Attributing a Value to Information

Ron Cottam, Willy Ranson & Roger Vounckx

Abstract

            Information is empowering. Survival requires its use [1]. It would seem prudent to take this into account when attributing to it a value, whether it be a semiotic, or a numerical one. However, as usual in the world of science, if at all possible we should establish a minimalist evaluation, to avoid the subsequent fragmentation of our description into subordinate categories.

            Studies carried out over a number of years in this and other research groups indicate that our environment is anything but uniform. Perceptionally-scalar hierarchical levels [2] correspond to approximate Newtonian potential wells [3] which are, both structurally and semiotically, necessarily separated by regions of complexity [4, 5]. Haughs and Lange [6] have characterized rational difficulties encountered in transiting this separating complexity as either Gödel incompletenesses or Turing halting problems. Correspondingly different regimes appear in our own investigations of evolutionary hierarchical systems, namely those of analog complexity associated with diffuse partiality [4], and digital complexity associated with incomplete partiality [7].

            Information enables survival, in the wider sense that gasoline enables an automobile engine. But nature is inhomogeneous, hierarchical, differentiated. It seems, indeed, fitting that we derive a minimalist evaluation of information, but it is not clear that the "minimalist engine" it empowers is always the same one! Surely it also will be "inhomogeneous, hierarchical, differentiated".

            We propose that a minimalist evaluation of information should be directly coupled to its usefulness. This appears to be an exercise in "passing the buck", as it begs the question "what does useful mean?". However, in an inhomogeneous environment, the best we can do is often to move our definitions closer to the actions and reactions of real entities, rather than isolating ourselves in abstraction. As Gell-Man [8] has affirmed for complexity itself, "Any definition ... is context-dependent, even subjective.". At a given moment, people know what is useful, at that time, in that context, for them (or, at least, they usually think they do!). In the absence of a rational distinction between the animate and inanimate [9], then so do all entities. The problem is not one of defining what nature should contain, it is one of matching our evaluating informational model to what nature already exhibits [7].

            Granted, evaluations of information exist which relate it to various measures of entropy and complexity. But these still miss a vital point. In the absence of a complexly-coupled hierarchy there can be no intrinsic stability. Uni-level appraisal is insufficient if we are to relate information to survival in the real world! Evaluation of information as a reflection of survivalist empowerment must also be hierarchical in nature, or at the very least its character must be established in the context of a hierarchical description which to some extent matches the hierarchy of nature. Not that we believe that a widely-applicable evaluation of information must of necessity include hierarchical aspects, but rather that an "elastic" context-dependent formulation may well be the most useful (that word again!), and that in initially formulating it we must first of all establish an all-embracing description, before we can begin working towards a minimalist one.

            This minimalist evaluation of information is arguably that which is just enough to enable survival. However, while this may be a sufficiently minimizing restriction for primitive "linear" processing, in the complex psychology of higher intelligence (or stupidity?) and socially generated security, other criteria can dominate in the abeyance of existence-risking threats, and at any specific moment survival per se may not be the central psychological issue. Comparative internal re-evaluation of an individual's goals may even lead to suicide. Elaboration of our chosen evaluation of information must be capable of adaptation to similar shifts. Survival in politics, in commerce, in relationships or in games is not such a different enterprise from survival in war.

            A second area of concern involves the implications of memory. It is reasonable to suppose that our universe is to a great extent approximately stable, or relatively fixed, and that modifications which appear spontaneous or emergent do not fundamentally threaten its existence, at least in a restricted temporal sense. Much reference to the evaluation of information, however, is in relation to its novelty, or to that part of it which is "new". In the hierarchical complexly-coupled structure of nature, novelty derives from aspects of the inter-layer complexity [10], and not from the stabilized Newtonian wells, within which all localized entities are sustained, and whose function is predominately associated with the survival of information, which is provided by memory [11]. Surely, from a survivalist, or stability-oriented point of view in a largely stable universe, the greater part of information which is to be considered valuable must consist of that which is stable, temporally-independent, "boring" and not at all novel?

            We argue for an approach to information which is directly related to the inhomogeneous, hierarchical, differentiated nature of our surroundings. Information is of value in far more ways than those which can be covered by formal uni-level appraisals, not least in the semiotic aspects of biology which remain un-addressed by syntactically comparative definition. This preferentially syntactic tendency is possibly the great error of formally rational science, which notwithstanding its great manipulative capabilities also blocks us from access to wider meaning, and fragments our view of our surroundings.

References

[1] Cottam, R., Ranson, W. and Vounckx, R. "A biologically-consistent diffuse semiotic architecture for survivalist information-processing". Presented at the Seventh International Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, Dersden, Germany, 1999.

[2] Cottam, R., Ranson, W. and Vounckx, R. "Emergence: half a quantum jump?". Acta Polytechnica Scandinavica: Emergence, Complexity, Hierarchy, Order. Espoo: Finnish Academy of Technology, 1998, pp. 12-19.

[3] Cottam, R., Langloh, N., Ranson, W. and Cottam, E. "Humble unification theory: partial comprehension in a quasi-particulate universe". Presented at the International Conference, Einstein Meets Magritte, Brussels, Belgium, 1995.

[4] Cottam, R., Ranson, W. and Vounckx, R. "Diffuse rationality in complex systems". InterJournal of Complex Systems, Article 235, 1998.

[5] Edwina Taborsky: private communication.

[6] Haughs, M. and Lange, H. "Emergence of observational hierarchies in natural evolution". Acta Polytechnica Scandinavica: Emergence, Complexity, Hierarchy, Order. Espoo: Finnish Academy of Technology, 1998, pp. 217-227.

[7] Cottam, R., Ranson, W. and Vounckx, R. "A biologically consistent hierarchical framework for self-referencing survivalist computation". Presented at the Third International Conference on Computing Anticipatory Systems, Liège, Belgium, 1999. Forthcoming publication by the American Institute of Physics.

[8] Gell-Man, M. The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex. London: Little, Brown & Co, 1994.

[9] Weber, R. "Meaning as being in the implicate order philosophy of David Bohm: a conversation". In Hiley, B. J. and Peat, F. D. (eds.), Quantum Implications: Essays in Honor of David Bohm. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987, pp. 440-445.

[10] Taborsky, E. "Architectures of information". Presented at the Forty Third Meeting of the International Society for the System Sciences, Pacific Grove, USA, 1999.

[11] Langloh, N., Cottam, R., Vounckx, R. and Cornelis, J. "Towards distributed statistical processing: AQuARIUM". In Smith, S. D. and Neale, R. F. (eds.), ESPRIT Basic Research Series, Optical Information Technology. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1993, pp. 303-319.
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