Cybernetics & Human Knowing - Thesaurus pilot project
Edited by M&T Thellefsen

Information

Definition
Information is the difference that makes a difference.

The difference between two forms of ORGANIZATION or between two states of UNCERTAINTY before and after a message has been received.

 

Relations:
closed System
closure
coding
cognition
constructivism**
coupling
language
objective information
subjective/autopoietic

 

Articles:

1997
A Principal Exposition of Jean-Louis Le Moigne's Systemic Theory / Darek Erikson. -  vol. 4 no. 2/3
From records to relationships: Courting organizational dialogue at NASA / Frederick Steier &  Eric Eisenberg. -   vol. 4 no. 1

 

Principia Cybernetica (web)
that which reduces UNCERTAINTY. (Claude Shannon); 2) that which changes us. (Gregory Bateson)

 Literally that which forms within, but more adequately: the equivalent of or the capacity of something to perform organizational work, the difference between two forms of ORGANIZATION or between two states of UNCERTAINTY before and after a message has been received, but also the degree to which one VARIABLE of a SYSTEM depends on or is constrained by (see CONSTRAINT) another. E.g., the DNA carries GENETIC INFORMATION inasmuch as it organizes or CONTROLs the orderly GROWTH of a living organism. A message carries information inasmuch as it conveys something not already known.

The answer to a question carries information to the extent it reduces the questioner's uncertainty. A telephone line carries information only when the signals sent correlate with those received.

Since information is linked to certain changes, differences or dependencies, it is desirable to refer to theme and distinguish between information stored, information carried, information transmitted, information required, etc.

Pure and unqualified information is an unwarranted abstraction. INFORMATIONTHEORY measures the quantities of all of these kinds of information in terms of BITs. The larger the uncertainty removed by a message, the stronger the correlation between the INPUT and OUTPUT of a COMMUNICATION CHANNEL, the more detailed particular instructions are the more information is transmitted. (Krippendorff)

Information is the meaning of the representation of a fact (or of a message) for the receiver. (Hornung)

 

Encyclopedia Autopoietica
The colloquial construct for "meaningful data", as used in the majority of the literature. Maturana and Varela concentrate on "information" as a flawed explanatory device for analyzing the phenomenology of living systems. More specifically, they criticize the explanatory line which assumes that (apparent) adaptation of organisms to achieve closer consonance with an environment is to be evaluated from the perspective that "... their organization represents the 'environment' in which they live, and that through evolution they have accumulated information about it, coded in their nervous systems. Similarly it has been said that the sense organs gather information about the 'environment', and through learning this information is coded in the nervous system." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 6)

Maturana and Varela attribute the capacity for functional discrimination to the organism's structure, not to an internal manipulation of extrinsic 'information" or "signals', as the cognitivist viewpoint would have us believe. In fact, their organizationally- and structurally-oriented account of living systems does not require recourse to a conventional notion of "information". This is illustrated by reference to the systemic relations of specificity which are often addressed with respect to an "information" construct. Maturana and Varela explain the realization of these relations in terms of the system itself. "Notions such as coding and transmission of information do not enter in the realization of a concrete autopoietic system because they do not refer to actual processes in it. Thus, the notion of specificity does not imply coding, information or instructions; it only describes certain relations, determined by and dependent on the autopoietic organization..." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 90)

Maturana and Varela explicitly reject the cognitivist view of cognition as information processing. "This would mean that such inputs or outputs are part of the definition of the system, as in the case of a computer or other machines that have been engineered. To do this is entirely reasonable when one has designed a machine whose central feature is the manner in which we interact with it. The nervous system (or the organism), however, has not been designed by anyone... (T)he nervous system does not 'pick up information' from the environment, as we often hear... The popular metaphor of calling the brain an 'information-processing device' is not only ambiguous but patently wrong." (Maturana & Varela, 1987, p. 169)

Furthermore, this has a bearing on the autopoietic account for communication. Maturana's construct of languaging is formulated in direct opposition to the conventional (cognitivistic) account of language as "... a denotative symbolic system for the transmission of information." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 30) The necessity for such a reorientation is motivated by an explanatory or epistemological flaw in the convention account, which "...would demand the pre-existence of the function of denotation as necessary to develop the symbolic system for the transmission of information, but this function is the very one whose evolutionary origin should be explained." (Maturana & Varela, 1980, p. 30)

This reformulation of the phenomena to which the explanatory device of "information" has previously been applied requires a significant amount of reflection to digest (cf. Stafford Beer's comments in the Preface, Maturana & Varela, 1980, pp. 68-69). The critical point in this digestion process is an acceptance that the relevant behavioral, cognitive, and social phenomena of interest can be comprehensively explained (in the autopoietic account) without recourse to an inferred abstract "information" construct (in the sense in which the term is most conventionally used).

Cf. coding, cognition, communication, language, languaging

 

International Encyclopedia of Systems & Cybernetics
"The content of a message apt to trigger som action" (J. de ROSNAY, 1975, p. 168)

In this wiev, as stated by W. R. WINBURN, "Information is "the difference that makes a difference" (1991, p. 558)

[…]

Using adequate physical and semantic codes, we communicate our observations and our interpretations to other people, in order to:
confirm, correct or invalidate what we did register or conclude;
obtain feedback in order to complement our own results;
seek a consensus leading to common understanding and collective action;

Only after such constantly renewed exchange, we may speak of "information" referring us to confirmed and circulation meanings admitted by som specific group of people. Moreover, information becomes knowledge only when organized within a net of interconnected meanings whose coherence is generally recognized after due testing and confirmations by numerous people and during a long span of time. This is the social frame of reference.