Cybernetics and Human Knowing. Vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 89-97
A New Paradigm for the Information Age Søren Brier1 and Zhou Liqian2 Review of Wolfgang Hofkirchner’s Emergent Information: A Unified Theory of Information Framework. Published in 2013 by World Scientific in Singapore. 280 pages. ISBN 978-981-431348-3. UK £58.00.
We are living in a globalized age with a highly developed technology of transportation, information and communication. Despite the advancement of transportation, which makes global travelling much more convenient than in any other period in history, information and communication technology (ICT) is still the crucial factor which makes it possible for globalization to advance at its present incredible speed. In an era of data created through phone and internet—as well as its combination in for instance Skype—digitalized information plays a more and more important role in globalization today. This is more than anything else why we call our time the Information Age. However, we lack a unified theory of information (UTI) to deal with the more and more serious challenges associated with the frictions which global digitalization creates, in the world we face today with its global intercultural communication and worldwide corporate reach. ICT makes it possible for us to connect with everyone else, but we live in a society full of gaps and frictions, gaps between: nature and culture, causality and normativity, body and mind, object and subject, representation and practice, natural sciences and humanities; as well as between different cultures of work, honesty, responsibilities, values and honor. Our society is riven into factions by these gaps. As information can be the bridge between these gaps, every intelligent researcher wants to establish a unified theory of information so that he can grasp the key to the future. This is the major challenge which Wolfgang Hofkirchner grapples with in this book. The modern investigation of information began with Claude Shannon (Shannon & Weaver, 1949) who is known as the father of information because he established the first scientific theory of information: the mathematical theory of communication. Because Shannon’s theory ignores the content or meaning of information, which is for most contexts the essential aspect of information, it is only concerned with engineering problems that handles the quantity of information. This was the reason that many researchers were not satisfied with it and tried to establish a semantic theory of information. Accordingly since the early days of information theory many alternative approaches have been tried. Examples are: 1. Professor of the Semiotics of Information, Cognition and Communication Science, Department of International Business Communication, Copenhagen Business School. Email:
[email protected] 2. Department of Philosophy & Religion, Nanjing University and Department of International Business Communication, Copenhagen Business School. Email:
[email protected]
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1. the attempts in Bar-Hillel and Carnap’s (1953) work to use probability to calculate semantic information according to modern logic, 2. the pragmatic information concept developed by Warren Weaver (1949)3 that divides information into three levels: technical, semantic and effectual; 3. transdisciplinary attempts, some having already originated in the early days of information theory, such as those of Donald M. Mackay and Gregory Bateson, who defined information in similar ways. Mackay defined information as “the change in a receiver’s mindset, and thus with meaning” (quoted in Hofkirchner, 2013, p. 9), and Bateson defined information as “a difference which makes a difference” (Bateson, 1972, p. 453). Modern transdisciplinary attempts are diverse including the following: 1. scholars defining information from the perspective of philosophy, such as the famous philosopher of information Luciano Floridi, who defines information in terms of data and does a great work of conceptual analysis of information (Floridi, 2010, 2011). 2. scholars who study the meaning of communication like Ruth G. Millikan (Millikan, 2002). 3. Research about signals from a game theoretical point of view combined with evolution and learning theory (Skyrms, 2009). 4. Terrence Deacon’s attempt to construct a complete definition of information through unifying Shannon’s mathematical theory of information, Boltzman’s thermodynamics, and Darwin’s evolutionary theory. (Deacon, 2007, 2008, 2012). In addition to these authors an academic circle in Europe wants to lay the foundation for information science; this is the Foundation of Information Science Group. This group includes Mark Burgin, Søren Brier, Tony Bryant, Gordana DodigCrnkovic, and Wolfgang Hofkirchner. They are not satisfied with the current divided situation of information science and want to create a framework to unify these factions. They have made many significant contributions such as Søren Brier’s framework of cybersemiotics with which to unify nature and culture, (Brier, 2008). Some of them are involved in editing a series of books on information studies, named the World Scientific Series in Information Studies, which aims to understand the foundation of information and establish a unified theory of information. This series has published three volumes now. Mark Burgin’s recent book Theory of Information: Fundamentality, Diversity and Unification is the first volume of the series, in which he established a general theory of information (GTI) that encompasses the enormous diversity of types, forms and classes of information. He analyzes statistical, semantic, algorithmic, pragmatic and dynamic information theories with the GTI (Burgin, 3.
Weaver was a colleague of Shannon
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2010). Information and Computation: Essays on Scientific and Philosophical Understanding of Foundations of Information and Computation, edited by Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic & Mark Burgin, is the second volume of the series in which is gathered a series of articles on the foundations of information and computation from different perspectives (Dodig-Crnkovic & Burgin, 2011). Finally Wolfgang Hofkirchner’s new book Emergent Information: A Unified Theory of Information Framework, which we review here, is the third volume and another great contribution to this enterprise. Wolfgang Hofkirchner is a professor in the Vienna University of Technology, founding president of International Society for Information Studies (ISIS), and president of the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (BCSSS). He proposed that we should establish a unified theory of information 17 years ago, (Fleissner & Hofkirchner, 1996), and now he has made a breakthrough. The goal of this original, landmark book is not only to construct a theory especially for information, but also formulating a new paradigm for our age. Its well-organized structure and brief writing style makes it easy for the reader to grasp what the book wants to tell us. Why we think this book is better than most is because Hofkirchner believes that a satisfactory theory should grow out of proper philosophical soil. Philosophy is the right way to describe the foundation of a paradigm. He therefore constructs his new philosophy: intergrativism through the sublation of modern philosophy and postmodern philosophy within a Hegelian dialectical spirit. In order to deal with concrete issues a new specific theory should also be embodied in a complete paradigm. He extends his new weltanschauung to a new cross-disciplinary theory, evolutionary system theory, which is a development of system science. With this solid foundation, Hofkirchner establishes a semiotics-based information theory. Modern science began with two things: The ontological idea that the language of nature is mathematics, and the empirical epistemology of experimentation as the tool for discovering the deep secrets of nature. With the establishment of Newtonian mechanics and the success of modern technology in industry, natural science began to take the lead place of culture in its postulation that everything can be explained by reducing it to basic level. The people of the Enlightenment got their confidence from their belief in the mechanical paradigm that the universe functions like a clockwork and is therefore predictable. Science will therefore be able to provide the basis for the creation of a new happy world with new technology and more rationality, as Bacon described in New Atlantis. But following the disasters of the modernist 20th Century, thinkers began to critique modernism and raised the points that we should abandon the grand narrative (Lyotard, J. 1979) and truth (Rorty, R. 1979) since they are impossible in essence, the world is unpredictable, and therefore there is no consistency criterion for science—anything goes (Feyerabend, 1970). Postmodernism sees the world torn a part by frictions between small narratives. But these ideas are counterproductive for our age. Hofkirchner thinks that the new and proper philosophy should sublate past philosophies by absorbing their advantages and abandoning their disadvantages; this can be done by restructuring the foundation. Since the world is determined by
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causality according to Newtonian mechanics, the world can be predicted; human beings can control and push the world into the direction we desire. However, quantum physics has found that because of quantum effects, the world is fundamentally unpredictable; chaos theory has found that there is uncertainty in certainties. Hence, today’s physics shows now that the world is less-than-strictly-determined. Thus a new philosophy should contain both necessity and contingency. Necessity comes from causality or the objective aspects of reality; contingency comes from the more complex self-organized systems and the subjectivity of living systems, not the least humans. If the dynamics of the world is based on a self-organization and subjectobject dialectics, the deterministic mechanistic ontology cannot explain the world once for all through finding the sufficient and necessary conditions of things, because the investigation of necessary conditions is endless. With a new combination of ontology and epistemology, we can create a new action philosophy or praxiology that helps us through insight to nudge the world by making use of the dynamics of systems. Hofkirchner calls his new philosophy nested praxio-onto-epistemology (POE) in which practice, reality, and method are integrated into a whole. POE cannot be built without a scientific foundation. The scientific basis of POE is evolutionary system theory (EST). Hofkirchner argues that system science is different from Newtonian science in that it does not treat the world as an automaton that can be reduced to basic elements. System science sees the world as whole with properties that cannot be reduced completely to its composed elements. Since Ludwig Von Bertalanffy, the world image has changed from a monotonous, deterministic and reversible automaton to a multiple, temporal, and complex system (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984, p. xxvii). The metaphor of nature transfers from clockwork to great oaks from little acorns,4 namely from machine to life. As we known, life is an alien for Newtonian science, this is the reason Descartes postulated mind-body dualism. As Prigogine (1980) argues, today’s science is changing from being to becoming. Thus, we agree with Hofkirchner that system science is the science more suitable for us to handle the issues of complexity we face today. However, as the scope of system science is so broad, and so many varieties have been developed, we are now missing a unified framework to summarize it. Many scientists of system science believe that the commonality between theories of system science is more than family resemblance. Systems, self-organization, complexity, and so forth are the paradigms scholars want to unify through a single framework. Hofkirchner is one of outstanding representatives of general systems and information theory and he is working on establishing EST. More importantly, considering self-organization enabled system theory to depart from a state in which it could deliberate only on how systems are maintained and to include system changes. At the
4.
We should notice that Bertalanffy, as an organicist, thought that living systems are closed systems outside the laws of thermodynamics, and thus in order to solve the mystery of life, he established a new science which he called general system science. We can say that the metaphor of system science is life instead of machine even at its beginning.
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same time, it opened the possibility for the Theory of Evolution to overcome the restrictions of simple mechanistic interpretations of the Darwinian model. This step enables the sciences to envisage a theory of open, nonlinear, complex, dynamic, self-organizing systems. It is the direct result of the merger of the systems theory and evolutionary theory. (Hofkirchner, 2013, p. 56)
In contrast with physical things that are determined by physical laws, subjectiveness (Hofkirchner’s term) within EST is a kind of uncertainty that allows room for agency. The evolutionary system is not just a physical system determined by physical causality, but a system with subjectiveness, hence, evolutionary systems are both deterministic and indeterministic, necessary and contingent at the same time. Different levels have different degrees of subjectiveness, but because of emergence between different levels, the differences between different levels are more than quantitative, they are qualitative leaps. According to EST, higher complexity emerges from lower complexity while in turn higher constrains lower. An evolutionary system is a collection of 1) elements E that interact such that 2) relations R emerge that – because of providing synergistic effects—dominate their interaction in 3) a dynamics D. This yields a distinction between micro-level (E) and macro-level (R) and a process (D) that links both levels in a feedback loop. Emergence and dominance are the key properties of D. D is to ensure perpetuation and elaboration of synergism. (Hofkirchner, 2013, p. 105)
Relation R emerges from elements E in interactions while in turn R dominates E. Thus, emergent dynamics becomes another important topic of EST. It is a pity that Hofkirchner tells so little about the details of emergent dynamics except borrowing a useful term—downward causation—from Donald T. Campbell. Instead Hofkirchner explains it by Haken’s slaving principle. We agree with Deacon’s critical remark, (Deacon, 2012, pp. 143-175) that downward causation explains nothing except using a term to describe what we should explain, avoiding the real problem by inventing new terms. We think Deacon’s concept of constraints is better than downward causation, because we do not have to introduce new causation into science (Deacon, 2012, pp.182-203). Constraints emerge from nonlinear dynamics of elements in interaction, in turn constraints constrain elements or reduce the space of possibility of elements. Emergence plays an important role in EST anyhow because new levels of systems emerge from lower systems. Borrowing from Friedrich Engels, Hofkirchner calls emergence a leap in quality. By integrating self-organization theory, autopoiesis theory, and social system theory, Hofkirchner constructs a three-stage system model: Human systems (recreative systems) emerge from living systems (autopoietic systems) which emerge from material systems (dissipative systems). The model includes two dimensions: structure and process or diachrony and synchrony. The three stages correspond to three phases: material system corresponds to physical phase, living system corresponds to biotic phase, and human system corresponds to social phase. Social level nests in biotic level which nests in physical level. In this three stages model, Hofkirchner defines the way he uses the concept of subjectiveness:
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In the case of subjects, that is, subjective agents, events and entities are not strictly determined: the effect is not predictable because it is subjective agency that intervenes in the chain of cause and introduces a degree of freedom that cannot be forced into a single alternative. (Hofkirchner, 2013, pp. 86-87)
For Hofkirchner, it seems that anything that is not deterministic in the form of having possible space to show agency is subjectiveness. As different levels of systems have different degrees of indeterministic freedom, the difference between them is the leap in quality. Material systems show themselves to be proto-subjects since they are selfreferential systems that are end-realized and form-assumed; living systems show themselves to be quasi-subjects since they are self-reproductive systems that are endimplicit and form-perpetuated; human systems show themselves to be subjects since they are self-productive systems that are end-explicit and form-created. Thus, all three levels of systems present subject-object-dialectics. We think that Hofkirchner may use the term subject in a too broad a sense. It seems to mislead us into some kind of animism. He thinks that the minimal unit of subjectiveness is something that is provided with a minimal quantum of degree of freedom to display agency. As we known, there is no subject in a quantum phenomenon but only physical causality that can be modeled as propensities of ensembles of particles. There exists the same problem at the level of material systems. Paraphrasing Deacon, the self of self-organization theory is misleading since there is no self in self-organizing systems, so he use morphodynamics to replace selforganization (Deacon, 2012, pp. 235-236). Only living systems, which are called teleodynamics by Deacon show subjectiveness which Deacon calls entention. We think in order to avoid some unnecessary misunderstanding, it is best not to introduce subjectiveness into the physical realm because enough space has been left in the physical realm to permit the existence of uncertainty to show agency. With the new paradigm this argumentation establishes, Hofkirchner constructs a complete paradigmatic background theory for his unified information theory. In contrast to other scholars of information theory, he bases his theory on Peirce’s semiotics which has been overlooked by most scholars of information theory. Although semiotics has been extended to contain studies of communication by Tom Sebeok and has already resulted in remarkable achievements in this area by biosemioticians, the French semiology started by Saussure leading to structuralism is still being seen as part of the humanities. Ernst Cassirer for instance saw semiotics as a cultural science even though he cited Sebeok’s work in his famous book An Essay on Man (Cassirer, 1944, p. 23). But this is not the case in Brier’s Cybersemiotics (2008), where the transdisciplinary foundation of Peircean semiotics and biosemiotics is made clear from the start. Most researchers conceive a gap between information theory and semiotics in the form of semiology’s lesser tradition since the former belongs to natural science, and the latter belongs to humanities. However, we think, as already shown by Brier (1996a, 1996b, 1996c) the two can supplement each other. Hofkirchner contributes a great example of this unification. He first recomposes
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Peirce’s semiotic triangle of sign, interpretant, and representamen into signator, signan, and signatum. Different from the traditional semiotic triangle, the three nodes of new one represent separate things that sigantor represents sign maker (subject), signan represents sign (mediator), signatum represents signified (object). Thus, the new triangle describes subject-object-dialectics and is therefore qualitatively different from Peirce’s semiotics with its philosophical foundation in his three category system ultimately built on a pure mathematical interpretation of the phenomenology of cognition and communication. Please note that subject here does not only refer to a living being that has interpretation capacity, as we have argued above. Because information co-exists with self-organization, Hofkirchner tries to bridge C. P. Snow’s two cultures through his new concept of information by integrating syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of sign with EST. Hofkirchner defines that we can describe sign relations as follows: sign-sign-relation (syntactic aspect), signsign-object-relation (semantic aspect), and sign-sign-object-subject-relation (pragmatic relation). He writes: “Given the evolution of self-organizing systems, the appearance of signs and their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects have to be differentiated in to as many types as types of systems may be distinguished” (Hofkirchner, 2013, p. 105). The syntactic aspect which manifests in material systems is patterned formation; the semantic aspect which manifests in living systems, is made through codes -- and it is code-making that narrows down the possibilities of self-organized buildup of order in living systems and creates an abundance of possibilities for survival; and the pragmatic aspect which manifests in human systems is constitution of sense. This is his typology of information. We think it is better to understand and describe it as three aspects of information instead of three types, since information is a triple entity. If we see these three aspects as three types, it may lead us to construct proto-subjectiveness and quasi-subjectiveness as having same status as real subjects, since only a real subject can read information from signs. Hofkirchner describes embodied information in system evolution as resulting from a sophisticated information-generating process, because of the functions it serves in any type of evolutionary system, be it cognitive, communicative, or co-operative. With Hegelian subject-object-dialectics and cybernetic thoughts, he re-interprets cognition, communication, and co-operation. Signator, signan, and signatum construct a feedback loop in which subject and object interact through the mediator signs. This is really an innovative idea that solves one of the hardest problems in philosophy of cognitive science which is how to bridge sensation and perception. There is a deep gap between sensation and perception in that the former belongs to the causal realm while the latter belongs to the normative realm. This is the mystery of cognition. One could solve the mystery of cognition if a theory is constructed that can bridge sensation and perception. But this is only done so far by C. S. Peirce via his very special triadic, synechistic, semiotic ontology, which Hofkirchner does not use but replaces by his general evolutionary systems theory. Hofkirchner describes cognition in five ascending stages, which are: 1) response; 2) flexible response; 3) sensation;
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4) motives; and 5) reflexion (Hofkirchner, 2013, pp. 201-207), nesting at different levels of system. Response is the process of system reaction to external stimuli; it has no intentionality but only physical causality. In other words, response is the process that transfers difference from the environment to the inside. Flexible response is a more sophisticated response to stimuli from the environment, and it seems equal to Deacon’s teleodynamic process which contains the most initial intention (Deacon, 2012, pp. 319-325). Sensation is the process that includes two sub-processes in opposite directions: transduction of stimuli and attention, in other words, sensation bridges causality and normativity. But one may wonder where sensation comes from in system science that has no phenomenology. Hofkirchner further says that motive is the process which refers to the effectorium (possible actions) of living systems and to the process in which activities are endowed with motivations according to a given sensation. Motive includes two sub-processes which are recognition and activation where the former leads to the semantic aspect of information, and the latters lead to pragmatic aspects. Reflexion is a feature of human thinking only, that makes percepts, knowledge, and wisdom possible. With his complete new paradigm and the unified theory of information, Hofkirchner believes that we can handle the global challenges and build a global sustainable information society, which promises human beings a better life. This book attempts to provide us with a philosophical guide to the information age. This is not a book solely for philosophers. It is for all scholars who have interest in information, cognition, communication, system science and life science. Of course it is not a book only for experts, but rather anyone who wants to know more about our age should also read it. Since it is only a framework, in itself it does not answer all the questions once and for all; on the contrary, it inspires us to ask more questions to enrich its details, such as what emergent dynamics is. In addition, Hofkirchner may overlook the information theory constructed by Peirce even though his theory is based on semiotics (Nöth, 2012). If we want to get a complete information theory, we still have long way to go, but Hofkirchner’s work, seems to place us on the road leading in the right direction. References Bar-Hillel, Y. (1964). Language and information. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Bar-Hillel, Y., & Carnap, R. (1953). Semantic information. In W. Jackson (Ed.), Communication theory (pp. 503-512). London: Butterworth. Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. Frogmore, St Albans: Paladin. Brier, S. (1996a). From second-order cybernetics to cybersemiotics: A semiotic re-entry into the second -order cybernetics of Heinz von Foerster. Systems Research, 13(3), 229-244. Brier, S. (1996b). Cybersemiotics: A new interdisciplinary development applied to the problems of knowledge organization and document retrieval in information science. Journal of Documentation, 52(3), 296-344. Brier, S. (1996c). The necessity of a theory of signification and meaning in cybernetics and systems science. Proceedings of the Third European Congress on Systems Science (pp. 693-697). Rome, 1-4 October 1996. Rome: Edizioni Kappa. Brier, S. (2008). Cybersemiotics; Why information is not enough! Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Burgin, M. (2010). The theory of information: Fundamentality, diversity and unification. Singapore: World Scientific. Cassirer, E. (1944). An essay on man: An introduction to a philosophy of human culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
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Deacon T. (2007). Shannon-Boltzmann-Darwin: Redefining information. Part 1, Cognitive Semiotics, 1, 123 –148. Deacon T. (2008) Shannon-Boltzmann-Darwin: Redefining information. Part 2, Cognitive Semiotics, 2, 167–194. Deacon, T. (2012). Incomplete nature: How mind emerges from matter? New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Dodig-Crnkovic, G., & Burgin, M. (2011). Information and computation: Essays on scientific and philosophical understanding of foundations of information and computation. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing. Feyerabend, P. (1970). Against method: Outline of an anarchistic theory of knowledge. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Fleissner, P., & Hofkirchner, W. (1996). Emergent information: Towards a unified information theory, Biosystem, 38(2–3), 243–248. Floridi, L. (2010). Information: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Floridi, L. (2011). Philosophy of information. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hofkirchner, W. (2013). Emergent information: A unified theory of information framework. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing. Lyotard, J. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. (G. Benningtom & B. Massumi, Trans.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Originally published as La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979) Millikan, R. (2002). Varieties of meaning: The 2001 Jean Nicod lectures. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Nöth, W. (2012). Charles S. Peirce’s theory of information: A theory of the growth of symbols and of knowledge. Cybernetics and Human Knowing, 19(1-2), 137-161. Prigogine, I. (1980). From being to becoming. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman. Prigogine I., & Stengers, I. (1984). Order out of chaos. New York: Bantam Books. Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shannon, C. E., & Weaver, W. (1949). The mathematical theory of communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Skyrms, B. (2009). Signals: Evolution, learning, and information. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weaver, W. (1949). The mathematics of communication. Scientific American, 181(l), 11-15.
Galanter, P. (1997). Untitled (Breeding Painting Series f041443a). Iris digital giclée monoprints; 21 x 29 in.
Galanter, P. (1997). Untitled (Breeding Painting Series f0427432; detail). Digital giclée monoprints; installed approximately 3 x 6 feet.
