In everyday usage, information is knowledge or facts acquired or derived from study, instruction or observation. Information is presumed to be both meaningful and veridical, and to have some appropriate connection to its object. Information might be misleading, but it can never be false. Standard information theory, on the other hand, as developed for communications [1], measurement [2] induction [3; 4] and computation [5; 6], entirely ignores the semantic aspects of information. Thus it might seem to have little relevance to our common notion of information. This is especially true considering the range of applications of information theory found in the literature of a variety of fields. Assuming, however, that the mind works computationally and can get information about things via physical channels, then technical accounts of information strongly restrict any plausible account of the vulgar notion. Some more recent information-oriented approaches to epistemology [7] and semantics [8] go further, though my introduction to the ideas was through Michael Arbib, Michael Scriven and Kenneth Sayre in the profoundly inventive late 60s and early 70s.

In this talk I will look at how the world must be in order for us to have information about it. This will take three major sections: 1) intrinsic information -- there is a unique information in any structure that can be determined using group theory, 2) the physical world (including our minds) must have specific properties in order for us to have information about the world, and 3) the nature of information channels that can convey information to us for evaluation and testing. In the process I will outline theories of physical information and semantic information. Much of the talk will be an, I hope simplified, version of [9] and [10], and other sources on my web page, and the book, Every Thing Must Go [10].

Acknowledgments

I acknowledge the support of the National Research Council of South Africa.

References and Notes

1. Shannon, C.E. and Weaver, W. 1949. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana, University of Illinois Press.
2. Brillouin, L 1962. Science and Information Theory, 2^nd edition. New York, Academic Press.
3. Solomonoff, R. 1964. A formal theory of inductive inference, Part I.Information and Control, Vol 7, No. 1: 1-22.
4. Solomonoff, R. 1964. A formal theory of inductive inference, Part II.Information and Control, Vol 7, No. 2: 224-254.          
5. Kolmogorov, A.N. 1965. Three approaches to the quantitative definition of information. Problems of Inform. Transmission 1: 1-7.
6. Chaitin, G.J. A theory of program size formally identical to information theory. J. ACM 22: 329-340.
7. Dretske, F. 1981. Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
8. Barwise, Jon and John Perry. 1983. Situations and Attitudes. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
9. Collier, John 1990. Intrinsic information. in Philip Hanson (ed) Information, Language and Cognition: Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science, Vol. 1. University of British Columbia Press, now by Oxford University Press: 390-409.
10. Collier, John. 2012. Information, causation and computation.Information and Computation: Essays on Scientific and Philosophical Understanding of Foundations of Information and Computation. Gordana Dodig Crnkovic and Mark Burgin (eds), Singapore, World Scientific: 89-106.
11. Ladyman, J., Ross, D., with Collier, J., Spurrett, D. 2007. Every Thing Must Go. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Immigration and settling down in a new society can be one of the most dynamic and complex processes in an individual’s life. Personal and cultural changes are enmeshed in continuous processes of discovery, upheaval and crisis. [1]With the advancement of urbanization, a lot of migrant children followed their parents to enter the city society in China. [2]Eventually, they became a group of stranger in the rural-urban fringe.The report of national urban migrant children in China issued in 2013 showed the number of migrant children increased rapidly, reaching the the scale of 35.81 million. [3]

The migrant situation in contemporary China is directly linked to two historical phenomena: the recent opening of the Chinese economy to market-style reforms, and long-term constraints on population mobility and the distribution of state-sponsored goods and services through a system of residence permits called the hukou system.[4]

Geographical migration not only cut off the geopolitical, kinship ties of the migrant children to some extent, but also broke the individual's social network of relationships. This kind of fracture has a certain effect on childhood development and the children’s future social interaction.

From the psychological perspective, migrant children are in a critical period of development in social interaction. [5]They are in an urgent need to find new ways to complete the reconstruction of the network of relationships. The motivation of the children to develop social network is more related to spontaneous demands of psychological or cultural aspects, rather than utilitarian purpose of the adults. Thus, how to find a way to build their social network and then accumulate enough social capital in the city has become an important issue of the social integration of the group.

Quantitative questionnaire survey and semi-structured, in-depth interview conducted with migrant children were the primary research methods adopted in this study.The sampling survey, was mainly conducted in primary and secondary schools. The whole process is divided into two rounds. The first round of the survey was conducted from November 2009 to March 2010, the research mainly concentrated in Nanjing. The second round of the survey was conducted from June 2013 to January 2014, the research hold in Nanjing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. A total of 2396 questionnaires were returned ,with 2268 valid, including 1537 migrant children and 731 urban children as the reference sample.Male ratio was 52.8%, the proportion of girls was 47.2%, from the ages of nine to fourteen. Given the reality, the situation of migrant children's education is divided into two different categories, one is enrolled in some special schools for migrant children, one is enrolled in some urban school on a temporary basis. The former is a typical "homogeneous" combination of education situation, the latter is a typical "heterogeneous" combination of education contexts. In those school environment, life often exhibit different characteristics to the migrant children.[6] To make a reasonable interpretation for the real living conditions of migrant children, the study took these two types of students into account in the sample.The migrant children interviewed in the semi-structured, in-depth interview part represent different profiles of the population. The snowball method applied in selecting the sample sought to attain a balance according to three primary variables: length of residence in the city, gender and age.

The analysis of the findings is presented in four sections:

1. The findings revealed that the internet was one of the favorite media for migrant children, although most of them began to use it only after immigration to the city.
2. The migrant children use the Internet to achieve the re-aggregation of strong relationship network. The study showed that 28.4 percent of migrant children usually can not meet and chat with their friends face to face. Most of the migrant children "usually communicate with friends via online chat tools ". QQ chat tool is the main one they chose to usel. Among the migrant children’s online chat list, classmates, fellow-villagers, relatives accounted for a large proportion. Internet provided the homogeneous groups a virtual platform to get together and share feelings. This link is not blurred, but the strengthening of the reality ties.
3. The internet has become an important channel for the migrant children to expand the weak ties[7] of social network,though the expansion of weak ties based on internet is difficult to turn virtual into the real. The migrant children’ s enthusiasm of using the internet to expand their social circle had some relation with their age and the real amount of peer interaction channels. Interviews showed that migrant children’s exchanges with the network of weak ties mainly focused on aspects of sharing of information, such as the information of schools, certain events, as well as the views of some pop stars. But it’s still pretty hard for the web-based weak ties to expand into the real level interaction. Network pseudonym made contacts and relations between anonymous individuals fragile. It is difficult to develop to further practical level. And once the expansion of weak ties got frustrated, migrant children tend to be more retreated into their homogeneous groups.
4. Migrant children enjoyed alternative exchanges in the participation of some online role-playing-games. [8]Migrant boys prefered games of conquer type, accumulating communicative capital between peers in obtaining alternative interactive experience[9]; though the girls prefer online virtual communities games, having fun from the integration of the dreamy community. However, the compensation got from online games is apt to make the group more addicted to the internet.

In summary, the new media weaved a reconstructive field of public communication networks for the migrant children. Here, the individual could expand the scope of social interaction to some extend, getting reach to the circle of urban people which is far away from them in reality. But after all, since the online media contact is virtual, getting too immersed into it is no good for the healthy development of the children. Media’s funtion in remodeling the migrant children is noteworthy. And the social problems cencerning the media behavior of the migrant children is worth further studying.

References

1. Nelly Elias and Dafna Lemish (2008).Media Uses in Immigrant Families: Torn between 'Inward' and 'Outward' Paths of Integration. International Communication Gazette, 70, 21
2. Zhang,Li Zhong (2007). Social integration of migrant children in the city and its countermeasures. South China Rural Area, 2,44-47.
3. Li,Haixiu(2013).“migrant childre more than 35 million”，Guang Ming Daily，2013.5.16
4. Woronov,T.E..In the Eye of the Chicken: Hierarchy and marginality among Beijing’smigrant schoolchildren.Ethnography,2004（5）:289-313
5. Lin, Chongde (2008).Developmental psychology. Hangzhou: Zhejiang Education Publishing House.
6. Ma, Liang (2007). Analysis on the interactive process between the migrating children compulsory education policy and the reality. In Gu,Xuebin,Ruan Zengyuanqi (ed.), Practice-based Chinese local social work research. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press.
7. Mark S. Granovetter(1973).The Strength of Weak Ties. The American Journal of Sociology, 78（6）：1360-1380.
8. Yang, Yinjuan (2009) An Empirical Study on the Intrinsic Motivation of Children's Participation in Mole Online Game. Journal of International Communication, 12, 99-104.
9. Lin, Yuling (2007). Schoolchildren's Game-Playing Practices and Gender Construction: A Case Study of Elementary School Pupils in a Remote Area. Mass Communication Research (Taipei), 90, 43-99. 

Introduction

In light of "the late capitalist economy where anything and everything is potentially commodifiable" [1], the fact that online social platforms foster a market ideology that commoditizes personal identity as a sellable good has been addressed in recent scholarship [2, 3]. This logic is, at the same time, counterbalanced by a popular faith in the Social Web [4] as the new ground for personal affirmation [5]. Web 2.0 has continued to be portrayed as the symbolic materialization of enterprise culture [6], in a time when the employment scene seems futureless, marked by increased uncertainty for both companies and employees and devoid of any guarantees of economic success or job security. Against the pervasiveness of self-commodification online, regular individuals have the option of leveraging the market logic themselves. This affirmation needs to be placed against the wider cultural background of recent years.

In little over a decade, individuals’ digital immersion has spread to become a global social phenomenon, attesting to the fact that society’s new habitat is the re-ontologised infosphere [7]. Individuals themselves are described as informational entities [8] embedded in this engulfing network of bits, with every piece of personal information available online carrying relevant identity cues [9]. Commercial Internet companies interested in reaping identity data from real individuals have been the first to harvest this realization. While they made social networking online increasingly compelling for participants, they operated a discrete change: reframing privacy "as something users opt into (rather than out of)" [10]. From a space of infinite possibility for anonymous identity play [11, 12, 13], the privately owned Social Web was recast around new ideals of transparency [14, 15].

The massive sharing of personal information that occurred with the widespread adoption of platform logic, corroborated with the "persistence", "replicability", "scalability" and "searchability" of digital information [16] contributed to the discretionary availability of large quantities of personal data online. Along with "communication power" [17], individuals gained great communication vulnerability. Online, flattened contexts allow for both audiences and information to aggregate, displaced from their intended temporal and spatial delineations [18]. Any search engine can bring together authored, co-authored, ambient or random personal information for an unintended audience, free to subjectively re-create the individual’s identity from its digital parts. Our increasingly digital culture [19, 20, 21], where surveillance is embedded in the very process of social interaction, both rewards and sanctions individuals based on who they appear to be online. Under this context, self-promotion has been presented as a normalized practice online [3].

While self-promotion as self-commodification has been the subject of vocal critique in the academic world [1, 22, 23], a popular culture fueled by both the personal development literature genre and a growing marketing practice embraced it as personal branding [10, 23]. For the individual user engaging in self-branding, the Social Web is valorized as enabling the alignment of self to enterprise ideology [2]. Yet, while online and offline identities increasingly merge in social and commercial ways [24] that leave little room for incongruity, the extent to which individuals are aware of both who they are in the infosphere and their possibilities to strategically manage their online selves is questionable.

Methods

The overall goal of my research was to shed light onto the individual practices that shape self-identity communication online, in light of a normalization of self-promotion practices, brought about by Web 2.0 ideology. Aiming for a theoretical sample [25], my orientation was towards the most representative group of individuals for the identity online phenomenon. Informants needed to be, on the one hand, biologically mature and thus credible to talk about self-identity on and offline, and, on the other hand, frequent and savvy users of multiple digital platforms, spending a minimum time of 3 to 4 hours a day engaged in online activities, irrespective of terminal technology or online platform. My 20 informants ranged in age from 21 to 35 and came from various professional backgrounds. Sample size was established as a result of theoretical saturation [25]. I conducted 20 in-depth semi-structured interviews in the homes of my informants, with an average duration of one hour and thirty minutes. The loose discussion guide used as instrument included projective techniques and verbal protocols. Prior to the actual interview, each participant was required to fill in a personal journal over a period of a week. The journals had a pre-set format, prompting respondents to answer (with text and images) specific points, ranging from personal information, to online habits, to actual web pages accessed over the given period of time. All 20 interviews were filmed and then transcribed. Simultaneously, the text was continuously perused for thematical similarities and differences that ultimately enabled the grouping of the data set into concepts and then larger categories, using both emic and etic codes.

Results and Discussion

The study was based on the theoretical assumption that identity online is a forming part of individuals living in our digital culture [24]. Yet, my findings revealed that the large majority of my informants did not acknowledge that the traces they leave online (intentionally or not) can be subjectively corroborated by various third parties to form the individual’s identity narrative. Nor that, in the face of this reality, they could or should make strategic use of the online medium's affordances to craft a strategic personal presence online. One is able to observe a disarming ingenuousness in user's perception of the Social Web as an environment for authentic self-expression. Although the projected self is, to some extent, edited, this practice is grounded on false assumptions. Protective self-presentation [26] is dismissive of the fact that real and imagined audiences [18] can differ and information can at some point aggregate and become available by searching. Identities online thus appear to be published rather then publicized.

While these results emerged out of a qualitative approach, and lack the support of quantitative validation, they encourage compelling threads for discussion. They seem to have surfaced an inequality in the system of sharing, an inconsistency between emerging social realities and actual user practices, which leaves the individual in a clear disadvantage. Commercial interest as the pervasive logic of Web 2.0 is, most often than not, one-sided. This creates an unfair imbalance between commercial entities' proven perception of individuals as products to be sold and individuals' disoriented perception of their own role and potential within Web 2.0 economy, at least in the country where this study has been conducted.

Conclusions

While established economies may have granted individuals an advance in understanding technology's consequences in regard to responsible self-identity communication, in less developed societies, individuals seem to be left exposed. Romania's tendential modernity [27] is historically based on the adoption of forms without substance [28]. In other words, institutional and social efforts towards modernity are undermined by a superficial understanding of its adoption process.

Extrapolating this logic to the online medium and to our current discussion, individuals were fast to adopt an onlife [8] way of living, without a pragmatic awareness of Web 2.0's affordances and pitfalls as technologies of self-construction.

In Romania, frequent users of the Social Web are yet to be educated on the implications of their presence in the new infosphere in order to have the capacity to evaluate the option of engaging in strategic rather than random representations of themselves.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Sectorial Operational Program for Human Resources Development 2007-2013, co-financed by the European Social Fund, under the project number POSDRU/159/1.5/S/134650, titled "Doctoral and Postdoctoral Fellowships for Young Researchers in the Fields of Political, Administrative and Communication Sciences and Sociology".

References and Notes

1. Wee, L.; Brooks, A. Personal Branding and the Commodification of Reflexivity. Cultural Sociology 2010, 4 (45), 45-61.
2. Marwick, A. Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Self-branding in Web 2.0. PhD Dissertation, New York University, New York, USA, 2010.
3. van Dijck, J. 'You Have One Identity': Performing the Self on Facebook and LinkedIn. Media Culture Society 2013, 35(2), 199-215.
4. Quittner, J. Mr. Rheingold's Neighborhood. Time Magazine 1996. Available at: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,985581,00.html [accessed 12 February 2015]
5. Shirky, C. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in the Connected Age, 1st ed. The Penguin Group: London, UK, 2010.
6. du Gay, P. Consumption and Identity at Work. Sage: London, UK, 1996.
7. Floridi, L. The Ontological Interpretation of Informational Privacy. Ethics and Information Technology 2005, 7(4), 185-200.
8. Foridi, L. The Informational Nature of Personal Identity. Minds and Machines 2011, 21(4), 549-566.
9. Marwick, A. (2013) Online Identity. In A Companion to New Media Dynamics, 1st ed.; Hartley, J., Burgess, J., Bruns, A., Eds.; Blackwell Publishing: Oxford, UK, 2013; pp. 355-364.
10. Senft, T. Camgirls. Celebrity and Community in the Age of Social Networks, 1st ed.; Peter Lang Publishing: New York, USA, 2008.
11. Rheingold, H. The Virtual Community. Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, 1st ed.; Harper Collins: New York, USA, 1994.
12. Stone, A.R. The War of Desire and Technology at the End of the Mechanical Age, 4th ed.; MIT Press: Cambridge, UK, 2001
13. Turkle, S. Life on the Screen. Identity in the Age of the Internet, 1st ed.; Simon and Schuster: New York, USA, 1995.
14. Bullingham, L.; Vasconcelos, A.C. The Presentation of Self in the Online World: Goffman and the Study of Online Identities. Journal of Information Science 2013, 39(1), 101-112.
15. Hogan, B. Pseudonyms and the Rise of the Real-Name Web. In A Companion to New Media Dynamics, 1st ed.; Hartley, J., Burgess, J., Bruns, A., Eds.; Blackwell Publishing: Oxford, UK, 2013; pp. 290-308.
16. Boyd, D. Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications. In A Networked Self. Identity, Community & Culture on Social Network Sites, 1st ed.; Papacharissi, Z., Ed.; Taylor&Francis: New York, USA, 2011; pp. 39-58.
17. Castells, M. Communication Power, 1st ed; Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2009.
18. Marwick, A.; Boyd, D. I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience. New Media and Society 2011, 13, 96-113
19. Castells, M. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed.; Blackwell Publishers: Oxford, UK, 2000.
20. Papacharissi, Z. A Networked Self. In A Networked Self. Identity, Community & Culture on Social Network Sites, 1st ed.; Papacharissi, Z., Ed.; Taylor&Francis: New York, USA, 2011; pp. 304-318.
21. van Dijck, J. The Network Society, 3rd ed.; Sage Publications: London, UK. 2012.
22. Lair, D.J.; Sullivan, K.; Cheney, G. Marketization and the Recasting of the Professional Self. Management Communication Quarterly 2005, 18(3), 307-343.
23. Shepherd, I.D. From Cattle and Coke to Charlie: Meeting the Challenge of Self Marketing and Personal Branding. Journal of Marketing Management 2005, 21(5-6), 589-606.
24. Elwell, J.S. The Transmediated Self. Life Between the Digital and the Analog. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 2014, 20(2), 233-249.
25. Glaser, B.G.; Strauss, A.L. The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Strategies for Qualitative Research, 7th ed.; Aldine Transaction: New Brunswick, USA, 2012.
26. Schütz, A. Assertive, Offensive, Protective, and Defensive Styles of Self-presentation: A Taxonomy. The Journal of Psychology 1998, 132(6), 611-628.
27. Schifirneţ, C. Tendential Modernity. Social Science Information 2012, 51(1), 22-51.
28. Schifirnet, C. Forms without Substance, a Romanian Brand. Comunicare.ro: Bucharest, Romania, 2007.

© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI and ISIS. This abstract is distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license.

Introduction

Technical progress goes so quickly onwards, that we’ve been asking for many years, whether isn’t it necessary to transform educational system to survive in our constantly changing world. It is an evolutionary change that has taken unprecedented turnaround. The original species homo-sapiens has evolved into homo mobilus. We are mobile beings, every individual (including children) own a mobile phone. It is the result of scientific progress in the miniaturization of computer components. The scientific progress has somewhat escaped away from the obsolete teaching methods. In schools today we are teaching more or less according to standard procedures and principles of teaching, even though the changes take place and individual schools try to adapt to the demand for students from the market side. There is still a big gap between the science and education procedures. The science goes by leaps and bounds and education is still based on learning to know not to think.

But it is not only caused by technical progress but also by change in the concept of the media. Today's world of social networking creates a wide net of relationships and information channels that cannot be controlled and hardly can be understood. We could say that there begins to dominate some sort of Global brain. When individual put into context the information you submit in the media and a large number of individuals determine whether the information is relevant or not. From the classic media consumption is becoming a place for discussion and thinking about the issues.

Education yes or no

The question is if we are able to made children learn things, which they can very quickly find on Internet. Whether to show them how to reflect reality or just obey and teach them how to ask. The most important thing which give us education is the ability to think about things, taking into account their causal relationships and all related consequences. We have to go through the whole chain of information, which are required to get full understanding.

We are really close to revolution where the necessity to know ‘Why’ will be replaced by the necessity to know ‘Where To Find The Answer’. There must be some regulation of what we are looking for and why. The main threat is the manipulation of the Internet as medium. If we are not critically thinking about answers, we remain passive consumers of information as they are. On the one hand, it is a great power to find whatever data we want to find. On the other hand, there must be a person on the opposite side somewhere, to give us that piece of information. This kind of information is relative. If we are thinking about consequences, what would happen if some day, 200 years in the future, someone decides to delete all information about the Archimedes law? And the second question is: Will it still be needed? What if we change our education procedures and there will be no one to understand that law, or even anybody capable of applying it?

We are a part of virtual reality, which seems to us real. Upon closer examination we find, that our communication is displaced to a virtual environment. The most important decisions are usually brokered through e-mails. We are able to communicate from almost everywhere, we can arrange meetings, send greeting cards, talk with people etc. and all we need is our smart phone. If you ask small children why is learning unnecessary – the smart phone will be their answer. The child is able to find all information on smart phone, there is no need to have the right knowledge. People are able to learn very quickly what they need to know and skip what is unnecessary.

The highest income have people who works whole days at the computer, they create materials, which are also virtual. For example, a consultants give advices by presentation, by creating models, by interviewing top managers, etc. And yet all those values are imaginary, we can send them by e-mail, we can print them, but if someone will find them after 100 years, they’ll have no remaining informational value. It is closely related to our quickly changing environment, where only the difference make difference. We are not able to take one model which is very good working for one organization and put it to use in another environment. It will probably be completely different. People in organization differ and the processes and goods and services are also different. Therefore, the acclaimed work is virtual, it has no longer meaning like for example the Pythagorean Theorem.

Conclusions

The media have significant influence on the virtual world we live in. They show us what to do, what to learn, what to think, how to act and react, etc. For us there’s only one important task. We have to think about it and it will be the main paradigm shift in our educational system. To help people decide what is important and what we can easily find by media.

Introduction

Whilst discussing various ethical implications of new technologies that are changing the conditions of communication, it is often forgotten to take into account the foundations of the concepts one is dealing with in practice. The point is that neglecting the metaphysical origin of conceptualization means to open the gates for errors and misunderstandings. Hence, it is the metaphysical ground itself which has to be illuminated in the first place, before being able to actually proceed with developing ethically adequate praxis. How this can be done shall be discussed in this contribution by showing that praxis is already theoretical while theory is always practical.

Results and Discussion

What we find is that on the route to developing a unified conception on systems, we are simultaneously engaged in looking for evolutionary stages of the interaction between energy-mass (matter) on the one hand, and entropy-structure (information) on the other. The generic approach to a unified concept is that of category theory, taking the mathematical origin of systems in Poincaré’s theory (long before this notion has been introduced by Bertalanffy) literally. But at the same time, whilst drafting out a framework for the unified treatment of systems, we also find that a detailed differentiation of the types of systems is necessary in order to understand the primary starting points for the subsequent applications of what has been conceptualized before.

Conclusions

Obviously, there is a multitude of various types of objects for categories that model one or the other          type of system. Essentially, there are two criteria that help to differ among them: The first criterion is the form of organization of a system. This is a concept related to the actual flow of information. We have thus order out of chaos (i.e. information structures emerge in the universe), order out of order (structures form self-replicating structures), and pure information out of order (organisms with minds externalize information, communicating and storing it), respectively.^[1]

The second criterion is the degree of complexity inherent in a system: This is what determines the localization of the appropriate level of evolution that can identified with the region associated with an explicit type of order production. The interacting parameters which determine form of organization and complexity, respectively, are energy-mass (matter) and entropy-structure (information) then.

Note that the substrate of all of this is always the same: We can call it primordial matter, possibly based on the initial dynamics of de-coherence as it is known in quantum physics. But we have also to note that in fact, when we are modelling the world, we permanently talk about the world as we can observe it, and as we would like to speculatively model it as a possibility – but we do not encounter the real world after all. So all the time we have to keep this “knowledge gap” in mind (“mind the gap”), in order to realize the ontological distance we cannot actually cover by our methods. This is the reason why we define systems by what we call them rather than by what they are. But while on the route towards a unified concept of systems, it has become obvious that category theory (in the mathematical sense) is not only helpful, but mandatory in the first place.

References

1. Jonathan Jaquette: Category Theory Pertaining to Dynamical Systems. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Final_Topics_Paper_on_Catos.pdf
2. Mike Behrisch et al.: Dynamical Systems in Categories, TU Dresden (2013), http://www.qucosa.de/fileadmin/data/qucosa/documents/12990/PreprintMATH-AL-05-2013.pdf
3. Jan J. M. M. Rutten: Universal co-algebra: a theory of systems. Theoret. Comput. Sci. 249 (1), 3-80, 2000.

^[1] We follow here the ideas of Robert Doyle. See: www.informationphilosopher.com/introduction/information/