1. The Informational Turn of Contemporary Science and Philosophy

As the science and philosophy of information develop, the specific character of information becomes more and more clear. From the point of view of science, information as well as matter and energy are now regarded as the three essential elements constituting the world, bringing about a fundamental transformation of our worldview and way of thinking.

Generally speaking, the Philosophy of Being, as well as the theory of the compartmentalization of the extant domain is the major paradigm of philosophy and makes up the core of philosophical metatheory. Following tradition, we can reasonably summarize ''the existential = the material + the mental" as in the traditional Western ontological paradigm, except for few doctrines out of the ordinary.

Based on the latest progress in the science of information, the contemporary philosophy of information compartmentalizes the existential domain again. It puts forwards a new ontological paradigm: ''the existential = the material + the informational". In the light of it, information is constituted by two domains: the objective informational and the subjective informational (mental). Compared with the traditional ontological paradigm, this new one not only reveals a whole fresh existential domain - the objective informational world - but also stipu1ates the essence of mind as a form of an advanced state of informational activity .1

The Western philosophical world has proposed various kinds of philosophical turns. However the result of those alleged turns did not transform the highest level of the philosophical paradigm as they were not fundamental ones. Comparatively speaking, because it achieves the transformation in the highest level of philosophical paradigm, the Philosophy of Information brings about a fundamental turn in philosophy for the first time.

2. The Intrinsically Convergent Unified Relationship of Science and Philosophy

In the most general sense, we can view philosophy as a human activity of seeking universal reason, while scientific observation and experiment have the character of concrete sensory data. On the basis of this, people have been used to recognize philosophy and science as separate disciplines. In fact, reasoning and operating with sensory data must not be separated completely at all levels of human cognitive activities. Human beings inevitably evaluate all kinds of sensory data in their rational constructions. It is this that constitutes the difference between human consciousness and the animal mind, as well as the ultimate ground of Philosophy and Science being intrinsically a unity.

Humans do not cognize the objective world directly. There are multiple kinds of complex intermediate relationships of between people and their cognitive objects. In my research on the contemporary philosophy of information, I have proposed a doctrine regarding the complex emergent occurrence of cognition, which explains aspects of five such intermediates: the objective field of information, its subjective physical structure, its subjective cognitive structure, its subjective instruments of materialization, and its subjective generative historical dimension. Since intermediate states with those five aspects exist between perception and cognition, the phenomena that scientists see directly are not the "objective facts" themselves of observation and experiment, but rather macroscopical signs that are designated as information, the "objective facts" remaining after passage through intermediate measuring instruments. Valid scientific judgments are accordingly possible only by explaining those signs. And the corresponding explanations depend not only on the analysis of the instruments and equipment of observation employed by those scientists, but also the scientific theoretical paradigms they use in recognizing structure. So there is no scientific fact that could be decided only by so-called concrete evidence; science, rather, is the product of the combination of concrete evidence and general reasoning. If defined in this way, philosophy is no longer something transcendental, irrelevant to and outside of science. It is actually the content covered in science which contains as an organic part, inevitably, the central role of mental activity.

2.1 General Rationality and Logic

A key concept in my theory is that of general rationality. I consider this an ontological feature of a scientific doctrine that measures how 'rational' it is, that is how far developed from the automatic, purely reactive forms of animal cognition. A higher rationality is one which reflects the best – therefore MOST ETHICAL - capacities of human beings to interact with themselves and the world. The term general rationality in Chinese accordingly corresponds to what is called informal logic in Western philosophy. „Informal‟ means that it is not based on simple linguistic reasoning using systems of axioms, but is rather like abductive logic as proposed by Magnani or the dynamic Logic in Reality of Brenner that refers to real processes.

From this perspective, general rationality describes the evolution of informational processes in both the disciplines of science but also in cognition and philosophy as the behavioral „activity‟ of human beings of which there are clearly higher and lower levels. There are only differences in the degree of general rationality involved in the various scientific disciplines, rather than the presence or absence of that rationality. From this, we can establish a relative boundary between philosophy and science from an onto-epistemological standpoint. The degree of generality (the extent of application) defines the inner differences of levels of generality of reasoning and consequently a hierarchy in philosophy and science themselves.

In fact, there exists a kind of dual-sense relationship between the levels of general rationality: in one respect, lower general rationality is the foundation on which higher general rationality is established on; in the other respect, lower general rationality is the presentation of higher general rationality in a concrete domain. The double sided characters of the definition of the lower and higher general rationalities will inevitably induce the interactions between different levels of rationality to define and converge. In this process, the higher general rationality will illuminate universally, restrict and control holographically the lower general rationality, while the lower general rationality not only embodies certain normative principles belonging to the higher general rationality at its own level but also provides certain valid basic support for higher general rationality due to its own plentiful contents and materials of activities. Those interactions between levels of general rationalities will necessarily result in the holographic unified relationship of inner convergence that ground and embody mutually, as well as reflect, constrain, control and define reciprocally different of levels of general rationality.

A true philosophy of science, which should be founded by science, cannot be separated from and override science. Rather, the foundational role of science determines its effects on philosophy from the bottom up. The dependence of philosophical development on scientific development indicates that science is the strongest and most basic driving force for the transformation of philosophy.

The rationality of science is much more universal and can surpass the limits of those narrow disciplines from which it was originally generated and evolve into a higher general rationality. This hierarchical transition is a process of self-sublimation of general rationality, the review and reproduction of the nature of general rationality. That self-sublimation of regeneration, review and reproduction permits the examination of previous higher general rationality in the transiting process of the lower general rationality to the higher level. The higher general rationality defines, amends and processes those original lower general rationalities (delete: by examination). In other words, the higher general rationality imposes its methodological effects on lower general rationalities while generalizing, summarizing and defineing the rational elements of those lower general rationalities as well. It is a kind of philosophical critique which is implemented in this process.

Whether a more concrete general rationality could enter the level of a more universal higher general rationality is decided by two aspects: one is whether those general rationalities have more universal character by themselves or not; the other is whether philosophy critiques those original lower general rationalities according to their own levels.

Indeed, philosophy must enrich and develop itself through science; however, that doesn't mean that philosophy is just a vassal of science. Philosophy has the critical role, at its own level in the development of the chains of human knowledge about the limits of science and philosophy. It is thus inevitable to consider aspects of the transformations enacted on philosophy by science and critiques made on science by philosophy.

We have observed that several new research approaches have been opened up in the studies of information problems: the computational, the information-ethical, the communication-informational, the information-cognitional, the semiotic-informational, the information-phenomenological, and so on. However, because these approaches employ theories dependent on a certain given concrete philosophy or science, they are constrained by the narrow and limiting character of the original theories and disciplines consciously or unconsciously, and these theories cannot reveal the true unique and revolutionary significance of information problems. An information theory founded on those theories can not be described as a higher science of information, not to mention as having the character of a general philosophy of information or a unified science of information.

Judging from this, the transformation of philosophy by science is not achieved automatically by using scientific success by itself as a criterion, but depends corresponding critical works that science acts on philosophy. That is a double sided interactive process to which both science and philosophy have to contribute. The transition from lower general rationality to higher one, and the critiques that philosophy makes of science have the following dual effects: on the one hand, outer information is criticized by philosophy; on the other hand, because that kind of critique changes the original construction of philosophy in itself, the philosophy is criticized recursively as well. If it is a comprehensive and complete change of construction, if that critique in itself is made of the most basic concepts and principles, or the highest paradigm of philosophy, a fundamental transformation has been made. The establishment of the contemporary philosophy of information reveals the significance for the development of philosophy itself through this kind of dual critique.

The general character of information transcends the basic beliefs and theoretical structures of traditional philosophy. The philosophy of information that truly shows the general character of information establishes the critiques that philosophy makes of science as well as the critiques that philosophy makes of itself.

3. Toward a Unified Science of Information

As a result of the role of information I established in the fundamental existential domain, the philosophy of information now provides a kind of dual-existential and dual-evolutionary theory of matter and information, which shows that information is a general phenomenon existing throughout the cosmos. Therefore, all research on matter and information should take this dual dimensionality into account. Because of the absence of the informational dimension in traditional philosophical and scientific research, it is now necessary to transform the research methods of traditional philosophy and science completely to bring them into line with the new scientific paradigm that is provided by the developing science and philosophy of information. By means of that transformation, all scientific and philosophical domains are facing an integrative developing trend I have named the ''Informational Scientification of Science'' . The emergence of this completely new and developing trend in philosophy and science, in my view, calls for the further establishment of a general unified science of information which includes all the domains of traditional philosophy, science and technology. It is transdisciplinary in the sense of Hofkirchner, Nicolescu, Brenner and others.

The tentative idea of establishing a unified science of information was initiated by a group of European scholars in the 1990s. Since then, from different levels and viewpoints of disciplines, many scientists and philosophers from all over the world have made numerous, fruitful work in that direction including A. D. Ursul and Konstantin Kolin from Russia: Pedro Marijuan, Wolfgang Hofkirchner, Luciano Floridi, Sören Brier, Rafael Capurro and Joseph Brenner from Europe: Yi Xin Zhong. Ming Li, Changlin Liu, Litian Shen, Xianhan Luo, Dongsheng Miao, Kang Ouyang, Xueshan Yan and myself from China; and, John Collier and Albert Borgmann from other countries. The independence and universality of the informational world revealed by these related researches is a precondition for the establishment and development of a new modem paradigm of science and philosophy, a new world view as well as a unified science of information.

4. Structure of the Proposed Unified Science of Information

Based on my research in this area, I have divided the unified science of information into six major levels: philosophy of information, general theory of information and informatics of which several sublevels and categories or branches exist and engineering/technological informatics.

As a result of its continuity across all levels of human knowledge from philosophy to science to engineering and communications technology, a unified science of information would be a disciplinary system that can be described in Chinese by the metaphor of „standing upright between heaven and earth‟. This metaphor captures the role of information in providing a link between phenomena at the lowest physical level and the highest human cognitive level. 4

Because this unified science of information is „upright between heaven and earth‟ and includes all levels of human knowledge, different scholars and disciplines could construct their concrete disciplines accordingly, including theories and viewpoints from their levels and points of view which today are separated. The result is that the trend toward so many diverse individual disciplines, schools and ideas of informational science is still increasing.

The development of a science of information will bring about a whole new integration of human science and philosophy as they converge with one another. In that process of integration, the philosophical sense of the science of information and the scientific character of the philosophy of information would be present in their entirety. From this standpoint, the philosophy of information could be viewed as apart of a general science of information, and the science of information could achieve its real foundational unity in the general provisions of philosophy. In other words, the unified science of information is the scientific basis of the general philosophy of information, and the philosophy of information is the general theoretical precondition of the unified science of information that is actually to be unified. In my opinion, the establishment of a unified science of information and the mature development of a philosophy of information should be the same process of mutual convergence, the two sides of the whole new integral developing pattern about contemporary human knowledge.

References and Notes

1. Kun Wu, the divide of existential domains, science•dialectics•modernization, 1986(2):32-33.
2. Kun Wu, the divide of existential domains and the “whole revolutionary”sense of the philosophy of information, the journal of humanity, 2013(5):1-6; Kun Wu,the crisis of philosophy and informational turn of philosophy, the journal of Xi‟an Jiaotong University, 2014(1):2-4; Kun Wu,On the development of philosophy and its fundamental turn from the view of informational world, the Journal of Chinese renmin university, 2014(3):72-78.
3. Kun Wu, the informational scientificiation of science, qinghai social science, 1997(2).
4. Kun Wu, the philosophy of information:theory, systerm and method, The Commercial Press, 2005,27-29.

Introduction

My presentation aims at answering a part of the questions posted in the invitation to the session. The questions arose in and originated from the FIS discussion on Physical informatics … in October 2014. No doubt, they were formulated in provocative manner. The goal was to challenge discussion. I plan to illustrate my personal answers with a few examples quoted from the history of 20^th c. physics. My answers to the questions are not intended to be enunciations and to provide final solutions, rather they serve as arguments and indicate that nothing is closed, the discussion is open. Methods

1 What do we consider physical information? Can one speak about physical information when there is no live percipient to accept, evaluate and use it? Can one speak about physical information (e.g., signal exchange) between inanimate physical objects (cf., e.g., Feynman diagrams)? And if so, what is it for? Is (physical) information a passive phenomenon, or its existence presumes activity?

Interpretation of ‘activity’ plays important role in the possible answers. One of the interpretations says that activity is an antropomorph phenomenon. It is a privilege of the human mind, which is able to perceive and process information, able to teleologically evaluate its possible consequences and (re)act accordingly. Another interpretation says that there is inanimate activity, that means, reception of information between physical agents and their reaction to it. I argue for the latter concept.

Let us see the example of the interaction between two (electric) charges. There were two approaches in the classical age of developing these theories (1928-33). When two electric charges interact, there appear two types of interaction. One is a Coulomb-type repulsion/attraction (according to their mutual signs) governed by their scalar potential, and the other is a Lorentz-type one governed by their vector potential depending on their relative velocity to each other.

One type of the theories considered first the interaction between the scalar potentials and calculated the effect of the vector potentials as perturbation. It considered two charges approaching to each other from the infinity, when in first approximation they have got information on the amount of the Coulomb charge of the other, but not its velocity and the caused Lorentz force. The latter was considered in the perturbation process.

The other type of the theories considered first the effect of the Lorentz force of the approaching charges, and took into consideration the effect of the Coulomb force in course of the perturbation.

Representatives of both types of theories agreed that the roles of the interacting electric charges must be symmetrical, but Christian Møller. Møller [7], who belonged to the latter type of theoreticians, applied scattering matrices (1931). He showed that there appeared a component among the matrix elements that was asymmetric in respect to the two interacting charges. H. Bethe (that time a doctoral student of E. Fermi, 1932) could not accept this asymmetry and ‘corrected’ Møller’s theory. He ‘symmetrised’ those matrix elements artificially [1]. That was a rough and unjustified involvement in Møller’s equation, but due to the later attained high authority of both Bethe and Fermi, the physics community accepted the apparently convenient symmetrisation of the theory without discussion and has not treated it until the recent years. Thus any possible distinction between (roles and properties of) interacting charges were unrevealed until the past decade.

However, the question can be formulated so: how do the charges, ready to interact, get information from each other? All theories agree that interaction between two charges take place by the exchange of a boson. In case of electromagnetic interaction this boson is a photon. Which of them emits the first photon towards the other? Did this emitter receive any information from the direction of the partner charge prior to the photon emission? What else is this if not an asymmetry between the roles, and possibly between properties of the two interacting charges? The distinction between the interacting charges was introduced by the isotopic field-charge theory, and the notion of ‘isotopic field-charge’ made the distinction between the properties of the two charges [2],[3],[4],[5]. The latter led to the proof of the gauge invariance under rotation of a newly introduced property, the isotopic field-charge spin, in an abstract field, and its conservation. This conservation is a result of a symmetry. Neverthe-less, this mechanism argues for activity between physical objects without an animated (human) agent.

2 What are the limits between (closed and open) systems, from the aspects of information and of symmetries? Further, if so, how wide can we extend the meaning of activity to be still accepted for generating information?

What are the roles of different appearances of symmetries in taking a stand in the mentioned questions? What kinds of symmetry (or their absence) may play a role in making decision in the listed problems?

The ‘classical’ (20^th c.) relativity theories demanded that all physical laws were invariant under the Lorentz transformation. This was established first in the special theory of relativity that was formulated for electromagnetic interactions [6]. Lorentz invariance of physical laws was in fact a symmetry principle (conservation of the form of the laws during reference frame change) [9]. This invariance proved to hold for many other physical laws, so later also the symmetry principle was extended to other physical laws as well.

The Lorentz invariant relativity theory included another consequence: there is no distinct (odd) reference frame in nature. In other words, all reference frames are equivalent. Aren’t they? Based on Noether’s theorems [8], one can show that conservation laws hold in all reference frames. However, the quantity of the conserved property (e.g., mass, charge, etc.) may change in the different reference frames. E.g., the amount of mass of matter in a closed system depends on the velocity of the observer relative to that system where the mass is to be measured. One can always find a reference frame from which the amount of the measured mass is minimal. This fact contradicts to the absence of a distinct (odd) reference frame. And there are more. Is there any invariance that compensates this lost equivalence of all reference frames?

The observer can be not only a human agent who measures with instruments and reads the records. It can be another inanimate mass that perceives information about the mass from the observed system. Its ‘activity’ is that this information can be obtained by experiencing a force. This force can be gravitational or inertial. According to the general theory of relativity the ‘observer mass’ is unable to make distinction whether the experienced force is of ‘inertial’ or ‘gravitational’ origin. At the same time, the inertial mass changes its value according to its relative velocity to the observer, while the gravitational mass does not. Thus the ‘observer mass’ in different reference frames will experience different inertial forces originating from the ‘observed mass’.

Something similar distinction can be made between the Coulomb charges and the Lorentz-type (current) charges. They are sources of the Coulomb force and the Lorentz force, respectively, and similar to the two types of masses, originate from the scalar potential and from the vector potential of the Hamiltonian of the charged object, respectively.

The two types of masses and the two types of electric charges are called isotopic field-charge pairs, respectively. They are subject of the same gauge invariance. As such, they can exchange their roles (switch into each other) by the exchange of a gauge boson (in addition to the graviton and the photon, respectively), called delta bosons in the theory. As a consequence of the additional invariance and the corresponding additional mediating gauge boson, the respective systems of the two interacting isotopic field-charges (masses or electric charges) are not subjects of the Lorentz invariance alone. They are subjects of a convolution of the Lorentz- and this additional invariance. One can conclude two things.

First, along with the development of physics, there is no more enough to demand invariance under the Lorentz transformation. At extended conditions, one should demand the invariance under a combination of the Lorentz invariance and an additional invariance. In short, we demand invariance under (the applicable) transformations.

Secondly, when two charges (let they be either gravitational, electric, or other field-charges) interact, they make a distinction between each other. The system, composed of the interacting two field-charges, follow the Pauli principle. That means, the two interacting field-charges must be in different quantum states. Since this state in which they differ cannot be characterized by any of the earlier known properties, it must be a characteristic of the newly introduced property. It must be one of the two stable positions of the isotopic field-charge that are rotated into each other by the SU(2) symmetry group in the isotopic field-charge field. These two stable positions are called, by an analogically given name, the isotopic field-charge spin (not identical either with the angular momentum spin or the isotopic spin). According to its proven invariance, the isotopic field-charge spin is a conserved property. When two field-charges interact, they must be in the opposite isotopic field-charge spin states. The information that they exchange about each other is about this state: they check whether the partner is in the opposite state. Otherwise they are ‘not allowed’ to interact (Pauli’s exclusion principle). The information exchange takes place by the exchange of a delta boson (called also dion) between them, in addition to the exchange of the traditional mediating bosons (like graviton, photon, weak charged and neutral bosons, or gluons). That delta boson switches the emitting charge from inertial to potential state, and the absorbing charge from potential to inertial state.

Conclusions

The asymmetry of the interacting charges has been explained. It was subject of information exchange between the interacting particle partners. In order to meet the Pauli principle, physical objects should exchange information about the (opposite) states of each other before getting into active interaction. The explanation led to the loss of an invariance property. However, this loss has been restored by introducing a new physical property (isotopic field-charge spin), by proving its conservation, and completing the Lorentz invariance with the respective invariance attributed to the newly proven conservation.

References

1. Bethe, H., Fermi, E., Über die Wechselwirkung von zwei elektronen, Zeitschrift für Physik, 77 (1932), 5-6, 296-306.
2. Darvas, G., The Isotopic Field Charge Spin Assumption, International Journal of Theoretical Physics, 50 (2011), 10, 2961-2991.DOI: 10.1007/s10773-011-0796-9
3. Darvas, G., The Isotopic Field-Charge Assumption Applied to the Electromagnetic Interaction, Int J Theor Phys, 52 (2013a), 11, 3853-3869, DOI 10.1007/s10773-013-1693-1.
4. Darvas, G., A symmetric adventure beyond the Standard Model – Isotopic field-charge spin conservation in the electromagnetic interaction, Symmetry: Culture and Science, 24 (2013b), 1-4, 17-40.
5. Darvas, G., Electromagnetic Interaction in the Presence of Isotopic Field-Charges and a Kinetic Field, Int J Theor Phys, 53 (2014), 1, 39-51, DOI 10.1007/s10773-013-1781-2.
6. Einstein, A., Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper, Annalen der Physik, 17:891 (1905); English translation: On the electrodynamics of moving bodies, in: The Principle of Relativity, (1923), London: Methuen and Co.
7. Møller, C., Über den Stoß zweier Teilchen unter Berücksichtigung der Retardation der Kräfte, Zeitschrift für Physik, 70 (1931), 11-12, 786-795.
8. Noether, E. A., Invariante Variationsprobleme, Nachrichten von der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen: Mathematisch-physikalische Klasse, (1918) 235-257.
9. Wigner, E.P. , Events, laws of nature and invariance principles, pp. 38-50, in: Wigner, Symmetries and Reflections, Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1967).

Introduction

If we live in cognitive capitalism or within a knowledge society, the leading social forces do not exert class rule. The once “new class” of scientifically or humanistically trained intellectual workers (Gouldner 1979) has not, as its explorers of the 1960s and 1970s assumed, become the ruling class. But its probable members have spread throughout society, from the headquarters of global information technology corporations through well paid specialist positions in business, political and academic organizations to the precarious creative scene and a newly taylorized cybertariat or cognitariat. While this omnipresence has been captured by neomarxist concepts like mass intellectuality, its impact on class formation remains to be theorized.

In my contribution, I plan to make new sense of an old question of Antonio Gramsci’s: is there an independent class of intellectuals? My focus will be on class interests and their proto-political articulation. I will develop an overview of central common characteristics of the situation of different knowledge workers, but also trace potential and actual lines of class division or fracturing.

1. The means of intellectual production: common and incorporated? The starting point will be a specific productive situation in which post-operaists see the potential unity of the new class: the means of intellectual production are both more individualized, incorporated in the producers, and more social, dispersed through common culture, than in industrial work. This feature sometimes stirs up broad solidarity against the owners of classical productive property, famously in the free software scene. However, it can also provoke narrow professional interests. Scientists, lawyers, teaching professions etc. have a long tradition of controlling access to their ranks and thus maintaining high income levels, and in new expert cultures individual negotiations seem to prevail over any solidarity. Examples from ‘academic capitalism’ to software programming will serve to discuss these tensions.
2. The process of intellectual production: increasingly incalculable? From Marx’s machine fragment to Virno and Vercellone, the time of intellectual labour is portrayed as not measurable. Yet critics like Caffentzis (2011) have forcefully argued that this time is actually measured, in terms of deadlines or simply by calculating the time which is averagely needed to perform a task – to teach a student, to write a text, to translate a code. The interesting question for class theory is whether there is a dividing line between intellectual workers whose tasks are perfectly calculable and those who are expected to produce innovations or solutions which are not so easy to monitor. Under this aspect, the new world of intellectual work may simply be described with the conventional distinction between ordinary dependant work and service classes.
3. The institutions of intellectual production: public or neo-feudal? Where intellectual goods are nonrival and exclusion from using them is impossible, costly, not justifiable or counterproductive, public investment in their production seems to be a natural solution. This could be a strong reason for information socialism, at least for a social democratic state with high taxes and a strong class of state employees. Yet the reality of cost intensive public institutions and infrastructures of knowledge is more public-private – dominated by corporate agents, publically funded private institutions and wealthy families. The best examples are academic systems, which allow to ask whether the public needs of the knowledge economy mainly engender neo-feudal oligarchies.
4. A split in the nature of intellectual work: Gouldner’s helpful distinction between humanistically trained “intellectuals” and technically trained “intelligentsia” not only points to a strong possible coalition, but also to divisions and conflicts. While a “culture of critical discourse” may unite both groups, an orientation on utility on the one side and on interpretation and reflection on the other side may lead to a cultural split. In various institutional struggles, from the politics of education to the promotion of art and science, a technology-capital-expert coalition stands against a humanist-generalist-culture cluster. The question is whether this is only appearance or really a deep, possibly unsurmountable conflict.
5. A gap in the power of intellectual workforce: As noted, neither technological experts nor humanist intellectuals have become dominant. They haven grown in numbers, but power and income still concentrate circles closely around capital (Castells 1997). An ironic point is that these circles have become professionalized and intellectualized, too: as financial experts, lawyers, managers etc. Even their institutional places of training intersect with other intellectual workers; their selection involves academic degrees. This is a strong reason to see a very simple stratification in the class(es) of intellectual workers – while a small group of them participates in capital control and state power, a larger fraction may reinvent themselves as “dominated fraction of the ruling class” (Bourdieu), and a still larger fraction remains simply excluded from access to power positions.

The aim of my presentation is to see whether this last tendency is without alternative, or whether forceful middle-precarious coalitions of intellectual workers against the private appropriation of common knowledge goods are possible.

References and Notes

Caffentzis, G. A Critique of „Cognitive Capitalism“. In Cognitive Capitalism, Education and Digital Labour, 1st ed.; Peters, M.A., Bulut, E., Eds.; Peter Lang, New York i.a., USA, 2011; pp. 23-56.

Castells, M. The Rise of the Network Society. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, 1st ed.; Blackwell: Cambridge, Mass. i.a., Volume 1, USA, 1997.

Gouldner, A.W. The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. A Frame of Reference, Theses, Conjectures, Arguments, and an Historical Perspective on the Role of Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in the International Class Contest of the Modern Era, London, 1st ed.; Macmillan: London i.a., United Kingdom, 1979.

Introduction

The study of information and its values has long been deeply tied up with the field of cybernetics, which studies informational processes of feedback occurring in a range of social, artificial and physical systems. Although sometimes derided as a mechanistic and anti-humanising discipline, cybernetics has always been an applied field, strongly tied to real-world phenomena. Many of its practitioners have been strongly aware of its power and potential for harm as well as good.

In particular, the origins of much of modern cybernetics during and shortly after the Second World War have forced a number of its practitioners actively to examine the military applications of their work. In this paper, we will consider four historical snapshots of cyberneticists wrestling with the ethical implications of their work, from the 1940s to the 1970s, in the United States and in Germany.

Cybernetics in general, and automatic control in particular, is a discipline that depends on the capture, transmission and processing of information. It is remarkable that after the Second World War so many engineers found the ethical and philosophical issues that had arisen so important. This paper will examine some of these.

Automatic control

The Second World War saw enormous advances in automatic control, in particular for anti-aircraft weapons. After the war, many publications appeared presenting the new technology both to engineers and the general public. A particularly fascinating book in the latter category is a Scientific American publication entitled, simply, Automatic Control. This featured chapters by some of the world experts of the time, and it is interesting to note that three out of the twelve chapters were devoted specifically to the concept of information. A number of the authors queried explicitly the benefits of developments in automation, raising a number of important ethical questions. Ernest Nagel, for example, wrote:

The crucial question is not whether control of social transactions will be further centralized. The crucial question is whether, despite such a movement, freedom of inquiry, freedom of communication and freedom to participate actively in decisions affecting our lives will be preserved and enlarged. It is good to be jealous of these rights, they are the substance of a liberal society. The probable expansion of automatic technology does raise serious problems concerning them (p.9).

Norbert Wiener, in his classic book published some years earlier [9], was even more concerned by what the future of automation might bring:

the modern industrial revolution is [...] bound to devalue the human brain at least in its simpler and more routine decisions. Of course, just as the skilled carpenter, the skilled mechanic, the skilled dressmaker have in some degree survived the first industrial revolution, so the skilled scientist and the skilled administrator may survive the second. However, taking the second revolution as accomplished, the average human of mediocre attainments or less has nothing to sell that it is worth anyone’s money to buy.

Wiener’s anti-military stance

Norbert Wiener’s work on automatic control in the Second World War formed one of the key foundations of his formulation of the concept of cybernetics. As he wrote late in his life, and was published posthumously, “in World War II several ideas came to my mind which I thought might be of military use, for we were all impressed by the catastrophe and were certain that we would be involved in it sooner or later” [10, p.31]. In particular, his work involved predicting the positions of combat aeroplanes to enable effective anti-aircraft weapons, although it is striking that his statistical method was “not used as such in any military apparatus actually adopted [although] it was taken over into the general volume of theories employed by people designing such apparatus” [10, p.32].

However, his stance changed significantly with the development of the atomic bomb and its potential for mass destruction. Just two years after the end of the war, he wrote a widely-read popular article which argued that “the experience of the scientists who have worked on the atomic bomb has indicated that in any investigation of this kind the scientist ends by putting unlimited powers in the hands of the people whom he is least inclined to trust with their use” [8]. He subsequently refused to take any military funding for his research work, despite the growing postwar importance of the US Department of Defense as a primary funding source even for pure research. This stance led to Wiener’s investigation by the FBI during the political purges of Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s.

Bynum has argued [1] that Wiener’s stance was explicitly ethical, that he “considered flourishing as a person to be the overall purpose of life—flourishing in the sense of realizing one’s full human potential in variety and possibility of choice and action” [1, p.427] and that in the process of doing so, he laid the foundations for later work on information ethics. Floridi [2], the most prominent contemporary analyst of information ethics, has also given credit for this ethical stance to Wiener.

A German cybernetics

Hermann Schmidt (1894-1968) was a physicist by training, gaining a first degree and a PhD from the University of Göttingen. He began to realise the generic nature of control engineering and its applicability to non-technical areas, and in 1939 he was asked to chair a new control engineering committee of the VDI Verein Deutscher Ingenieure. Under his leadership the committee took a broad approach, working with electrical engineers, physiologists and others, promulgating these ideas in lectures and publications. He was appointed to probably the first full chair in control engineering in Berlin towards the end of the war.

In this paper, however, we wish to discuss his post-war interests in philosophy and ethics. Schmidt saw control engineering as a major part of the way that technology would solve many of society’s ills. Influenced by the philosopher Arnold Gehlen^[1], who viewed human beings as having inherent flaws that could be overcome only by means of social and cultural developments and institutions, Schmidt viewed technology as playing a vital rôle in the perfection of human society. For Schmidt, the engineer must appreciate that:

his technological world is no wall separating him from nature, but a bridge upon which nature and intellect [Geist] meet, a world in which nature and intellect have joined forces through the work of our hands – a world, like that of language, that we have set between us and nature through our own creative power, and a world that is thus much closer to us than unspoiled nature [5, p.88].

Heinz von Foerster and the funding of the Biological Computing Laboratory

Our last story relates to a slightly later historical period. Much of the core work around cybernetics in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States was carried out at the Biological Computing Laboratory (BCL) at the University of Illinois, under the leadership of Heinz von Foerster. It was at the BCL that the approach described by von Foerster as second-order cybernetics took shape; and a number of those still active in the American Society for Cybernetics had a close connection with the BCL.

Von Foerster’s interests were in epistemology and neuropsychology (along with his early research in physics), and he conducted no military research. As an Austrian of part-Jewish heritage, he rather remarkably managed to survive the Second World War by working in Berlin “on obscure scientific projects considered too important to draft him into the German army yet carefully avoiding any usable result” [4, p.554]. He continued this approach when he moved to the United States after the war.

However, as Umpleby [7] relates, the funding of the BCL was closely tied to that of the US military. During the 1950s and 1960s, the US Department of Defense (DoD) unproblematically funded non-military basic research into a range of scientific topics, including the work of the BCL. Public protest around the Vietnam War, however, led to the passing in 1970 of legislation (the Mansfield Amendment) that the DoD could only fund specifically military work. This was created by a liberal Democrat who sought to reduce the influence of the military on American universities – but it had the side-effect of cutting funding for groups such as the BCL. As Von Foerster was unwilling to link his research to military work (unlike researchers in artificial intelligence), the main centre of US cybernetics research was forced to close in 1976.

Conclusions

The accounts of cyberneticists wrestling with ethical dilemmas, especially around the military implications of their work, have been told here in a historical vein, rather than trying to draw conclusions for present ethical issues. We summarise here a few of the key conclusions:

1. Cybernetics has never been an ethically-neutral disciple. Ethical considerations have been present from the start in the work of cyberneticists, drawn from a number of source fields (including philosophy, mathematics, physics, engineering and neuroscience) and from several different countries. They are also independent of the political system involved – ethical issues in cybernetics are as relevant to a liberal democracy (such as the United States) as it is to a dictatorship (such as Nazi Germany).
2. Likewise, we would argue that there is no such thing as ethically neutral information. The cases above show that the gathering, analysis and distribution of information is inherently tied up with ethical issues. An attempt to ignore the ethical concerns all too often leads to the privileging of those in positions of power.
3. Although we have drawn our examples in this paper from concerns around military applications, the same concerns can readily be applied to information issues in a range of fields. A clear example of widespread current concern is that of surveillance by governments and corporations upon individuals, but many other areas apply.

It is important to acknowledge that there is now a considerable amount of work on information ethics, both in terms of theoretical frameworks and in application to specific issues. In its current form, Floridi [2] suggests information ethics dates back to the 1980s, although it has a number of antecedents, including the work of Wiener. We have shown in this paper that at least in the area of military application, cyberneticists have long been concerned with ethical issues.

References

1. Bynum, T.W. (2010) ‘Philosophy in the Information Age’, Metaphilosophy, 41, No. 3, pp. 420-442.
2. Floridi, L. (2013) The Ethics of Information, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
3. Habermas, J. (1969) Technik und Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie’, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main
4. Krieg, P. ‘The human face of cybernetics: Heinz von Foerster and the history of a movement that failed…’, Kybernetes 34, no. 3/4, pp. 551-557.
5. Schmidt, H. (1941) ‘Regelungstechnik – die technische Aufgabe und ihre wissenschaftliche, sozialpolitische und kulturpolitische Auswirkung’, Zeitschrift des VDI, Vol. 85, No. 4, pp. 81-88.
6. Scientific American (1955), Automatic Control, Simon & Schuster, New York
7. Umpleby, S. (2003) ‘Heinz von Foerster and the Mansfield amendment’, Cybernetics and Human Knowing, 10(3/4), pp.161–163
8. Wiener, N. (1947) ‘A scientist rebels’, Atlantic Monthly, January, pp. 46.
9. Wiener, N. (1948) Cybernetics: or control and communication in the animal and the machine, Wiley, New York
10. Wiener, N. (1998) ‘The history and prehistory of cybernetics’, Kybernetes, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 29-37.

^[1] For an introduction to Gehlen’s philosophical thought see Man: his Nature and Place in the World (1940, thoroughly revised in 1950). Gehlen was following an earlier German tradition dating back at least to Kapp (1877) of viewing technologies as ‘projections’ of human organs, and his approach influenced later German philosophers including Habermas [3].

Introduction

I suggest a simple thought experiment. Science fiction books occasionally mention an imaginary device: a replicator. It consists of two boxes; you put an object in a box, close the lid, and instantly get its undistinguishable fully functional copy in the second box. In particular, a replicator can replicate smaller replicators.

Now imagine the economy based on replicators. It needs two groups of producers: a very small group of engineers who build and maintain the biggest replicator and a very diverse, but still small, group of artisans, designers, and scientists who produce a single original prototype of each object. This hypothetical economy also needs service sector, mostly waste disposal.

Next, try, if you can, imagine a sustainable, stable, equal, and democratic model of education that supports this lopsided economy.

But this apocalyptic future is already upon us – in the information sector of economy, where computers act as replicators of information. Mathematics, due to its special role in the information technology, is the most affected part of human culture. The new patterns of division of labour split mathematics for makers from mathematics for users and trigger a crisis of mathematics education. The latter increasingly focuses on mathematics for users and undermines itself because sustainable reproduction of mathematics requires teachers educated as makers.

The ultimate replicating machines

I borrowed the title of this section from a chapter in my book [1]. I argue there that the essence of mathematics is its precise replicability which imitates the stability of laws of the physical universe, that

Mathematics is the ultimate in the technology transfer. [2]

A mathematical theorem needs to be proved only once – and then used for centuries. An algorithm needs to be developed only once – and then it can serve, as the Google Ranking Algorithm does, as a kingpin of a global information system.

In previous historic epochs, every use of a mathematical result required participation of humans, who had to understand what they were doing and therefore had to be mathematically educated; the criterion of understanding was the ability to reproduce the proof. Nowadays, mathematics is used mostly by computers, not by people, and used in an instantly replicable way.

This creates a completely different socio-economic environment for mathematics.

Division of labour

As I argue in my paper [3], the history of human civilisation is the history of division of labour. By the start of the 21st century, the ever deepening division of labour has reached a unique point when 99% of people have not even the vaguest idea about the workings of 99% of technology in their immediate surrounding. This transformation is deeper than the Great Industrial Revolution of 18^th and 19^th centuries, and its social consequences have a chance to be more dramatic.

Mathematics and mathematics education are the proverbial canaries in the mine, they are more sensitive to this technological change. It costs to make (“replicate”) a smartphone, it costs to write an app for smartphone, but the per unit cost of mathematics encoded and hardwired within the phone   converges to zero.

There are more mobile phones in the world now than toothbrushes. But the mathematics built into mobile communication systems is beyond the understanding of most universities' graduates. This creates a paradox: mathematics is used in everyday life millions of times more intensively than 50 or even 10 years ago – but remains invisible.

Meanwhile, mathematical results and concepts involved in practical applications are much deeper and more abstract and difficult than ever before. The cutting edge of mathematics research moves further away from the stagnating mathematics education. From the point of view of an aspiring PhD student, mathematics looks like New York in the Capek Brothers' book A Long Cat Tale [4] (and notice that Karel Capek was the man who coined the word “robot”):

And New York – well, houses there are so tall that they can't even finish building them. Before the bricklayers and tilers climb up them on their ladders, it is noon, so they eat their lunches and start climbing down again to be in their beds by bedtime. And so it goes on day after day.

Investment cycles and research-and-development cycles in many modern industries are just two years long. On the other hand, proper mathematics education still takes at least 15 years from the age of 5 to the age of 20 – or even 20 years if postgraduate studies are needed.

As I argue in [3], mathematics education is being undermined by this tension between the ever deepening specialisation of labour and ever increasing length of specialised training required for jobs at the increasingly sharp cutting edge of technology.

If banks and insurance companies were interested in having numerate customers, we would witness the golden age of school mathematics – fully funded, enjoying cross-party political support, promoted and popularised by the best advertising companies in all forms of mass and social media. But they are not; banks and insurance companies need numerate workforce – and even more so they need innumerate customers.

25 years ago in the West, the benchmark of arithmetic competence at the consumer level was the ability to balance a chequebook. Nowadays, bank customers can instantly get full information about the state of their accounts from an app on a mobile phone – together with timely and tailored to individual circumstances advice on the range of available financial products. As Anna Sfard [5] put it,

It is enough to take a critical look at our own lives to realize that we do not, in fact, need much mathematics in our everyday lives.

In short, the present model of “mathematics education for all” is unsustainable and, not surprisingly, first cracks have started to appear. On the other hand, the reproduction cycle of mathematics

primary school – high school – university – teacher training – a teacher's return to school

is 20 years long, and it is not clear at all whether the current model of education could be smoothly and peacefully replaced by the new one, aimed at in-depth mathematics education of a much smaller stratum of people. Assessments of this situation from the opposite ends of the political spectrum are instructive:

Failure in achieving a meaningful mathematics education is not a malfunction which could be solved through better research and a proper crew, but is endemic in capitalist schooling. (Alexandre Pais [6])

While there is an upside limit to the average intellectual capabilities of population, there is no upper limit to the complexity of technology. … With ... an apparently inbred upper limit to human IQ, are we destined to have an ever smaller share of our workforce staff our ever more sophisticated high-tech equipment and software? (Alan Greenspan [7])

Mathematics education

When previously meaningful social activities (and social institutions supporting them) loose their economic purpose, they either collapse or transform themselves into a complex of rituals, “cargo cult,” in the words of Richard Feynman. In the “cargo cult” environment, everything goes. This is why we see the explosive growths in the number of various approaches and methods tried at school – because there are no objective bottom-line criteria to distinguish between them.

Here, I want to touch on a popular myth: that the same computer technology that kills demand for mathematics will save mathematics education.

First of all, we have to distinguish between education and training. As a famous saying goes,

“For those of you with daughters, would you rather have them take sex education or sex training?”

This witticism makes it clear what is expected from education as opposed to training: the former should give a student ability to make informed and responsible decisions.

This is the old class divide that tears many education systems apart: education is for people who are expected to make decisions and give orders; training is for ones who take orders.

However it is increasingly accepted that modern mathematics education is not even training of workforce for future employment (this model of education is so 20^th century), it is filtering of workforce by means of mathematical tests – even if no mathematics is needed at the actual workplace. Computers could be very efficient tools for training students to pass tests – I do not dispute that. However, although the skill of passing a mathematics test remains personally important, it becomes increasingly redundant at the scale of the economy as a whole. An exam at the end of the course should test students' ability to perform certain tasks – but in case of school and college mathematics, these tasks now are much better performed by computers – see a detailed discussion of that in [3]. Then what is the aim of training? The ability to imitate robots? Are students' skills assessed are of any economic (or "real life") value if computers can pass the tests in an instant and with better scores than humans?

Makers and Users

So far I was looking at the emerging new social environment of mathematics. Now a few words on consequences for mathematics itself.

The new patterns of division of labour split mathematics for makers from mathematics for users. How t describe the two? The replicability of mathematics mirrors the stability of laws of the physical universe, which is captured by the apocryphal formula:

Mathematics is the language of contracts with Nature which Nature accepts as binding.

It is dangerous to replace, in this formulation, "Nature" by "Computer" – but it appears that this increasingly frequently happens in practice. Therefore, in my understanding, Mathematics for Makers is mathematics that cannot be entrusted to computers, mathematics for those whose duty is writing contracts with Nature, in the process inventing new mathematics and new ways to apply mathematics. In terms of the “universal replicator” simile from the Introduction, these are people who produce the originals for subsequent replication.

The mainstream mathematics education increasingly focuses on mathematics for users. But sustainable reproduction of mathematics requires teachers educated as makers – on that point, I refer the reader to my paper [8].

Conclusions

The expansionist model of mathematics education is dying because the technological changes in the wider economy lead to the shift of demand for mathematically competent workers: smaller numbers are needed, but much better educated. Compression cracks are more destructive and less predictable than expansion gaps – for the obvious reason: where should the excessive mass go? Potential social consequences bring to mind the apocryphal curse

May you live in interesting times;

It looks as if interesting times are already upon us. But I do not takes sides in the increasingly politicised debate. In my view, most policies in mathematics education can be divided in two categories:

• rearranging chairs on the deck of Titanic (the preferred option of the political Right);
• helping disadvantaged passengers to get better chairs on the deck of Titanic (the preferred option of the political Left).

My role is different, I am with my fellow teachers in the famous band that continues to play regardless. Not the first violin, of course; I am in the back row, with a tuba: “Boop, boop, boop, boop.” I am a mathematician; I will play to the end.

Disclaimer

The author writes in his personal capacity; his views do not necessarily represent the position of his employer or any other person, corporation, organisation or institution.

References and Notes

Borovik, A. V. Mathematics under the Microscope: Notes on Cognitive Aspects of Mathematical Practice, American Mathematical Society, Providence, USA, 2010; pp. 217 – 245.

Stewart, I. Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos. Penguin, London, UK, 1990.

Borovik, A. V. Calling a spade a spade: Mathematics in the new pattern of division of labour, to appear. A pdf file: http://goo.gl/TT6ncO

Capek, K.; Capek, J. A Long Cat Tale, Albatros, Prague, The Czech Republic, 1996; p. 44.  

Sfard, A. Why Mathematics? What Mathematics? In The Best Writings on Mathematics, Pitici M., Ed.; Princeton University Press, Princeton, USA, 2013; pp. 130-142.

Pais, A. An ideology critique of the use-value of mathematics, Stud. Math., 2013, vol. 84, pp. 15 – 34.

Greenspan, A. The Map and the Territory: Risk, Human Nature and the Future of Forecasting, Allen Lane, USA, 2013.

Borovik, A. V. Didactic transformation in mathematics teaching, http://www.academia.edu/189739/Didactic_transformation_in_mathematics_teaching

1.The root cause of stagnation of western value philosophy

After had developed hundred years, western value philosophy have been in a standstill and met some theoretical difficulties. I believe the reason resulting in this predicament comes down to it that the ontology has been built on the dualism which splits the world into substance and spirituality. Mr. Wang Yuliang generally concluded the developing process of western value philosophy into three steps:The first step, which had been lasting from the end of 19th century to the early 20th century, was the formation period of western value philosophy. During this period, the subjectivism axiology, such as theories of Affective pleasant, object of desire, meet the demand, evaluation result had maintained the predominance. The second step, which had been lasting from the early 20th century to the 1920s, was a period that the subjectivism axiology and objectivism axiology had co-existed. Except the subjectivism axiology mentioned above, in this period the theory of object of interest had emerged.

Meanwhile, two objectivism axiology, intuitionism axiology and phenomenology axiology, had emerged as well. The third step, which has been lasting from the 1930s till now, the subjectivism axiology, especially the emotionalism, has played a predominant role. To summarize the main formations of the three steps’ axiology, we can acquire two dominating branches of axiology, subjectivism axiology and objectivism axiology. Professor Northrop had ever said that the concept mainly has two kinds: one is acquired on instinct, the other one is acquired by hypothesis. He said ：“The concept that acquired on instinct is such kind a concept that express some direct insight things, the full significance of it is given by some direct insight things. ”Making a general survey of subjectivism axiology, its various concepts can be boiled down to the concepts acquired on instinct, such as theories of Affective pleasant, object of desire, meet the demand, evaluation result and so on, which  are all perceived by human intuitive feeling directly. Therefore, the subjectivism insists that we must use the intuitive feeling, whether it has been satisfied and pleased, whether its desires have been implemented, whether it obtains favorable outcome, to define if the value exists. And the positive value that is advantageous to human is the real value, the negative value and neutral value don’t exist, so the boundedness, one-sideness and the unsustainability of subjective value have been reflected.

The other value form, objectivism axiology that is contrary to subjective value form, had emerged in the first 20 years of 20th century. This situation can be explained by Hegelian words-everything contains its negation and Chinese ancient philosophy book, the Book of Changes which annotated by Taoism and Confucianism, also pointed out it that everything in this world, when it develops to its extremity, will develop conversely to the other extremity. Therefore, when the subjective value develops to its extremity, its negation-objective value, will be sure to emerge. Going around and around, nowadays the subjective value becomes the leading role once again. As you can see, the western value philosophy has been hovering between the subjective and objective axiology al the time, using different languages and concepts to interpret it and repeating this work, so it is impossible to have any theoretical breakthrough.

The reason leading to this plight is that the division of subjectivism and objectivism, which is the greatest obstacle. Moreover, this division is built on the traditional dualism, which indicates us that the western value philosophy is fundamentally restricted by its conservative ontology, which leaves no chance for it to break through and develop.

2.The root cause of stagnation of western value philosophy

If it wants to transcend its old frame, the western value philosophy has to find out the breakthrough point on ontology. And Wu kun’s philosophy of information brings us a brand new  perspective, which makes the fundamental change in ontology possible. He surmounts the traditional threshold of dualism, treating the information as a being and introducing a new ontological viewpoint. He produces a in-self information as a media located between substance and spirit, thus he gives us a whole new world view-a double beings world, which is that an information world reflecting multiple prescriptive property of material world is beard by the material world. Therefore, this world, our world, and its all existence are both physical and informational.

While we conclude that our world is a double beings world that contains matter and information, we revolutionize the traditional dualism world view. The relationship between matter and spirit are no longer the fundamental relation of ontology, and we should define at least three relations from a complex and multiple information world perspective: the relation between matter and information, the relation between matter and spirit and the relation between information and spirit. Therefore we can conclude three philosophical categories of information form: in-self information, for-self information and reproductive information.

3. The new meaning and value of information axiology of Wu Kun

3.1 The definition of value in the information value philosophy.

Currently more popular definition of value is usually considered by placing in the relationship between subject and object, namely one kind of effectiveness relationship that object meet the requirements of the subject with their own properties and subject is met by object. Such definitions emphasize that the subject is satisfied by object with their own properties, and the definition is based on the premise of that the subject can perceive the object. Otherwise there is no theory of meet the demand, then how the subject to perceive the objects, the existing theories of Western value philosophy is failed or not been elucidated.

Wu Kun described the cognitive activities of human in his information theory of epistemology, namely the object can not access directly to the human perceptual system, human sense organs can not contact with the object directly, but should re-combined information about the object that useful for subject through a lot of intermediary and multilayer filter. Thus, if there is no informational intermediaries, there is no human perception, feelings, let alone the meet problems. Therefore, the current popular definition of the value is a narrow definition that even didn’t defined the nature of real value, then the philosophical theories of values in Western under the definition must be one-sided, superficial, and not stand up to scrutiny.

The information philosophy of value that introduce the information redefined the concept of the value:“ From a philosophical level, the value is the effects that (material, information, including the subjective form of information - spirit) achieved by internal interaction or external interaction of things.” This definition is firstly breakthrough the definition take the subject as the reference, regard the value as a common phenomenon in internal interaction or external interaction of all things; Secondly, further proposed that only interaction is not value, interaction itself does not the value directly, the changes in each sides caused by interaction is the effect(value) ;Thirdly, the effect that realized in the interaction not only can occur in the relationship between the material and spirit, but also may occur in the relationship between the material and information, information and spirit, and which should be the fundamental relationship between the material and information; and finally, this effect should be the interaction of two or more parties shared nature of the effect can be positive, negative or neutral , not judge by man, but by the role of the development of things, which can be judge as positive value, negative value or neutral value. It seems that the definition of the value proposed by Wu Kun is more extensive applicability and explanatory power. It covers the existing Western value theory that major centering on subject, also can explain the natural value phenomenon which did not clarified in Western value theories. And from the vertical and horizontal relationships in the evolution of the universe, the natural value or Heaven value is called ontological value, primary value, information philosophy of value that established on the basis of this can be continually renewed, progressive, while humanitarian value advocated by the Western value philosophy is only secondary value or derived value, regard it as a value ontology, its foundation itself is  not reliable, which will inevitably fall into the theory crisis.

3.2 Three classifications of value form based on the form of information

Since there are three basic forms of information in the philosophy of information: In-itself information,for-itself information and regenerated information. So we have reason to believe that there are also three basic value forms (in-itself value, for-itself value and regenerated value) in the information philosophy of value that developed on the basis of philosophy of information, First of all, the in-itself value is effect that generated by the interaction of universe itself and cosmic inventory in accordance with their own laws, which is the most common and most basic form of value, and can also be called primary value.

As long as the universe exists, everything in this open system commonly correlates with each other and its interrelations with things outside this system also  universally exist. Consequently, everything itself and the mutual interaction and multiple interactions among everything inside and outside this system produce effects, which makes sure that the initself information exist, dispensing with judging by satisfying the need of subject. In the second, for-itself value ,in fact, is the value that advocated by the Western value philosophy which recognize the value cognition of people as a starting point, recognize the evaluation results of value of human as value itself, then appearing of the related theory of value such as“positive effect of the object to the subject” or “the object meet the requirements of the subject”that specified the value itself. Because of that the for-itself value is value form that demand the subject’t intuitive grasp to initself value through perceiving the information transmitted by object.

Finally, the regenerated value is a value form and value idea that human striving for and trying to achieved, which imagined and transformed by human on the basis of for-itself value As seen above, the new information value philosophy that based on the philosophy of information, can break through obstacles of development of existing Western value philosophy which introduced to concept of information made itself more inclusive and universal. In addition, the natural value or Heaven value is raised to the ontological value, and more in line with the development and evolution of the universe, and will certainly continue to innovate and develop with the evolution of the universe. Furthermore, the new information value philosophy is more refined the form of value, including initself value, for-itself value and regenerated value .Thus, I believe that this is a fundamental change for Western value philosophy.

1. ICT and its role in the current educational process

The present educational process is typical by a very large support of ICT. E-learning has become an integral part of contemporary education in a number of educational institutions worldwide. Since the pioneering beginning the development of applications which allows social interaction and communication increased the opportunity to share knowledge, exchange experiences, forming collaborations etc. On the other hand it seems to be still a big gap between the efficient utilization of these applications and the possibilities of these applications or the social media.

One of the main barrier of their adequate utilization is the lack knowledge about the spectrum of the applications or social media which could be a good helper in the educational process. The teachers must very often look for them themselves without enough knowledge about and sometimes without any skills to work with.  

Teachers and students therefore remains unknown number of useful and interesting contents that may be used by a social media or other applications during the learning or teaching process. It seems to be quaint, but it is not uncommon to see a teacher during the lecture only near the blackboard with a chalk in his hand or at best, standing in a front of the screen with the boring power-point presentation.

Of course, the problem could be not only in the lack information about the applications but also in the lack knowledge about the modern and efficient teaching methods or in the interest to include the approaches to the current teaching scheme and in a lot of other reasons.

2. The face of the modern educational process

Modern educational process should be characterized by an increasing amount of self-study to transform the traditional lecturing resp. teaching to the learning. (1) The aim is to make a balance between the role of student and the role of teacher to be more equal partners instead of an authority on the one hand and the ignorant disciple on the other hand. The other important aim is to increase the space for knowledge development and knowledge acquisition. (2) The appropriate use of the social media could influence the strengthening student activities and their preparation for fruitful co-operation and collaboration. In many cases the students are able to orientate in the offer and use of social media better than the teachers.

But a teacher first should be able to demonstrate how to use the media effectively, to give them appropriate examples to motivate the students to look for different ways of data collection, knowledge sharing and experience exchanging.

3. Five important “literacies” of social media

Rheingold informs that the people must be trained to be literate in social media that they are not inherently born knowing how to use them effectively. (3) He found out the five important interconnected “literacies” of social media. (4)

Attention:

The ability to know where and when to place one´s attention when navigating various types of social media and when navigating between social media and real world moments.

Participation:

The identification of “a good participant” due to effective usage of appropriate and helpful social media

Collaboration:

The key aspect of the effective training and educational process at all

Network awareness:

The understanding of network operating and its functioning

Critical consumption:

The ability to determine a relevant, reliable and usable information in “the ocean” of online data (4)

4. Conclusions

The paper focuses on the current situation and identification of the barriers and limitations as well as the added value of the social media use and the use of other applications which allow social interaction and communication. The comparison of the current situation with the identified interconnected literacies can better show the points which are still important to improve and develop. As Rheingold said “technology has given us freedom and power” (5) but similarly as in the other cases the educators must be careful to manage the usage of social media effectively and to operate through them expertly and responsibly.

References and Notes

1. Barr R. B. , Tagg J.: From Teaching to Learning, A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education in http://www.athens.edu/visitors/QEP/Barr_and_Tagg_article.pdf online 4. 5. 2015
2. Wilson S. M. and Berne J.: Teacher Learning and the Acquisition of Professional Knowledge: An Examination of Researchon Contemporary Professional Development, Review of Research in Education, Vol. 24 (1999), pp. 173-209, in American Educational Research Association, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1167270, Accessed: 20/12/2012 12:58
3. Crook J.: Howard Rheingold’s Five Media Literacies, ETEC 5310, 2012 in http://www.jaycrook.com/jay/masters/Howard%20Rheingold.pdf , online 4. 5. 2015
4. Blankenship M.: How Social Media Can and Should Impact Higher Education, Distance Learning Technology, Hispanic Outlook, 29.11. 2010 in http://www.jaycrook.com/jay/masters/Howard%20Rheingold.pdf https://www.wdhstore.com/hispanic/data/pdf/nov29-howsocial.pdf, online 4.5. 2015
5. Rheingold, H. (2010). Attention, and Other 21st-Century Social Media Literacies. EDUCAUSE Review, 45(5), 14-16.
6. Rheingold, H. (2008). Using Social Media to Teach Social Media. New England Journal Of Higher Education, 23(1), 25-26.

Introduction

Worldwide information studies has been so diversified nowadays that the unified theory of information science seems very hard to achieve within a foreseeable time frame. People with different backgrounds in academy may have different explanations for this diversity. To my understanding, however, the major factor responsible for the diversity is the improper employment of methodology in information studies.

Methods

As is well known, the studies of information science are very different from that of physical science. Yet, most of authors in information studies are still employing the methodology, which is only suitable for the studies of physical science and is featured by “divide and conquer”, or reductionism. In the studies of information science, information plays the role of the lifeline of an information system. By employment of the method of “divide and conquer”, the information lifeline will be cut into a number of smaller pieces and the properties of information system can never be recovered by summing up all the smaller pieces.

Results and Discussion

Therefore, information studies should experience a great shift in methodology, shifting from the traditional one in physical science to the new methodology, which is suitable in the studies of complex sciences and is featured by the information view, system view, ecology view, and the view of interaction between subject and object. This is because of the fact that information science is really a sort of complex science.

Conclusions

This talk will provide an analysis for the methodology shift in information studies and will also provide an explanation to the general model for information studies derived from the methodology of complex science. The speaker believes that the new methodology and the model of information process derived from the methodology will be helpful and useful for information studies.

Acknowledgments

The author of this writing wants to express his thanks to the National Natural Science foundation of China for the valuable supporting to his research by projects granted.

References and Notes

1. Zhong, Y.X. Principles of Advanced Intelligence, Science Press: Beijing, China, 2014

Introduction

The formulation of a unified theory of information still poses a fundamental scientific challenge [1,2]. Information may be present or being transmitted in two different ways, either in native form by physical structures or in symbolic form by coded sequences of letters, images, etc. The latter form is equivalent (i.e., necessary and sufficient) to the existence of life; there is no life without symbolic information processing, and there is no symbolic information without life [2]. In contrast, structural information may be attributed to any physical, unenlivened processes or structures and can usually be quantified in terms of entropy. The self-organised emergence of symbolic information out of structural information exhibits typical features of kinetic phase transitions of the 2^nd kind and is referred to as a "ritualisation" transition [3], a term coined by Huxley [4] in behavioural biology for the development of signal-activity out of use-activity [5]. The origin of life, the appearance of human language or the establishment of social categories such as private property or money can be understood as ritualisation transitions [2,3]. All these transitions have in common that as their results, arbitrary symbols are produced and recognised by information-processing devices, by "senders" and "receivers" in the sense of Shannon’s information theory, which had developed during an evolutionary process along with the actual set of symbols and of coding rules (such as “grammars” [6,7]), and replaced a related original non-symbolic causal chain.

A written text such as this abstract is typically a physical structure consisting of dark and light dots. The information carried by the text is in no way reducible to the physical properties of the given spatial distribution of dye; in this sense symbolic information is an emergent property. However, written text appeared as a result of the evolution of human language from more primitive signal systems used by animals, and those in turn from elementary physical and chemical processes. Here, ritualisation is understood as a universal qualitative transition from elementary structural to emergent symbolic information properties in the course of evolution processes. Another emergent property that often accompanies symbolic information is its value, such as selective values in biology or exchange values in economy; this aspect will elucidated in more detail in the presentation of Werner Ebeling at this conference.

Methods

Derived from thermodynamics [8] and the mathematical theories of bifurcations and catastrophes, the concept of kinetic phase transitions in non-equilibrium systems [9] appeared to be a useful tool also for the physical description of evolution processes which are thought of as potentially unlimited series of dynamic instabilities and subsequent steps of self-organisation [2,6]. In combination with empirical paradigms developed in population biology [10], ethology [5], evolution theory of culture and religion [11, 12], language theory [13,14] and economy [15], the striking qualitative similarity of the transition processes observed in those fields motivates their unified description from the perspective of self-organisation of information [2,3,16].

Results and Discussion

The very first ritualisation transition was the origin of life when chemical interaction of randomly assembled organic molecules became controlled by a primitive precursory genetic code, executed by catalysts forming a simple translation apparatus enclosed in a proto-cellular compartment [2,17]. Ritualisation was and is an extremely successful transition phenomenon in evolution that has been repeated many times after it once had happened for the first time, as briefly summarised in Table 1.

Table 1. Estimated time table of significant ritualisation transitions in evolution history (modified from [2]). Starting with the genetic code, each qualitative step of symbolic information processing gave rise to novel emergent properties, valuation and competition mechanisms.

Time BP   /    Evolution stage   /   Emergence of

4500 Myr   /   Random catalysis   /   Physico-chemical networks
3700 Myr   /   Genetic code   /   Biological systems
1200 Myr   /   Sexual reproduction   /   Sexual selective values
635 Myr   /   Morphogenesis   /   Multicellular organisms
518 Myr   /   Neuronal networks   /   Individual information gathering
2 Myr   /   Human spoken language   /   Human social systems
5500 yr   /   Written numbers   /   Book-keeping of personal property
2600 yr   /   Coined money   /   Market economy, exchange values
2600 yr   /   Greek natural science   /   Scientific information accumulation

Phase transitions of the 2^nd kind own the characteristics [8] that the two phases involved (i) possess different symmetries, (ii) are indistinguishable at the transition threshold and (iii) cannot stably coexist in space. The new symmetry that emerges during the ritualization transition is coding invariance; if one set of given symbols, say, Latin letters, is replaced one-to-one by a completely different set of symbols, say, computer bits, the functioning of the entire system will remain unaffected if sender and received are modified accordingly. This is illustrated by the letter “A” in Figure 1. In contrast, the picture on the left of Figure 1 cannot be arbitrarily modified without losing its meaning, the ox. The new, neutrally stable, so-called Goldstone mode related to the coding symmetry is found in every symbolic information system; it permits slow drift and diversification of the set of symbols and at the same time preserves a trace of its own evolution history. The paradox discussed already by Herder in 1772 [13] whether our spoken words are completely arbitrary creations of the human mind or are of traceable onomatopoetic origin may be explained this way.

Figure 1. Example for the ritualization transition in the evolution of the human written language. A physical object such as an ox is originally described by a symbolic picture (a “caricature”) which gradually develops into a mere symbol, losing any relation to the original object. The information represented by the final symbol(s) is an emergent property as its meaning cannot be derived from the physical dye distribution of letters such as “A”.

(please see the PDF version for the Figure).

Conclusions

Symbolic information systems appeared exclusively during the evolution of life, if technical devices are counted as “honorary living things” [18]. Similarly exclusively, ritualisation may be the universal transition process by which symbolic information emerged from structural information. Accordingly, very different symbolic information system have universal properties in common which find their roots in the properties of the ritualisation transition, in particular, in the coding symmetry which fundamentally distinguishes symbolic from native information. In turn, the physical carriers of symbols possess native information; their physical structures are percussions of their own evolution history. The way how emergent symbolic information, the “soul”, became liberated from its original physical nature, the “body”, may be an evolutionary approach to a future unified theory of information.

Acknowledgments

The author is indebted to Wolfgang Hofkirchner for being invited to the ISIS Summit Vienna 2015.

References and Notes

1. Hofkirchner, W., Ed. The Quest for a Unified Theory of Information; Gordon and Breach: Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1999.
2. Feistel, R.; Ebeling, W. Physics of Self-Organization and Evolution; Wiley-VCH: Weinheim, Germany, 2011.
3. Feistel, R. Ritualisation und die Selbstorganisation der Information. In Selbstorganisation und Determination; Niedersen, U.; Pohlmann, L., Eds.; Duncker & Humblot: Berlin, Germany, 1990; Volume 1, pp. 83-98.
4. Huxley, J. The ritualization of Behaviour in animals and man. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 1966, 251, 249-269.
5. Tembrock, G. Grundlagen des Tierverhaltens; Akademie-Verlag: Berlin, Germany, 1977.
6. Ebeling, W.; Feistel, R. Physik der Selbstorganisation und Evolution; Akademie-Verlag: Berlin, Germany, 1982.
7. Jiménez-Montaño, M.A.; Feistel, R.; Diez-Martínez, O. On the information hidden in signals and macromolecules: I. Symbolic time-series analysis. Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences 2004, 8, 445-478
8. Landau, L.D.; Lifshitz, E.M. Statistical Physics; Reed Educational and Professional Publishing: Oxford, UK, 1980.
9. Haken, H. Synergetics: An Introduction; Springer-Verlag: Berlin, Germany, 1978.
10. Fisher, R.A. The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection; Clarendon Press; Oxford, UK, 1930.
11. Koenig, O. Kultur und Verhaltensforschung; DTV, München, 1970.
12. Wunn, I.; Urban, P.; Klein, C. Götter - Gene - Genesis: Die Biologie der Religionsentstehung; Springer Spektrum; Berlin, Heidelberg, 2015.
13. Fitch, W.T. The evolution of language; Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 2010.
14. Ifrah, G. Universalgeschichte der Zahlen; Campus-Verlag: Fankfurt/Main, Germany, 1991.
15. Marx, K. Das Kapital, Erster Band; Dietz-Verlag: Berlin, Germany, 1951.
16. Ebeling, W.; Feistel, R. Selforganization of Symbols and Information. In Chaos, Information Processing and Paradoxical Games: The Legacy of John S Nicolis; Nicolis, G.; Basios, V., Eds.; World Scientific Pub Co.: Singapore, 2015; pp. 141-184.
17. Eigen, M. From Strange Simplicity to Complex Familiarity; Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2013.
18. Dawkins, R. The Blind Watchmaker; W.W. Norton & Co.: New York, 1996.

Introduction

China has a long-standing problem for patients to queue and book appointments with doctors (gua hao) in real life, especially with those medical experts (zhuan jia hao). The demands for expert doctors in 3AAA hospitals are extremely high, leading to a hidden market for scalpers to trade doctors’ appointment notes. To tackle this problem, China introduced a series of regulations in the year of 2009 as a means of healthcare reform, and required these 3AAA hospitals to adopt the Online Booking Systems (wang shang gua hao; abbreviated as OBS below) gradually – in which patients can book with doctors in advance by their personal identity information and doctors can easily access his/her clinical record before the appointment [1]. This is quite similar to GP online services offered by NHS (i.e. www.chooseandbook.nhs.uk); but it can be both managed by public institutions such as Beijing Health Bureau (www.bjguahao.gov.cn) and private funds (http://www.guahao.com/). This paper aims to examine how these online booking systems can transform patient experience.

Methods

This study interviews five groups of middle-aged people (with 3 – 5 people each group) in Beijing, mainly focusing on their experience of booking appointments with doctors as well as those of their relatives/friends [2]. A set of semi-structured questions are asked to identify the extent to which the OBS have changed patients’ behaviors/perceptions, as well as to examine what factors have constrained their adoption of OBS [3]. Meanwhile, this study will assess the impact of technological change in relation to various socio-economic factors [4]. Throughout this process, participants will be asked to identify problems needing to be the most urgently tackled, regarding China’s healthcare reform. Lastly, their views towards electronic medical records are investigated in relation to the privacy issue.  

Results and Discussion

In overall, participants interviewed by this study have shown positive attitudes towards the Online Booking Systems (OBS), mainly due to its accessible feature – i.e. People can take the initiative in terms of scheduling their own appointments (Besides this, many of them also use the telephone platform “114” as an alternative to make appointments). But it is clear that numbers of appointments allocated to OBS are limited [5]. Moreover, some criticize these technological advancements as a “temporary medical relief that only treat the symptom”, given the fact that 1) the supply of medical resources – still unevenly distributed both at the national and regional level – cannot meet the demand of patients and 2) the scarcity of expert doctors exacerbate patients’ willingness to strive for the perceived “best” medical service – despite few complained about the quality of these experts. On this basis, factors such as “illness seriousness”, “emergency extent” (mainly means those needing operations) etc. could pressure patients or their relatives to buy expert doctors’ appointment notes from scalpers for higher prices. Regarding the electronic medical records, most participants interviewed in this group have shown some extent of agreement on sharing them with their doctors as well as for further medical research; while they strongly opposed letting third parties to use them for commercial purposes (e.g. recommending medicine).

References and Notes

1. Li, Q.; Li, W. Large Hospital Registration System Design and Implementation. Programmable Controller & Factory Automation 2011, 9, 51-55.
2. The middle-aged group always needs to take care of elderly people and children, thus having extensive experience in terms of making appointments with doctors.
3. Bryman, A. Social Research Methods, 4th ed.; Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2012.
4. Kierkegaard, K. Governance Structures Impact on eHealth, Health Policy and Technology 2015, 4, 39-46.
5. Liu, B.; Jiang, X.; Cao, D.; Wang, L.; Wang, H. A Comparative Study of Different Booking
6. Methods in Hospitals of China, Modern Hospital Management 2007, 5, 5-7.