[Fis] Information Foundation of the Act--F.Flores & L.deMarcos

Thu Jul 23 10:06:29 CEST 2015

Dear Fernando and Luis,

Your paper is very rich and very serious, and so I hope you will accept my slightly different perspective and see it as a basis for further foundational work, rather than just criticism. I will first make just two comments here:

1. Matter is potentiality, actuality and form. This is true, but the relationships between the three need to be further specified, since the terms themselves correspond to real physical properties. To come out with only epistemological categories (knowledge and praxis) is too limiting. Real change involves movement from potentiality to actuality (Aristotle) but also actuality to potentiality, often at the same time (Aristotle missed this).

2. Decisions to create informational values can be represented as a series of 0's and 1's. This is also true, but it and your initial examples create a binary framework that seems to refer primarily to quantitative value. This approach is computationally tractable, but might fail  to capture qualitative aspects of 'vital acts'. In fact, you present vital acts in terms of power and competitive (survival) success, modernization as mechanization. In my opinion, informational values include but are not limited to these.   

I look forward very much to comments by you and others on these points.

Best,

Joseph

Joseph E. Brenner, Ph.D.
Les Diablerets, Switzerland
International Society for Information Studies, Vienna, Austria
International Center for the Philosophy of Information, Xi'An, China
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Pedro C. Marijuan 
  To: 'fis' 
  Sent: Wednesday, July 22, 2015 2:33 PM
  Subject: [Fis] Information Foundation of the Act--F.Flores & L.deMarcos

  The informational foundation of the act
  Fernando Flores
  Lund University
  fernando.flores at kultur.lu.se

  Luis de-Marcos
  University of Alcalá
  luis.demarcos at uah.es

  See the whole text at: http://fis.sciforum.net/resources/

  Our introducing paper (35 pages) presents a theory that quantifies the informational value of human acts. We argue that living is functioning against entropy and following Erwin Schrödinger we call this tendency "negentropy". Negentropy is for us the reason behind "order" in social and cultural life. Further, we understand "order" as the condition that the world reaches when the informational value of a series of acts is low. Acting is presented as a set of decisions and choices that create order and this is the key concept of our understanding of the variation from simplicity to complexity in human acts. The most important aim of our theory is to measure non-economic acts trying to understand and explain their importance for society and culture. In their turn such a theory will be also important to understand the similarities and differences between non-economic and economic acts. 
  We follow the classical concept according to which informational value is proportional to the unlikelihood of an act. To capture the richness of the unlikelihood of human acts we use the frequency theory of probability developed by Ludwig von Mises and Karl Popper. Frequency theory of probability allows us to describe a variety of acts from the must most "free" to the least "free" with respect to precedent acts. In short, we characterize human acts in terms of their degree of freedom trying to set up a scale of the information and predictability carried out in human decisions. A taxonomy of acts is also presented, categorizing acts as destructive, mechanical, ludic or vital, according to their degree of freedom (complexity). A formulation to estimate the informational value in individual and collective acts follows. The final part of the paper presents and discuss the consequences of our theory. We argue that artifacts embed information and that modernization can be understood as a one-way process to embed acts of high levels of complexity in simple devices. However, our theory assumes that the total amount of information in the social and cultural world is constant and that Modernity only enables us to redistribute our informational potential. We also advocate for the development of a new science named "agnumetry", the science that quantify Modernity, measuring the obsolescence of an environment (from agnumy the Greek word for "break"). 
  In our study of human acts we found that acting can also be classified as productive, consumptive and as acts of exchange or economical. The informational value of acts can be the expression of any or all of these acting forms. We outline the relation between the informational value of production and the informational value of consumption (which we call "operative information"), and conclude that these acts define the non-economic value. Sometimes, and depending on the social level of informational value, the acts of exchange emerge defining the informational value of an item at the market, an informational value that assumes the shape of "price" justifying the use of money.

-- 
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Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
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