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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Courier New"">Dear Mark<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Courier New""><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align:justify;line-height:150%"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:150%;font-family:"Courier New"">Thanks for your commentaries. Our use of the term “foundational” is more philosophical than practical. You are right;
the term contradicts in some sense our intentions which are “very” practical. (This is a term which we could leave behind without hesitation.) In fact, we have no intentions in “instituting” a new concept of “information”. Our work is “foundational” only in
one aspect, and that is in searching for methods to measure the informational value of collective acts in everyday life. We found that it was necessary to classify human acts in such a way that their informational value could be “operative” (useful in practical
tasks); we did that, grouping the acts in types depending on their complexity. We found that these acts could also be distinguished in relation to their consequences on the everyday world. We noticed that the movement from the very complex acts to the simplest
acts follows a reduction of the surrounding world and that the human body is the natural reference in the understanding of this reduction. We knew that we could express informational value in relation to probabilities and found in the von Mises/Popper frequency
series a possible and easy solution (an accessible mathematics). We insist; we have been working only with practical problems and we have not been thinking so much of which concept of information we are using;
</span><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:150%;font-family:"Courier New"">we believe that cybernetics does not address the practical problems we confront</span><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:150%;font-family:"Courier New"">. However, we are
sure that if we succeed, some cybernetic theorem will explain our success. The question is that the state of knowledge we have today is insufficient to understand the simplest informational problems in our surrounding world. Informational theory and cybernetics
have been developed in the world of Physics; instead, we try to develop solutions that work in everyday life. If you understand as “variety” the measure of the “states of a system”, the series of von Mises/Popper could be our kind of variety, but we are not
sure. You are certain, our “acts” are neither “actions” nor “events”, but they are not the hybrids of Latour either. Our acts are phenomenological; they are intended to be congruent with concepts as “work”, “money”, “culture”, “thing”, “market”, and the like.
The concept “informational value” for example, is very close to the concept of “information” without meaning exact the same.
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">Fernando Flores PhD<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">Associate Professor<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">History of Ideas and Sciences<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="SV" style="font-size:10.0pt;color:black">Lund University<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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