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

Mark Johnson johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com
Wed Jul 29 00:11:08 CEST 2015 

Dear Drs Flores and de-Marcos


I very much enjoyed reading this paper: there is a lot to reflect on and I
need to spend more time with it, but I have some immediate questions which
I hope you can address.



   1.

   The first concerns the concept of the ‘foundations’ in your title.
   Having lurked on this list for some time, I see talk about foundations
   forming the bulk of the discussions. Foundations can frame narratives or
   explanations which can generate new imaginative possibilities and reveal
   new ways of exploring those possibilities in nature: perhaps what Gordon
   Pask meant when he called cybernetics the “art and science of manipulating
   defensible metaphors”. But foundations can also be blinding and clever
   people can become overly-attached to them (Pask’s obsession with
   conversation may be a good example!). What does it mean to you to say
   information is a ‘foundation’ for acts?
   2.

   Your approach to information seems very practical. You make the appeal
   to “information” to justify an approach to ‘counting’ information in acts
   (for example, counting information in technological acts, modernisation,
   etc). In cybernetic terms this seems to me like counting ‘variety’ (I was
   thinking of Beer’s diagram of variety attenuation in the insurance firm –
   Heart of Enterprise, p521). Shannon’s information theory also provides a
   way of counting – Beer uses his equation in the same case on the previous
   page – and maybe Shannon’s counting of “surprises” also says something
   about Beer’s variety counting too. To see counting surprises as not that
   different from counting ‘variety’ is also to see the relationship between
   Shannon’s information and Ashby’s homeostat as clearly complementary. I was
   left wandering if your idea of information conservation wasn’t a disguised
   re-statement of Ashby’s law? How is your concept of information distinct
   from variety?
   3.

   Leading on from both these questions is a further question concerning
   the acts of the scientist. These are not acts like those instrumental acts
   studied in scientific management. They are much messier, appearing to
   scholars like Latour as 'entanglements': Karen Barad puts the radical case
   that in scientific practice “matter and meaning are not separable” (see her
   "Meeting the Universe Halfway"). I was wondering if you had thought about
   accounting for your own scientific acts in developing this work within your
   informational scheme? Does your concept of information as a foundation for
   acts help us to understand science?


I hope these questions make sense, but many thanks for a very stimulating
and important paper.

Mark

On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 1:33 PM, Pedro C. Marijuan <
pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es> wrote:

>
> * 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/
> <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.
>
> --
> -------------------------------------------------
> 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.eshttp://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
> -------------------------------------------------
>
>
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>


-- 
Dr. Mark William Johnson

Phone: 07786 064505
Email: johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com
Blog: http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com
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