[Fis] Is the concept of 'information' itself merely heuristic?

[Guy A Hoelzer]

Hi All,

I have enjoyed reading the FIS posts over the past couple of weeks and it has raised a very fundamental question for me. There has been lots of discussion here over the years on questions that are at least tangential to my current question, but I’m not sure it has been considered in quite the same form.  Forgive me if I am retracing an old topic.

Some (most? all?) scientific concepts/terms are entirely heuristic; that is, they are practical tools for advancing our understanding of nature without necessarily identifying a real physical property of the universe.  We treat these concepts as if they were real as they (hopefully) help us to make sense of things.  Ultimately, purely heuristic concepts should be revealed as frauds and rejected as anachronisms.  Other scientific concepts/terms are understood to be imperfect representations of real properties of the universe.  There is something real that we are trying to better approximate over time by adjusting the meaning of such a term to match our advancing understanding of reality.

The scientific community is rarely clear about this distinction in general, or regarding which terms are intended to be purely heuristic or targeting reality, and I think this ambiguity plagues our FIS discussions.  I personally prefer to think of ‘information’ as an important aspect of physical reality, so I also prefer to constrain our definitions of ‘information’ in ways that conform to our current theoretical and empirical understanding of nature.  Alternatively, some of our distinguished FIS posters seem to prefer the freedom of defining ‘information’ in what they see as the most useful ways.  I wonder what you think about this distinction within semantics, or if it might facilitate FIS discussions for posters to explicitly identify their perspective on this distinction in their arguments.

Regards,

Guy


Guy Hoelzer, Associate Professor
Department of Biology
University of Nevada Reno

Phone:  775-784-4860
Fax:  775-784-1302
hoelzer at unr.edu