Information Studies and the Quest for Transdisciplinarity

The following sections are included:

• About the Editors
• Contents

According to literary sources [cf. Bernstein, 2015], the term transdisciplinarity was introduced in 1970 at the seminar on interdisciplinarity in universities, which took place at the University of Nice and was jointly sponsored by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development and the French Ministry of Education, as well as in the Doctoral dissertation of Mahan [1970]. Three presenters, the eminent Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, the French mathematician André Lichnerowicz and the Austrian astrophysicist Erich Jantsch, used the term transdisciplinarity although only Piaget is generally credited with coining this term. They all published their first works on this topic in the same book [Jantsch, 1972; Lichnerowicz, 1972; Piaget, 1972]…

If we want to define a universal concept of information, we have to cover not only objective statistical information, but also subjective experiential and meaningful cognition as well as intersubjective meaningful communication in nature, technology, and society. In that case the main problem is to decide which transdisciplinary philosophy of knowledge framework the concept of information should be based on and integrated in. All the ontological attempts to create objective concepts of information result in concepts that cannot encompass meaning and experience of embodied living and social systems. There is no conclusive evidence that proofs that the core of reality across nature, culture, life and mind is purely either statistical or of a computational nature. Therefore the core of the information concept should not only be based on pure logical or mathematical rationality. We need to include interpretation, signification and meaning construction in our transdisciplinary framework for informa-tion as a basic aspect of reality alongside the physical, chemical and molecular biological. It is difficult to produce a pure quantitative statement independently of a qualitative analysis based on some sort of relation to the human condition as a semiotic animal. But this direction of research leads us out of the world of technology into the world of the living. To follow the transdisciplinary ambition in much information science and philosophy leading to cognitive science we need to include a phenomenological and hermeneutical ground in order to encompass a theory of interpretative meaning and signification to achieve a transdisciplinary theory of knowing and communication. This is also true if we start in cybernetics and system theory that also have transdisciplinary aspirations for instance in Bateson’s ecological concept of information as a difference that makes a difference and in Luhmann’s triple autopoietic communication based system theory, where information is always a part of a message. Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmaticist semiotics differs from other paradigms in that it integrates logic and information in interpretative semiotics. I therefore suggest alternatively building information theories based on semiotics from the basic relations of embodied living systems meaningful cognition and communication. I agree with Peircean biosemiotics that all transdisciplinary information concepts in order to work across the natural, technical, social and humanistic sciences must be defined as a part of real relational meaningful sign-processes manifesting as tokens. Thus Peirce’s information theory is empirically based in a realistic worldview, which through modern biosemiotics includes all living systems.

People always need more information than they have. They can get some of this information by themselves but a good deal of information remains inaccessible. This situation, which always existed in human civilization, brought forth Oracles. The idea of an Oracle reflected interactions between systems, such as people and states, with less information and systems with more indispensable information. In the 20^th century, it was proved that some information is intrinsically inaccessible and then the concept of an Oracle naturally came to computer science becoming popular in the realm of algorithms and computations. At first, Turing machines with an Oracle were introduced and studied. Later inductive Turing machines with Oracles, limit Turing machines with Oracles and evolutionary Turing machines with Oracles were established and explored. Here we create a theoretical background for the concept of an Oracle. In the first part of this work, we contemplate Oracles in human culture. In the second part, we contemplate Oracles in computer science and mathematics. In the third part, the variety of Oracles is analyzed and classified. In the fourth part, we develop a mathematical theory of Oracles, where the concepts of an Oracle and its brands are formalized and studied in the mathematical framework.

Physically, information carriers are encountered in two occurrences, either in native form as physical structures, or in arbitrarily coded, symbolic form such as signal systems or sequences of signs. The symbolic form may rigorously be associated with the existence of life. In contrast, structural information may be present in various physical processes or structures independent of life. The self-organised emergence of symbolic information from structural information may be called ritualisation. A century ago, Julian Huxley had introduced this term in behavioural biology. Subsequently, this evolutionary key process of the emergence of animal and social communication was studied in depth by Konrad Lorenz, Günter Tembrock and other ethologists. Ritualisation exhibits typical features of kinetic phase transitions of the 2^nd kind. From a more general viewpoint, the origin of life, the appearance of human languages and the emergence of human social categories such as money can also be understood as ritualisation transitions. Occurring at some stage of evolutionary history, these transitions have in common that after the crossover, arbitrary symbols are issued and recognised by information-processing devices, by transmitters and receivers in the sense of Shannon’s information theory. In this paper, general properties of the ritualisation transition and the related code symmetry are described. These properties are demonstrated by tutorial examples of very different such transitions in natural, social and technical evolution, reviewed from the perspective of the emergence of symbolic information and its structural historicity.

All intelligent information systems in general and human information system in particular should possess such functions as information acquisition, transfer, processing and information conversion to knowledge and further to intelligence for problem solving so that they can well successfully interact with their environment for living. Furthermore, all these functions must also be integrated into a process of “information conversion and intelligence creation”. In this chapter, we present the law that governs the entirety of these processes. In addition, we briefly explain the methodology, models, concepts, theories and principles that support this law.

Before dealing with the problem of philosophical foundation, it is necessary to clarify the definition of the concepts involved. In the case of systems, matter, and information, this has not yet been achieved in a sufficiently satisfactory manner. As it turns out, the adequate language for such an enterprise would be that of mathematics. This adds a lot of precision and consistency to the chosen objective. But until now, this has been done only in very rare cases. In 2012, I have pointed to the most important aspects of such an approach in a joint paper with José M. Díaz Nafría published in two parts in the journal “Information”. In this present paper here, the results of this earlier work are collected in order to discuss the underlying problems of definition and foundation derived there from. I will show that it is topos theory that is the adequate mathematical instrument to deal with the theory of systems. On the other hand, it is the philosophical reflexion of topos theory that opens the path towards concrete details concerning the foundation of the prime concepts involved which are matter (energy-mass) and information (entropystructure), respectively. As it turns out, within their conceptualization, one cannot be separated from the other, and the approach to both is a generically interdisciplinary enterprise. With respect to the concept of information in particular, this present paper follows the line of argument as discussed in Helmut Klemm’s review paper of 2003. But note that here, different from earlier approaches, the discussion is unified with a view to both matter and information in the first place, so that information science for itself is showing up as a part of the project rather than the whole project. The idea is that the concept of information cannot be actually unified without unifying matter and information at the same time.

Similar to oil that acted as a basic raw material and key driving force of industrial society, information acts as a raw material and principal mover of knowledge society in the knowledge production, propagation and application. New developments in information processing and information communication technologies allow increasingly complex and accurate descriptions, representations and models, which are often multi-parameter, multiperspective, multi-level and multidimensional. This leads to the necessity of collaborative work between different domains with corresponding specialist competences, sciences and research traditions. We present several major transdisciplinary unification projects for information and knowledge, which proceed on the descriptive, logical and the level of generative mechanisms. Parallel process of boundary crossing and transdisciplinary activity is going on in the applied domains. Technological artifacts are becoming increasingly complex and their design is strongly user-centered, which brings in not only the function and various technological qualities but also other aspects including esthetic, user experience, ethics and sustainability with social and environmental dimensions. When integrating knowledge from a variety of fields, with contributions from different groups of stakeholders, numerous challenges are met in establishing common view and common course of action. In this context, information is our environment, and informational ecology determines both epistemology and spaces for action. We present some insights into the current state of the art of transdisciplinary theory and practice of information studies and informatics. We depict different facets of transdisciplinarity as we see it from our different research fields that include information studies, computability, human-computer interaction, multi-operating-systems environments and philosophy.

This book series, intended to describe the role of Information Science in the Quest for Transdisciplinarity, makes two major metatheoretical assumptions:

• Transdisciplinarity is a not fully established domain of knowledge whose importance justifies making a quest to augment it.
• Given the convergence in progress between the Science and Philosophy of Information, both can make a contribution to this quest.

For this chapter, we draw on new research by Wu establishing the contours of a potential Unified Science-Philosophy of Information (USPI) and by Brenner on information and the foundations of Transdisciplinarity. Wu states that the underlying interaction of Information Science and Information Philosophy now appears as a convergence toward a potential USPI. We follow the Nicolescu concept of Transdisciplinarity as what lies in, between and beyond disciplines, but feel it requires an amplified, informational ontology which an eventual USPI could provide. We see the combination of these two lines of thought as a trend which could give a new unity and comprehensive form to knowledge. This is exactly the objective stated for Transdisciplinarity itself by Nicolescu in his 1996 Manifesto. In the framework of a Unified Science-Philosophy of Information, which would include Transdisciplinarity, philosophy, science and technology may develop in an interactive, more humanistic manner.

When two people try to communicate there is inevitably confrontation: representation against representation, subconscious against subconscious. As this confrontation is subconscious, it often degenerates into conflict. A new model of civilization is necessary, the keystone being the dialogue between human beings, nations, cultures and religions for the survival of humanity. In forming a new model of civilization the methodology of transdisciplinarity is crucial. In this context, it is important to distinguish between natural information and spiritual information.

The existence is one of the ultimate concepts in the studies of western philosophy. Almost all well-known philosophers in history had their own understandings of this concept. As a new philosophical form in new era, the philosophy of information states that philosophy of information and information science should develop together. The existence in philosophy needs to be redefined. The segmentation of existential field should be the first step to tackle with the issue of existence and non-existence. In the view of the philosophy of information, there are four levels of the existence: A. objective direct existence, B. objective indirect existence, C. subjective for-itself existence and D. subjective regenerated existence. The existential levels of a certain thing cover four levels in part or in its totality. Consequently, the nonexistence, as the opposite concept of the existence, has also changed. The existence and non-existence can be transformed into each other, with five properties in the process, those are: continuity, developmental feature, contingency, retrospective feature and predictability.

Animals communicate by exchanging signals that contain information. The type and amount of information contained in a signal is restricted and shaped by long lasting evolutionary processes. In the course of human evolution, the emergence of a special set of cognitive abilities and social motivations changed the way in which information is transmitted by a given signal. First, the interpretation of a signal depends on whether it is used with the intention to provide information. Second, humans expect signals to be cooperatively intended and therefore expect them to provide relevant and useful information. Finally, the signal is interpreted in the light of the facts and beliefs that are shared between the interlocutors. In this chapter I will argue that these changes enabled humans to flexibly create and understand signals in unprecedented ways. This in turn changed the way that information was transmitted across individuals and generations.

Fechner’s law and its modern generalizations can be regarded as manifestations of alternative forms of arithmetic, coexisting at stimulus and sensation levels. The world of sensations may be thus described by a generalization of the standard mathematical calculus.

Information exchange between inanimate objects (like individual physical particles, or systems) involve special approaches, due to the peculiarity that conscious information emitters/recipients are excluded. This paper aims at answering a part of questions arising by these approaches. One can put the question, whether can we speak about physical information when there is no live percipient to accept, evaluate and use it? Can one speak about physical information (e.g., signal exchange) between inanimate physical objects? (Cf., e.g., Feynman diagrams.) If so, what is the nature of that information? Is (physical) information a passive phenomenon, or its existence presumes activity? What does, e.g., a signal represent if it is not perceived and used at another end, and where is that end when one can say: that signal was lost without perception or use? I try to illustrate my personal answers with a few examples quoted from the history of 20^th century physics. My answers to the questions are not intended to be enunciations and to provide final solutions, rather they serve as arguments and indicate that nothing is closed, the discussion is open.

The present work discusses the pertinence of a “sociotype” construct, both theoretically and empirically oriented, based on the conceptual chain genotype-phenotype-sociotype. It suggests the existence of an evolutionary preference in humans for some determined averages of social structure and communicative relationships. Although human individuals become highly adaptive and resilient concerning the implementation of their sociality, a core pattern, or “sociotype” might be delineated for their social structures and relationships. Anthropologically, this construct dovetails with recent developments in origins of language, social networks, and the “Social Brain Hypothesis.” From several points of view, properly framing the sociotype construct and submitting it to empirical testing could be a timely enterprise. In our times, dramatic changes are occurring in the social relationships of entire communities. Economic globalization, new communication technologies, and the demographic transition towards elderly populations are configuring a new panorama of social intercourse, paradoxically characterized by an increasing level of isolation. Such perceived isolation and feelings of loneliness become an unrewarding condition for individuals, an unwanted state, and also a risk factor for mental health. An empirical search throughout the sociotype lens could provide useful orientations for these problems — a pilot study on the social relationships of young people is herein included.

This chapter deals with the problem of outlier detection a data mining technique with a range of potential applications across many disciplines. In particular, it concentrates on the detection of outlier information in numeric and textual records. A brief survey of the literature concerning outlier detection methods, including those using linguistic summaries, is followed by an overview of outlier detection methods applied to numeric attributes. The techniques for the analysis of textual records are also discussed, with a particular focus on the n-gram and generalized n-gram methods. Then, the concept of linguistic summaries is explained in some detail and applied to the process of outlier detection to enable a simultaneous analysis of both textual and numeric records. The proposed solution is illustrated with examples.

A fundamental question in science is how investigators are to convert their observations of the universe into information about the universe. That question is answered best using the language of probability theory. Using that language, what one expects to observe in any situation is given by the expectation value of the observable function with weight conditioned on the information one has accumulated. Before any observations have been reported, one must set the stage by defining the geometry of the parametric manifold. Because the observable must be expressed as a function to be evaluated mathematically, all models for the universe necessarily are parametric, even those which claim to be parameter free. As a concrete example of the process, a detailed study is made here of the simple problem of assigning a binary type to objects as they cross some specified line in space. The stage is set using the transformation group approach to establish the prior state of knowledge, and how one establishes the reliability of one’s predictive power is expressed. When the probabilistic nature of observation is respected, one realizes that even perfect knowledge of the likelihood of an event’s occurrence cannot yield perfect predictions of its occurrence, because the action of observation amounts to the selection of one particular universe out of the many which are possible.

The article is devoted to an important role of the concept of resonances not only in classical and quantum mechanics but also in genetics and biological communication. Matrix representations of oscillators with many degrees of freedom are used to model some phenomena of Mendelian genetics and to analyze structures of genetic-molecular alphabets. To explain phenomena of segregation in these molecular alphabets, the existence of dominant and recessive resonances in nitrogenous bases of DNA and RNA are postulated by analogy with dominant and recessive alleles in Mendelian genetics. Relations of genetic alphabets with modulo-2 addition, dyadic groups of binary numbers and matrices of dyadic shifts are shown. A connection of structures of genetic alphabets with known formalisms of noiseimmunity coding (Rademacher and Walsh functions, Hadamard matrices) are discussed taking into account noise-immunity properties of genetic encoding.

The current forms of American Apartheid express longstanding and persistent dynamics of segregation and serial forced displacement that have successfully adapted to challenge over several centuries. Segregation confines non-white people to closely specified areas while serial forced displacement moves them repeatedly from one place to another. Both inhibit or destroy the nondisjunctive ‘weak’ ties that unify a community across its inherent or imposed divisions. Absent these social ties, it is almost impossible to carry out normal daily life, let alone advance the civil rights struggle. How are such ties to be reconstructed? While community-building is an inherent human activity, and significant mobilizations of any kind will begin to reknit social cohesion, the policies of serial forced displacement are so powerful that it impossible to do the work of rebuilding ties without simultaneously fighting for community stability. Thus, for many Americans, the Future Information Society, in the absence of suppression of the evolving institutions that instantiate racism, will simply resemble the past. Driving the self-perpetuating and highly adaptive modalities of American Apartheid to extinction remains today as urgent a calling as was the Abolitionist enterprise of previous centuries.

Conventional methods of genetic engineering and more recent genome editing techniques focus on identifying genetic target sequences for manipulation. This is a result of historical concept of the gene which was also the main assumption of the ENCODE project designed to identify all functional elements in the human genome sequence. However, the theoretical core concept changed dramatically. The old concept of genetic sequences which can be assembled and manipulated like molecular bricks has problems in explaining the natural genome-editing competences of viruses and RNA consortia that are able to insert or delete, combine and recombine genetic sequences more precisely than random-like into cellular host organisms according to adaptational needs or even generate sequences de novo. Increasing knowledge about natural genome editing questions the traditional narrative of mutations (error replications) as essential for generating genetic diversity and genetic content arrangements in biological systems. This may have far-reaching consequences for our understanding of artificial genome editing.