Special Issue "Information and Energy/Matter"
QuicklinksA special issue of Information (ISSN 2078-2489). This special issue belongs to the section "Information Theory and Methodology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 29 February 2012
Special Issue Editor
Guest Editor
Dr. Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic
School of Innovation, Design and Engineering, Computer Science Laboratory, Mälardalen University, Sweden
Website: http://www.idt.mdh.se/~gdc
E-Mail:
Phone: + 46 21 15 17 25
Fax: + 46 21 10 31 10
Interests: philosophy of information and computing
Published Papers
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
We stand on the edge of one more major leap in our understanding of the universe. One of many indications for the need of radical re-conceptualization is the fact that in our current understanding most of the universe seems to consist of something we know next to nothing about - dark energy and dark matter. All our knowledge about physics however is based on ordinary energy/matter which makes up less than 5% of what we know as the universe.
There are several strategies for attacking this problem of understanding of physical reality, and already today we can see the beginnings of the development of a new conception of the world, where physics is placed in a broader context of human knowledge. It goes via basic ideas of information and computation. This development is a consequence of the advances in information processing technologies which affect knowledge production and our grasp of the fundamental ideas of reality, human mind and cognition, knowledge, sciences, humanities, engineering and arts.
Many have already declared that reality basically is an informational phenomenon. To name but a few: Wheeler with IT FROM BIT; Floridi with Informational Structural Realism; Lloyd, Seife, Vedral with Decoding Reality; Frieden with Physics from Fisher Information and more. How does this information relate to energy/matter?
The essential for new approaches is closure - coming back to human which is the center of all knowledge production about the world. This self-reflective process has traditionally been avoided because of the practical problems in addressing it computationally. Nowadays we have tools at our disposal which help us understand self-reflective dynamical structures, so this does not present a problem for modeling anymore.
The idea is to explore how the framework for knowledge production relates to what can be known (and all of our knowledge is structured information so laws of physics are information about the informational structure of the world – a meta-information). It connects information with matter-energy as we find it in the world and in the observer of the world.
This special issue will explore all the different facets of the relationship between the world (physical world as we know it in form of energy/matter) and information.
Dr. Gordana Dodig Crnkovic
Guest Editor
Submission
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Information is an international peer-reviewed Open Access quarterly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. For the first couple of issues the Article Processing Charge (APC) will be waived for well-prepared manuscripts. English correction and/or formatting fees of 250 CHF (Swiss Francs) will be charged in certain cases for those articles accepted for publication that require extensive additional formatting and/or English corrections.
Keywords
- information
- energy/matter
- IT FROM BIT
- informational structural realism
- decoding reality
- physics from information
Submitted Papers
Title: Chemical Affinity as Material Agency for Naturalizing Contextual Meaning
Authors: Koichiro Matsuno *,1, Stanley Salthe 2
Affiliations: 1)Nagaoka University of Technology, Nagaoka 940-2188, Japan; E-Mail: CXQ02365@nifty.com
2)Biological Sciences, Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York 13754, USA
Abstract: Chemical affinity involves the integration of two different types of interaction. One is the interaction operating between a pair of reactants while forming a chemical bond, and the other is the prior interaction between those reactants when they identify a reaction partner. The context of the environments under which chemical reactions proceed is identified by the interaction of the participating chemical reactants themselves unless the material process of internal measurement is substituted by theoretical artifacts in the form of imposed boundary conditions, as in the case, for example, of thermal equilibrium. The identification-interaction specific to each local participant serves as a preparation for the making of chemical bonds. The identification-interaction is intrinsically selective in precipitating those chemical bonds that are synthesized most rapidly among possible reactions. Once meta-stable products appear that mediate chemical syntheses and their partial decompositions without totally decomposing, those products would become selective because of their ongoing participation in the identification-interaction. One important natural example must have been the origin and evolution of life on Earth.
Title: Beyond Bayes: On the Need for a Unified and Jaynesian Definition of Probability and Information within Neuroscience
Authors: Christopher Fiorillo *
Affiliation: Department of Bio and Brain Engineering, KAIST, Daejeon 305-701, Republic of Korea;
Email: fiorillo@kaist.ac.kr
Abstract: Although it is commonly believed that the nervous system is specialized for processing information, the concept of information has not been clearly defined within neuroscience. Efforts to quantify information have been in agreement that it depends on probabilities (through Shannon entropy), but there has long been a dispute about the definition of probabilities themselves. The “frequentist” view is that probabilities are (or can be) essentially equivalent to frequencies, and that they are therefore properties of a physical system, independent of any observer of the system. The alternate “Bayesian” definition is that probabilities are always conditional on a state of knowledge (information). E.T. Jaynes established that the rules of logic, expressed in the maximum entropy principle, provide the bridge between information and probabilities. Jaynes and others have provided an objective means for deriving probabilities, as well as a unified account of information and logic. Despite the important implications of this topic to neuroscience, the neuroscience literature virtually never specifies any definition of probability, nor does it acknowledge any dispute concerning the definition. Although there has recently been tremendous interest in Bayesian approaches to the brain, even in the Bayesian literature it is common to find probabilities that are purported to come directly and unconditionally from frequencies. Here I argue that adoption of a strictly Jaynesian approach will greatly facilitate progress towards understanding brain function. I go on to propose a natural extension of Jaynesian theory in which probabilities are conditional on information held within the physical state of an observer, whether that observer corresponds to a brain, neuron, bacterium, machine, etc. Probabilities therefore describe and quantify the information of an observer about an “object.”
Title: Ten Steps to a new Concept of Information
Authors: Gerhard Luhn *
Affiliation: Faculty of Computer Science, Technical University of Dresden, 01062 Dresden, Germany; E-mail: gerhard.luhn@tu-dresden.de
Abstract: This paper proposes a fundamental concept of information, which is grounded in physics (causal), and which incorporates a logical concept of the appearance of newness (compositional). Information is the (causal, rule based) capability of any system to interact with other systems and to compose new overall system states. The terminus “composition” declares that there are local rules (dynamization of boundary conditions) as well as global rules (increase of overall possible system states) guiding the compositional process. The informational content (meaning) of any message or signifier is not given by the signifier itself, but by the corresponding overall system transformation(s) (including emission and/or reception of portions of energy/mass [‘signals’, ‘messages’]). This proposed concept of information will be developed from within the background to corresponding theories and ideas of Mark Burgin, Joseph Brenner and Luciano Floridi.
Title: If physics is an information science, what is an observer?
Authors: Chris Fields *
Affiliation: 21 Rue des Lavandi`eres, Caunes Minervois, 11160 France; E-mail: fieldsres@gmail.com
Abstract: Interpretations of quantum theory have traditionally assumed a ``Galilean'' observer, a bare ``point of view'' implemented physically by a quantum system. This paper investigates the consequences of replacing such an informationally-impoverished observer with an observer that satisfies the requirements of classical automata theory, i.e. an observer that encodes sufficient prior information to identify the system being observed and recognize its acceptable states. It shows that with reasonable assumptions about physical dynamics, the observations recorded by such an observer are correctly described by standard quantum theory, without requiring specific assumptions about the observer's physical implementation.
Last update: 6 January 2012