Bateson Information Revisited: A New Paradigm

Abstract

The goal of this work is to explain a novel information paradigm claiming that all information results from a process, intrinsic to living beings, of self-production; a sensory commensurable, self-referential feedback process immanent to Bateson’s difference that makes a difference. To highlight and illustrate this fundamental process, a simulation based on one-parameter feedback is presented. It simulates a homeorhetic process, innate to organisms, illustrating a self-referenced, autonomous system. The illustrated recursive process is sufficiently generic to be the only basis for information in nature: from the single cell, to multi-cellular organisms, to consideration of all types of natural and non-natural phenomena, including tools and artificial constructions.

Concept Emergence from Complex Sensory Data: A Connectionist Model

“…Similar to the approach presented by Cárdenas-García and Ireland (Burgin and Cárdenas-García, 2020;Cárdenas-García, 2022;Cárdenas-García and Ireland, 2020), the sensors that are proposed here produce qualitative information by encoding the quantitative aspect of a signal through a comparator element. As discussed above, and aligned with the ideas in the latter work, the act of sensing does not understand much of quantities but rather, it understands more about differences.…”

A Dialogue Concerning the Essence and Role of Information in the World System

“…Note that implicit in this conception of information is that all information that human beings have access to is produced by us. In other words, we can conceive it as a process of info-autopoiesis, or of self-produced information, as central to humankind [30,31]. This can be extended, more generally, to all cognitive beings that exist in nature.…”