I start with a brief summary of kinds of information used in science, showing how they are nested (or hierarchical), with inner kinds inheriting properties of the outer kinds. I further argue that within each kind there is also hierarchical organization, and that the major kinds are distinguished by their dynamics, not just being ordered in a hierarchy. Next I argue that similar rules that apply to non-equilibrium thermodynamics apply also to information systems, and give some examples of resulting self-organization, or what we have called “rhythmic entrainment” [1]. I point out that entrainment that results from properties within a system are more efficient than ones that are entrained by outside forces. This also gives a sort of resilience to such systems, and in higher kinds of information allows for self-adaptation via accommodating both external forces and internally generated forces. I then apply these lessons to management and argue that the most efficient and creative form of management comes not from severe control from the top, or from imposed “efficiency” but through self-organization allowed by a low degree of control and the encouragement of diversity. This form of management I call facilitation. There may be specific people assigned a facilitation role, but this is not required; any member of a group can act as a facilitator. What is required, however, is that members of the group are accustomed to being open-minded and flexible. This form of management is most compatible with anarchism as a political (and management) theory, but has benefits in pretty much any political system. I then go into some complications of this view and some of their consequences.

Acknowledgments

I acknowledge assistance from the National Research Council of South Africa.

References

1. Collier, J.D..; Burch, M. Order from Rhythmic Entrainment and the Origin of Levels through Dissipation. Symmetry: Culture and Science Order / Disorder, Proceedings of the Haifa Congress 1998, 9, 165-178.

Introduction

While forms of peer-to-peer exchange have existed throughout human history, there has been an explosion of interest in the sharing economy and peer-to-peer exchange in recent times. This rise has been enabled in particular by web and mobile technologies, with examples of online-mediated sharing services including Craigslist, Airbnb, car sharing services, food sharing, tool sharing and so on. As noted in a March 2013 article on the rise of the sharing economy in The Economist^[1]: “technology has reduced transaction costs, making sharing assets cheaper and easier than ever—and therefore possible on a much larger scale. The big change is the availability of more data about people and things, which allows physical assets to be disaggregated and consumed as services.”

The disruptive impacts of these new services are also gaining increased public and governmental attention, especially monetised exchange services such as in AirBnB and Uber. Governments world wide are starting to react to concerns about changes to local neighbourhoods and about changes to tax revenues, setting up review commissions^[2] and making legislative changes.

The motivations to participate in such sharing and exchange services are wide and varied, and often conflicting (Shih et al, 2015). One critique of many of the more monetized services is that they are becoming increasingly driven from a profit motive and have lost touch with some of the initial idealism and motivations around these services, such as promoting sustainability through the sharing or collaborative consumption of resources, or promoting social connectivity and community building.

However for many people, the more altruistic and community/sustainability oriented motives still hold and exchange services such as time banking and food sharing are also the gaining increasing attention (Light and Miskelly, 2014) as people explore new possibilities for civic engagement, collaborative consumption and welfare structures. A key feature of these services is their focus on the more local community level. Another key feature is that exchanges are not monetized but valued in other ways. It would be more accurate here then to talk about the sharing community rather than the sharing economy.

However, how to ‘do’ such new services well, and how to design technologies to best support such services is still a matter of trial and error and reflection (Malmborg et al, 2015). What is becoming increasingly clear though from the literature and case studies of such communities is that the shift from the idealist rhetoric of sharing and community to the day-to-day realities of making such a service work is non-trivial. Just having a good technical support platform is not enough. Regardless of platform, or of any particular model of sharing exchange, there is significant ongoing effort needed to establish, maintain and grow a service, not only focussing on the practical aspects of the service but on also building trust and growing a community, and accessing relevant resources and infrastructures.

Contributing to these reflections, I will focus particularly on not-for-profit and non-monetised exchange services and explore the issues entailed in establishing and running these new forms of exchange, how technologies are being used as enablers, and what lessons can be learnt to date. To do this I will draw on some of our own and other’s research into various sharing communities, including food sharing (Ganglbauer et al, 2014), timebanking (Bellotti et al 214) and enabling sharing that engages older people as active participants (related to the AAL ‘Given and Take’ project^[3]).

Issues to be explored include how to establish new sharing communities, the organisational work to make a service work, the impact of funding and sponsorship models, the choice for model of exchange service, how to create new cultural norms and build sustained engagement. These findings have implications not just for the design of technical platforms to support services, but more critically in the design of the services that will realize the impact or not of such technologies in use.

Acknowledgments

I thank the partners, collaborators and participants in the EU AAL-funded ‘Give and Take’ project, in particular Lone Malmborg, Oezge Subasi, Naemi Luckner, Katharina Werner; also thanks to Eva Ganglabauer who undertook the research around food sharing as part of her PhD work.

References and Notes

1. Bellotti, V.; Cambridge, S.; Hoy, K.; Shih, P.; Handalian, L.; Han, K.; Carroll. J. Towards Community-Centered Support for Peer-to-Peer Service Exchange: Rethinking the Timebanking Metaphor. In Proc. CHI 2014, ACM Press, New York, 2014; pp. 2975-2984.
2. Ganglbauer, E.; Fitzpatrick, G.; Subasi, O.; Güldenpfennig, F. Think Globally, Act Locally: A Case Study of a Free Food Sharing Community and Social Networking. In Proc. CSCW’2014, ACM Press, New York, 2014; pp. 911-921.
3. Light, A.; Miskelly, C. Design for Sharing. Northumbria University / The Sustainable Society Network, Nov 2014.
4. Malmborg, L.; Light, A.; Fitzpatrick, G.; Bellotti, V.; Brereton, M. Designing for Sharing in Local Communities. In Pro.c CHI EA‘15, ACM Press New York, 2015; pp. 2357-2360.

^[1] “The rise of the sharing economy”, The Economist, Mar 9 2013. Available from http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21573104-internet-everything-hire-rise-sharing-economy [Last accessed 15 May 2015].

^[2] Dept for Business Innovation and Skills. Independent report: Sharing economy review: terms of reference. Retrieved from: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sharing-economy-review-terms-of-reference/sharing-economy-review-terms-of-reference [Last accessed 15 May 2015]

^[3] Give&Take - Designing a reciprocal exchange service for a good and engaged senior life. EU/AAL project 2014-2017. http://givetake.eu/

1. Introduction. Rationale

The description of this Session included many goals or questions, of which I discuss two here: 1) what do we consider physical information? 2) What are the roles of different appearances of symmetries in taking a stand on these questions? In a recent paper [1], based on a contribution I made to an Essay Contest on the subject, I discussed whether information or energy was more fundamental in the universe [2]. My answer (which did not win a prize), published elsewhere [3], was that energy was definitely more primitive than information as bits, but that energy and information as difference in energy emerged together from an unknown substrate, perhaps the quantum vacuum. Subsequently, energy and information always accompany one another. They follow the extension of logic to real processes or systems that I have called Logic in Reality (LIR) [4]. LIR is grounded in the dualistic properties of energy and applies to the evolution of complex processes at biological, cognitive and social levels of reality.

A direct relationship between energy and information has been established by Gerhard Luhn in his Causal-Compositional Concept (CCC) of information [5]. In this conception, the first change of state of any kind in the universe resulted in a non-uniform energy-density distribution, thus a new form. From this follows a Compositionality Principle that states if that there are fundamental processes in the Universe (the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics; the Pauli Exclusion Principle) and that they interact at all, this principle was itself new irreducible information or a basic principle of the universe, the basis for all subsequent processes of the emergence of form and structure. The new form thus results in a further unequal distribution of energy, and the meaning or content of this new form are the activities which this non-equilibrium distribution of energy induces, which appear as new laws. The universe appears to operate in such a way as to increase the number of new states or laws, that is, information.

Unlike standard bivalent and multi-valent linguistic logics and their mathematical equivalents, LIR is not topic-neutral but founds an ethics. It is therefore relevant to the development of an information commons in which information is a carrier of value, even at the lowest level as in the concept of Luciano Floridi [6]. Accordingly, theories which support or add credibility to the dialectical physical approach of my logical system ipso facto also support its application in the ethical domain.

2. Symmetry-Forming (In the beginning . . .)

The key postulate of LIR is that any element of an energetic process A is always accompanied, logically and functionally, by its opposite or contradiction non-A but only to the extent that when A is predominately actual (or present or active), non-A is always predominantly potential, alternately and reciprocally, without either ever going to the ideal limit of 0 or 1. The mid-point of equal actuality or potentiality is one of maximum opposition from which new entities may emerge at higher levels of reality or complexity.

Is it appropriate, then, to consider the relation between Symmetry and Asymmetry, defined as the absence of Symmetry, as an abstract one, or is there is real tension or energy exchange between the parts of a system displaying symmetries in a real temporal (energetic) sequence? One of the corollaries of the LIR system is that it is not necessary that these two issues be completely disjunct, unless we are discussing purely formal or abstract geometric Symmetry.

My proposal for discussion is that indeed Symmetry ‘was’ more fundamental, but it was so in a state of the universe about which we can only speculate. Assuming it is meaningful to ascribe Symmetry to what as far as we know now was an undifferentiated entity of some kind, singularity or not, one could then say that the ‘first’ Symmetry-Breaking was the emergence of particle-fields as we know them. We thus have a picture of Asymmetry as being ontologically secondary to Symmetry in our world. Energy, information, Asymmetry and difference all emerged together from an unknown substrate, making the difference that really made a difference! Symmetry then re-emerged (was actualized) when the universe 'cooled down', and the Asymmetry that was potentialized was re-actualized in the evolution of real processes associated with the appearance of mass.

Roger Penrose has developed a Conformal Cyclic Cosmology [7] which describes the possibility of smooth movement from an ‘old’, diffuse universe to a ‘new’ condensed one via a singularity. Matching of the disparate physical dimensions is possible due to conformal invariance, but as one moves to the new state, the Symmetry of fields corresponding to conformal invariance may not be true in a quantum context, as new rest mass begins to appear. This supports a speculation that the singularity, which does not have to be of infinitesimal size in this theory, possesses spherical symmetry which is then broken before the new symmetries appear.

3. Symmetry, Anti-Symmetry and Asymmetry

Like information, Symmetry is a complex metaconcept with both ontological and epistemological references to phenomena. Following Darvas, I will consider that Asymmetry is the conjunction of Symmetry and Anti-Symmetry. In particle physics, some particles will be characterized by symmetric wave functions (bosons) and others, for example fermions, by anti-symmetric wave functions. The most primitive example of Anti-Symmetry is in the wave functions of fermions (electrons) as expressed in the Pauli Exclusion Principle. Since this principle is ultimate ground of all real physical difference and the formation of complex chemical structures, one can say that our existence, let alone information, depends on that of Anti-Symmetry.

According to the ontological viewpoint, symmetries are a substantial part of the physical world, their theories representing properties (capacities for action) existing in nature or characterizing its structure. The epistemological aspect of symmetries is related to our ignorance of laws of nature; we use Symmetry principles to search for and hopefully discover them. Brading and Castellani [8] concede that aspects of Symmetry may be used to support either an ontological or an epistemological account, but I feel the emphasis given here is incorrect. Rather than focusing and/or trying to opt for one or the other, one might consider a picture in which both are partly correct, as suggested by Logic in Reality.

As with information, also, the mind moves back and forth between the aspect of Symmetry which is primarily active or actualized and the other, as above, alternately and reciprocally. Brading and Castellani state that many physical phenomena can be explained as direct or indirect consequences of 1) Symmetry principles, with an explanatory role based in a hierarchy of physical theories, or 2) Symmetry arguments, used especially in the area of Symmetry-Breaking (Cf. Section 4).     

5. Symmetry-Breaking

Symmetry-Breaking was first explicitly studied in physics to explain the physical occurrence of the phenomena on the basis of the Symmetry-Asymmetry of the situation. Explicit Symmetry-Breaking is a well-studied process in quantum mechanics, for example in parity. Spontaneous Symmetry-Breaking (SSB) will be discussed in another paper in this Conference, but SSB gives a way of understanding the complexity of nature without renouncing fundamental symmetries – or Symmetry as fundamental? In [8], the questions are asked why we should prefer symmetric to asymmetric fundamental laws, in other words, why assume that an observed Asymmetry requires a cause – asymmetric initial conditions or any form of Symmetry-Breaking? In SSB [8] the symmetry of the ‘cause’ is not lost, but is preserved in the totality of the outcomes (the ‘effect’). This apparent partial overlap between cause and effect should be a signal that the concepts of cause and effect themselves may follow some interactive pattern in their evolution. Following Lupasco, I have suggested [4] a contradictorial picture of cause-effects that applies at both the physical and theoretical levels. Among the classical examples of Symmetry cited in [8] are situations or processes, such as rest - motion which may display a certain Symmetry. Breaking of this Symmetry cannot happen without a cause, that is, no Asymmetry can arise spontaneously. This position, not unsurprisingly, is that of the anti-realist van Fraassen and it begs the question of the origin of any ‘first’ Symmetries and of their breaking. I see the sole of the existence of the Symmetry – Asymmetry pair as a further exemplification of the underlying duality of the universe.

As to why asymmetric fundamental laws are preferred and Asymmetry, as it is created in real thermodynamic systems gets much less attention than Symmetry except as a negation, according to Lupasco, Symmetry has the properties of an identity and people like identities. This is an inevitable logical consequence of our existence as biological – read mortal – entities. Similarly, Lupasco saw all 20^th Century science as a search for invariants, to the exclusion of their opposites. This may be human but it is not good science. It is often said that the physical world appears asymmetric to us, but that that does not necessarily mean that Asymmetry belongs to the fundamental laws of nature. Perhaps, but it does not mean that Asymmetry may not, especially if it can be seen as operating dually with Symmetry. In this perspective, the discussion of the Symmetries in particles and Einsteinian space-time Symmetry become a posteriori. Once Symmetry is in hand so to speak, it can or must be broken for the universe to evolve. 

6. Symmetry and Information

I find the subject of Symmetry in relation to Information extremely interesting in principle. However, the mathematically knowledgeable authority on information, Mark Burgin, makes no reference to Symmetry in his major compendium, Theory of Information [9]. Other authors, for example Terrence Deacon [10], stress the Asymmetry of the thermodynamic changes involved in or which constitute information.

Today, does it make sense to talk about Symmetry principles applied to information and complex cognitive processes, such as this Conference? I think not, basically because the concept adds no new information, no new laws in Luhn’s terms, that are not already explicitly present or the consequence of the same emergent cognitive processes involved in other subjects. The cognitive process involved in my finding symmetrical patterns esthetic is not itself symmetrical, and if it is termed asymmetrical, then every process is asymmetrical and the term becomes vacuous. Use of the phrase ‘symmetrical behavior’, similarly, would force Symmetry to have a purely semiotic meaning as a classification of the epistemological similarities between processes that has no further ontological purport.

What remains to be explored, however, is the nature of the information present in complex systems that display both Symmetry and Anti-Symmetry. From this point of view, one may imagine that additional ‘non-classical’ information is encoded as a consequence of the joint presence of entities whose form is congruent (the Yin-Yang picture) but whose reference is to an opposition between them as instantiating conflicting properties. This is another expression of the fundamentality of the dualist Principle of Dynamic Opposition in Logic in Reality. I wish to assure the reader, however, that nothing mystical intended here about the information that is encoded and decoded by the observer. The information in the encoding is present as a pattern of physical potentialities and its decoding results in a pattern of physical cognitive changes – ‘meaning-as-process’.

7. Conclusion

Information and Symmetry/Anti-Symmetry are brothers-in-arms, ‘born’ together with energy when our world became our world, but their relative roles have changed. Today, Information is hard at work, while Symmetry/Anti-Symmetry has retired to a somewhat more scientific and esthetic life. We now know that Symmetry must be taken into account in science, e.g., in any attempt to make meaningful statements about the emergent dynamics of our world at the fundamental level of quantum and non-quantum physics. Symmetry or the absence of it in biological structures is an important component of discussions on how they emerge, evolve and function.

The concept of Symmetry, which should be understood as Symmetry-Asymmetry and Symmetry/Anti-Symmetry, however, does support a scientific picture of the underlying duality of the universe. As mentioned, I have shown elsewhere that the related Principle of Dynamic Opposition provides a non-transcendental grounding for ethics. The question, then, is how to best express the importance of Symmetry studies for the Information Society as well as Information Science. Given their difficulty, how can Symmetry principles contribute to the achievement of a new common informational good? I would be happy to learn.

References and Notes

1. Brenner, J. E. 2013. It, Bit Both or Neither? Submission to the 2013 FQXi Essay Contest, Templeton Foundation, Philadelphia.
2. Rovelli, C. 2013. Relative Information at the Foundation of Physics. arXiv:1311.0054v1 [hep-th] 31 Oct 2013.
3. Brenner, J. E. 2014. The Logic of the Physics of Information. Information 2014, 5, 389-403.
4. Brenner, J. E. 2008. Logic in Reality. Dordrecht: Springer.
5. Luhn, G. 2012. The causal-compositional concept of information Part I. Elementary theory: From decompositional physics to compositional information. Information 2012, 3, 151–174.
6. Floridi, L. 2010. The Philosophy of Information. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
7. Penrose, R. 2010. Cycles of Time. New York: Vintage Books.
8. Brading, K. and E. Castellani, “Symmetry and Symmetry Breaking”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/symmetry-breaking/.
9. Burgin, M. Theory of Information: Fundamentality, Diversity and Unification; World Scientific: Singapore, Singapore, 2010.
10. Deacon, T. W. 2012. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Evolved from Matter; W.W. Norton & Company: New York, NY, USA, 2012.

As a short background Main changes in people´s lives – structures and roles, will be sketched. What changes are going on in the professional, private and citizen’s role? What is Quality of Life in the ICT society? What are the human aspects that are sensitive to the use of ICT – behavior, values, motivation, and feelings?

Convergence and acceleration are main processes at the interplay between technology, societal structure, organizational design, and human roles in the society. I will reflect on the convergence theory and discuss risks and opportunities in the 21st Century ICT society. Where are the “energy centers” that can activate and create changes towards “The Good Information Community” and “The Good Information Society”?

How can Wisdom be extracted - wisdom on various levels of analysis? What do voices from around the world tell us? How can agreements on Goals and Visions be achieved?

Co-mapping a possible Tree of Actions towards a good and sustainable society? Who are strategic stakeholders – passive and active/silent?

References and Notes

1. Biography and full references to the sources below, see home page http://gunillabradley.se/
2. Understanding the Change of Habits in the ICT Society. (Bradley, G. 2015) TED-talk on YouTube http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Understanding-the-Change-of-Hab
3. Major Challenges to Peace in the 21st Century. Bradley, G. and Whitehouse, D. (2012)
4. Social and Community Informatics: Humans on the Net. (Routledge) (Bradley 2006)

The purpose of this paper is to address some of the questions on the notion of agent and agency in relation to property and personhood. I argue that following the Kantian criticism of Aristotelian metaphysics, contemporary biotechnology and information and communication technologies bring about a new challenge – this time, with regard to the Kantian moral subject understood in the subject’s unique metaphysical qualities of dignity and autonomy. The concept of human dignity underlies the foundation of many democratic systems, particularly in Europe as well as of international treaties, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Digital agents, artificial organisms as well as new capabilities environments bring about an important transformation of the human self-appraisal. A critical comparative reflection of this transformation is important because of its ethical implications. I deal first with the concept of agent within the framework of Aristotelian philosophy, which is the basis for further theories in accordance with and/or in opposition to it, particularly since modernity. In the second part of this paper, I deal with the concept of personhood in Kantian philosophy, which supersedes the Aristotelian metaphysics of substance and builds the basis of a metaphysics of the moral human subject. In the third part, I discuss the question of artificial agents arising from modern biology and ICT. Blurring the difference between the human and the natural and/or artificial opens a “new space” for philosophical reflection as well as for debate in law and practical policy.

There is a struggle for control over Communicative Spaces across Europe, now, perhaps more pertinent and urgent than ever: it is the struggle of social actors, private entities and states, aiming to counter-act technological uses that result into unpredictable modes of behaviour. On the one hand, sometimes systematic, sometimes opportunistic approaches to curtain freedom to access and impart information are applied by state and state actors with the aim to ensure more control over digital communications and offline spaces. Particularly in our times of crisis, institutions and market actors have pursued the control over spaces of information and communication through regulation and/or through practice. Debates and public discourses about the 'Information Society' have entailed a preoccupation with the technological dimension of communication and connection among citizens but also between citizens and institutions. A contested term, IS has been approached right from the start as a near mythical dimension of powerful extremities: total liberation but also total destruction. What is important at this point is to unfold the ways in which the struggle over communicative spaces is pursued and explore the potential for re/democratisation re/decentralisation and emancipation in European societies. This struggle, this presentation argues, is part and parcel of the governance of communications broadly and of the information society particularly.

The paper will discuss the meaning and dimensions of 'Communicative Spaces' as spaces of on/offline continuity to explore the political aims and dimensions of their governance. In particular the paper will address the ways in which multiple crises on financial, political and institutional levels bring about a combination of power constellations and conflicts that give rise to the emergence of new political actors and force established ones to reconfigure their positions. The paper discusses resistance to attempts for control over media and assemblies, physical parliamentary and virtual, the aims to reconstitute free spaces for debate, contestation and protest as well as spaces for the development of new social practices. These social struggles are rooted in the increasing role of social movements and their interaction and use of technologies and the media. Not a separate, isolated or extraordinary case of struggle over spaces for expression, privacy and social connection, the process of shaping communication/s is inherent in the processes of governance of communications in general. The paper expands this notion through the concrete study of press coverage, civil society action and regulatory interventions.

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

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

Acknowledgments

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

References and Notes

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

The talk will show how insights from a view of information based upon systems thinking (Unified Theory of Information) can be applied to analyse the crises we have been witnessing in our times of global challenges. Under the premise that sciences of information are instrumental to the survival and thriving of humanity, normative propositions are deduced. The vision of a Global Sustainable Information Society is presented and a design of information processes is discussed that allows for coping with the global challenges.

The following passage of Incomplete Nature raised the following question in my mind are culture, language, organization science, economics, technology (CLOSET) teleodynamic phenomena?

Teleodynamics can be understood as characterizing the distinguishing dynamics of life. However, rather than being an abstract description of the properties that living processes exhibit, it is a specific dynamical form that can be described in quasi-mechanical terms. Although it is the distinguishing characteristic of living processes, it is not necessarily limited to the biological. Teleodynamic processes can be identified with respect to the specific end-directed attractor dynamics they develop toward.

So why do I think that culture, language, organization, science, economics and technology (CLOSET) represent teleodynamic processes? I believe that they are autonomous agents that maintain themselves, self-organize, and seem to have agency? They are obligate symbionts and hence their energy is provided by their hosts, us humans, but they assist their hosts acquire energy and do work.

The elements of CLOSET parallel the processes of living organisms they also undergo a parallel form of Darwinian evolution of descent, modification and selection. And like living organisms they have a telos in that they fit Deacon’s definition of a teleodynamic system in that they are “self-creating, self-maintaining, self-reproducing, individuated systems”.

Morten Christiansen (1994) has argued that human language can be “construed” as an organism that evolved to be easily learned. Terrence Deacon (1997) in his book The Symbolic Species makes a similar argument. In my book The Extended Mind: The Emergence of Language, the Human Mind and Culture (Logan 2007) I have argued that not only language, but also culture can be construed as organisms that evolve and reproduce themselves.

Deacon argues that “The incessant need to replace and reconstruct organism components depends on synthetic form-generating processes, not merely resistance to breakdown (ibid., 276).” The individual members of CLOSET also in a certain sense replace and reconstruct their components through form-generating processes (new Cultural practices through technological change, diffusion, acculturation; new words added to a Language through grammaticalization, portmanteau or neologisms; new Organizational models; new Scientific paradigms developed in what Kuhn terms revolutionary science respectively; new Economic models and Technological breakthroughs through invention, innovation and diffusion respectively). Like living organisms the individual members of CLOSET are also self-correcting and self-maintaining.

The claim that the individual members of CLOSET are teleodynamic systems suggests that these six species are self-creating, self-maintaining and self-reproducing respectively. Language reproduces itself and came into being by self-organizing the signals used by individuals into a system of communication that can be easily learned and hence reproduced by imitation. This mechanism also insures the self-maintenance of the system as the use of expressions that do not maintain the integrity of the system will not be imitated and hence discarded. Culture follows a similar pattern. The cultural practices that are easy to learn and insure the survival of the society in the environment in which they operate self-organize and self create the culture. Practices that ran counter to norms of society and which were inconsistent with the demands of the environment quickly die out and hence culture self-maintains itself. Technologies and tools that aid the survival of a society self-organize and survive, but those that do not aid survival of their hosts do not themselves survive. Science by its very nature is a self-maintaining activity as theories inconsistent with the observation of nature will be eventually detected and discarded. Economic and organizational practices that promote the well being of a society self-maintain and self-repair themselves.

Culture, Language, Organizations, Science, Economics and Technology are activities that behave like living organisms that self-created themselves and behave like living organisms that self-regulate, self-reproduce themselves, self-correct and self-maintain themselves with the one exception that as obligate symbionts they depend on their human hosts for energy.

In conclusion the analogy between living organisms and the individual members of CLOSET consists of the following points:

• all propagate their organization;
• all evolve through descent, modification and selection;
• all are emergent phenomena;
• all arise from self-organization and catalytic closure; and
• all have a form of instructional information or constraints.

We are swimming in a sea of information but do we really understand what is information. A project that I engaged in with a number of systems biologists provided an interesting perspective on this question. In a paper entitled Propagating Organization: An Enquiry by Stuart Kauffman, Robert K. Logan, Robert Este, Randy Goebel, David Hobill and Ilya Shmulevich that appeared in Biology & Philosophy 23: 27-45 we wrote,

“Our broad aim was to understand propagating organization as exemplified by the vast organization of the coevolving biosphere.”

The cell operates as an information processing unit, receiving information from its environment, propagating that information through complex molecular networks, and using the information stored in its DNA and cell-molecular systems to mount appropriate responses. We argue that Shannon information does not apply to the evolution of the biosphere because one cannot prestate all possible Darwinian preadaptations or the ensemble of possibilities and hence their entropy cannot be calculated.

According to the Shannon definition of information a structured set of numbers like the set of even numbers has less information than a set of random numbers because one can predict the sequence of even numbers. By this argument a random soup of organic chemicals would have more information that a structured biotic autonomous agent.

The biotic agent has more meaning than the soup, however. The living organism with more structure and more organization has less Shannon information. This is counterintuitive to a biologist’s understanding of a living organism. We therefore conclude that the use of Shannon information to describe a biotic system would not be valid. Shannon information for a biotic system is simply a category error.

A living organism has meaning because it is an autonomous agent acting on its own behalf. A random soup of organic chemicals has no meaning and no organization. We may therefore conclude the meaning of life is organization—organization that propagates.

The Relativity of Information

You may legitimately ask the question “isn’t information just information?”, i.e., an invariant like the speed of light. Our response to this question is no, it is relative.

Instructional or biotic information is a useful definition for biotic systems just as Shannon information was useful for telecommunication channel engineering.

Thus we identify the information in living organisms with the organization of constraints that allow an organism to capture energy from the environment for their growth and replication. A living organism propagates its organization, which constitutes its information.

We therefore conclude that constraints are information and information is constraints, which we term as instructional information because this is its function and we want to distinguish it from Shannon information. The constraints are the organization of the living organism and therefore the organization is the information and vice versa.

We next note that biotic information is not symbolic but is embedded in the biomoleules of which the living organism is composed. Biotic information cannot be separated from the medium in which it is instantiated. DNA does not symbolize RNA but rather catalyzes its creation.

And likewise RNA does not symbolize proteins but rather catalyzes its creation.

And the same with proteins they are not symbols but enzymes.

One of the characteristics of biotic information is that it is instantiated materially whereas symbolic information and Shannon info can move from one medium to another. For biotic information the medium is the message in the McLuhan sense and it is also the content. The medium is the content and the content is the medium. Whereas for symbolic info the medium and its content are separate.

We humans deal with 3 kinds of information: genetic, percepts , and concepts (symbolic).