A fundamental issue is whether artifacts can ever gain the status of living beings. In particular, the relevance of meaning-making by machines is an area of study whose relevance cannot be ignored, putting front-and-center the matter of intelligence, whose etymological origin relates to “the ability to understand” [1]. Since the release of ChatGPT on the 30^th of November 2022 by OpenAI [2], countless other applications compete in searching through a massive amount of written text by reading millions of articles and books online to produce work that has perfect grammar, correct punctuation, and no spelling mistakes. Multiple uses include writing songs, stories, press releases, guitar tabs, interviews, essays, and technical manuals. In addition, hallucinations are also readily achieved. ChatGPT may be regarded as an autonomous agent, similar to a living organism capable of biological agency, which acquires, uses, processes, communicates, and acts on information [3]. This brings into focus the use of information as the glue that makes possible the examination of intelligence in living beings and their artifacts. The purpose of this presentation is to critically examine information in this role.

The long history of information uncovers an elusive concept that needs clarification [4, 5], and involves a dichotomy that needs resolution. For some, information is considered an absolute quantity of the Universe in addition to matter and/or energy, whose existence is predicated upon a postulate which some consider sufficient to bring into existence [6-11]. For others, it is a relative quantity/quality, ‘a difference which makes a difference’ [12], where “The essence of this definition is that information is something which is generated by a subject. Information is always information for "someone"; it is not something that is just hanging around "out there" in the world” [13]. This implies that there is no information outside living beings interacting with their environments. Clearly, the more reliable choice to use to perform a more detailed assessment of information is the one not dependent on the enunciation of a postulate, but rather, on firsthand observation.

The result of performing this assessment leads to infoautopoiesis, the self-referential, recursive, and interactive process of self-production of information [14]. Not only is it possible to create a model of a general organism-in-its-environment, but it is also possible to also define the roles of semantic (endogenous) and Shannon/syntactic (exogenous) information [15]. Semantic information creation is motivated by the individuated satisfaction of physiological and relational needs in order to make the external environment meaningful. Semantic information is inaccessible except through external Shannon/syntactic information expressions using language, gestures, pictographs, musical instruments, sculptures, writing, coding, etc. Shannon/syntactic information is a metaphor for the creation of all our artificial artifacts in the arts and sciences which surround us [16-18]. In summary, infoautopoiesis enables an explanation of how meaning-making comes about, and its use as a general framework to answer the key question: what is the connection between human and machine intelligence?

References

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