Structural and Symbolic Information in the Context of the General Theory of Information

Burgin, Mark; Feistel, Rainer

doi:10.3390/info8040139

Cited by 9 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Similarly, we can define a societal shock as a social transformation propagating faster than the 'speed of acceptance' along the social network (according to individual acceptance time and communication efficiency). A shock is also characterized by irreversibility, i.e., a partial 'memory loss' (explicitly coded -symbolic-information/or inherent -implicit-structural information (Structural information relative to a system, similarly to the philosophical notion of 'essentia', is from a bird view the 'information needed to build it', according to one of these two modalities of 'being': in knowledge (symbolic information) or with matter (inherent information) [16]) in the case of complex systems, and by a disruption of the physical state variables (temperature, pressure, speed of sound . .…”

Section: Resilience In the Convergence Paradigmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sharpening the Scythe of Technological Change: Socio-Technical Challenges of Autonomous and Adaptive Cyber-Physical Systems

Cancila

Gerstenmayer²,

Espinoza

2018

Designs

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Autonomous and Adaptative Cyber-Physical Systems (ACPS) represent a new knowledge frontier of converging “nano-bio-info-cogno” technologies and applications. ACPS have the ability to integrate new `mutagenic’ technologies, i.e., technologies able to cause mutations in the society. Emerging approaches, such as artificial intelligence techniques and deep learning, enable exponential speedups for supporting increasingly higher levels of autonomy and self-adaptation. In spite of this disruptive landscape, however, deployment and broader adoption of ACPS in safety-critical scenarios remains challenging. In this paper, we address some challenges that are stretching the limits of ACPS safety engineering, including tightly related aspects such as ethics and resilience. We argue that a paradigm change is needed that includes the entire socio-technical aspects, including trustworthiness, responsibility, liability, as well as the ACPS ability to learn from past events, anticipate long-term threads and recover from unexpected behaviors.

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Section: Resilience In the Convergence Paradigmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sharpening the Scythe of Technological Change: Socio-Technical Challenges of Autonomous and Adaptive Cyber-Physical Systems

Cancila

Gerstenmayer²,

Espinoza

2018

Designs

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“…"Trees that may have been cut down a century or two ago but have retained a detailed record of how sweet their springs were, how harsh their winters, how clean their sources of water." 22 The information embodied originally by the rings may be termed structural information, in contrast to the related extracted information in the form of numbers, texts, photographs or computer bits, as denoted by symbolic information (Ebeling & Feistel, 1994;Feistel & Ebeling, 2011Feistel, 2017a,b;Burgin & Feistel, 2017). While the carrier of structural information is the physical structure of an object, such as the visible tree ring, the carrier of symbolic information are symbols specified by convention, such as words or numbers attributed to the ring.…”

Section: Symbols and Symbolic Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Evolution of Symbols and Prediction Models

Feistel

2023

Biosemiotics

Self Cite

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The ability of predicting upcoming events or conditions in advance offers substantial selective advantage to living beings. The most successful systematic tool for fairly reliable prognoses is the use of dynamical causal models in combination with memorised experience. Surprisingly, causality is a fundamental but rather controversially disputed concept. For both models and memory, symbol processing is requisite. Symbols are a necessary and sufficient attribute of life from its very beginning; the process of their evolutionary emergence was discovered by Julian Huxley a century ago. In behavioural biology, this universal symmetry-breaking kinetic phase transition became known as ritualisation. Symbol use for predicting future dynamical processes has culminated in the unprecedented complexity of mental models used in science and technology, coining the historical ascent of modern humans. Observation and measurement transform structural information of physical exchange processes into symbolic information from which state quantities are derived by means of mental models. However, phylogenetically inherited models such as naïve realism do not necessarily explain the sophisticated insights revealed by modern experiments with, say, entangled quantum states. It is suggested to carefully distinguish observed exchange quantities from predicted unobservable state quantities, and physical reality from mental models thereof.

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“…A somewhat similar approach, bridging gaps through a broad and formal approach, has been taken by Mark Burgin, in his General Theory of Information (GTI) [63,[70][71][72], extended to include an evolutionary perspective [73]; a helpful summary is given by Burgin and Feistel [74]. Developed over several decades, the GTI is a mathematical theory, aiming to incorporate previous approaches, including those of Shannon, Bar-Hillel, Dretske, and others.…”

Section: Philosophy Of Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This approach may, in principle, encompass all forms of information including the physical, biological, mental, and social, and encompassing syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information. It recognises the distinction between the two basic classes of structural, or embedded, information, which may be related to physical entropy, and symbolic information, which assigns meaning, and is associated with living creatures [74,76,77]: 'Information constitutes a bridge between lifeless physics and living beings struggling for survival' [74] (p. 141). There is a clear analogy here with Floridi's categories of environmental and semantic information.…”

Section: Philosophy Of Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Still Minding the Gap? Reflecting on Transitions between Concepts of Information in Varied Domains

Bawden

Robinson

2020

Information

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This conceptual paper, a contribution to the tenth anniversary Special Issue of Information, gives a cross-disciplinary review of general and unified theories of information. A selective literature review is used to update a 2013 article on bridging the gaps between conceptions of information in different domains, including material from the physical and biological sciences, from the humanities and social sciences including library and information science, and from philosophy. A variety of approaches and theories are reviewed, including those of Brenner, Brier, Burgin and Wu, Capurro, Cárdenas-García and Ireland, Hidalgo, Hofkirchner, Kolchinsky and Wolpert, Floridi, Mingers and Standing, Popper, and Stonier. The gaps between disciplinary views of information remain, although there has been progress, and increasing interest, in bridging them. The solution is likely to be either a general theory of sufficient flexibility to cope with multiple meanings of information, or multiple and distinct theories for different domains, but with a complementary nature, and ideally boundary spanning concepts.

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Structural and Symbolic Information in the Context of the General Theory of Information

Cited by 9 publications

References 45 publications

Sharpening the Scythe of Technological Change: Socio-Technical Challenges of Autonomous and Adaptive Cyber-Physical Systems

Sharpening the Scythe of Technological Change: Socio-Technical Challenges of Autonomous and Adaptive Cyber-Physical Systems

On the Evolution of Symbols and Prediction Models

Still Minding the Gap? Reflecting on Transitions between Concepts of Information in Varied Domains

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