavor rose into public awareness. A generation later, in the age of Google, his second opus seeks to identify, chronicle, and define this title property as the quintessence of universe and human. The work begs a long review, for it is a capsule of our situation. As a starter, the text struggles with a mix of metaphors. Jorge Borges’ infinite library with all knowledge but no catalog is apt, so is John Archibald Wheeler’s self-realizing, ‘it from bit,’ cosmos. But does raw randomness rule per Richard Feynman, Jacques Monod, and Gregory Chaitin, or a textual reality that “computes its destiny” per Alan Turing? Is a “program” really running universe and us with its own content and intention? But a magnificent read, leading to these further ruminations. Goonatilake, Susantha. The Evolution of Information. London: Pinter, 1991. Innovative conjectures and ideas on the operation of informative codes in genetic, neural, and cultural settings within a self-organizing universe. The central thesis in this book has been that several phenomena covering a wide variety of disciplinary fields can be scientifically discussed by examining their information flow lines. (167) Goyal, Philip. Information Physics – Towards a New Conception of Physical Reality. Information. 3/4, 2012. In this online paper, the SUNY Albany theorist summarizes the history and waxing status of this new formulation of quantum phenomena. Again taking John Archibald Wheeler as prescient exemplar (see quotes below), a major revision of cosmology is merited that includes, indeed requires, sentient observation by emergent aware entities for its full manifestation. By these lights, the classic, mechanical model of “matter moving in space by universal laws of motion” can be surpassed by the novel inclusion of the knowing, self-recognizing personages. The concept of information plays a fundamental role in our everyday experience, but is conspicuously absent in framework of classical physics. Over the last century, quantum theory and a series of other developments in physics and related subjects have brought the concept of information and the interface between an agent and the physical world into increasing prominence. As a result, over the last few decades, there has arisen a growing belief amongst many physicists that the concept of information may have a critical role to play in our understanding of the workings of the physical world, both in more deeply understanding existing physical theories and in formulating of new theories. In this paper, I describe the origin of the informational view of physics, illustrate some of the work inspired by this view, and give some indication of its implications for the development of a new conception of physical reality. (Abstract) Haefner, Klaus, ed. Evolution of Information Processing Systems. New York: Springer, 1992. A good technical survey of the information perspective. Haefner’s introduction presents the basic concepts of a hierarchy of information processing at physical, genetic, neural, and social levels. Hao, B.-L., et al. Fractals Related to Long DNA Sequences and Complete Genomes. Chaos, Solitons and Fractals. 11/6, 2000. A self-similar geometry distinguishes molecular genetic networks, which is then seen as a reflection of the underlying structure of nature. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. In a work on the transformative dynamics of cyberspace, a humanities professor perceives an active, formative information at the root of living systems. Insights abound: bodies are like books; our world is becoming virtual as informational patterns increasingly take over materiality. Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother was a Computer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. For past centuries, an era’s definitive machine, such as steam engine or telephone, became the image of natural reality. Hayles, a Duke University “postmodern literature critic” is well regarded for showing how complex system themes now pervade the arts - check Amazon for her Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (1991) and How We Became Posthuman (1999). In this work, as the quotes note, she entertains the iconic computer model that has taken over our age and lives. Early chapters specify a “computational” universe, from Stephen Wolfram, Edward Fredkin to Harold Morowitz whose The Emergence of Everything (2002) views an ascendant evolution due to “interactions between components” which self-organize into a multilevel sequence. But per third quote, may one gain a deep insight that genetic phenomena is a complementarity of digital and analog, DNA and AND? Later chapters take on writers such as Neal Stephenson, Shelley Jackson and Stanislaw Lem who try to express reality as some sort of dynamic simulation. However might imaginations finally reach and read “Methinks it is a grand cosmos to child genesis?” This view of materiality goes hand and hand with what I call the Computational Universe, that is, the claim that the universe is generated through computational processes running on a vast computational mechanism underlying all of physical reality. (3) In this context, “My mother was a computer” can be understood as alluding to the displacement of Mother Nature by the Universal Computer. Just as Mother Nature was seen in past centuries as the source of both human behavior and physical reality, so now the Universal Computer is envisioned as the Motherboard of us all. (3)
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