Entropy and the Self-Organization of Information and Value

Abstract

Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, Rudolf Clausius, and Léon Brillouin considered certain "values" as key quantities in their descriptions of market competition, natural selection, thermodynamic processes, and information exchange, respectively. None of those values can be computed from elementary properties of the particular object they are attributed to, but rather values represent emergent, irreducible properties. In this paper, such values are jointly understood as information values in certain contexts. For this aim, structural information is distinguished from symbolic information. While the first can be associated with arbitrary physical processes or structures, the latter requires conventions which govern encoding and decoding of the symbols which form a message. As a value of energy, Clausius' entropy is a universal measure of the structural information contained in a thermodynamic system. The structural information of a message, in contrast to its meaning, can be evaluated by Shannon's entropy of communication. Symbolic information is found only in the realm of life, such as in animal behavior, human sociology, science, or technology, and is often cooperatively valuated by competition. Ritualization is described here as a universal scenario for the self-organization of symbols by which symbolic information emerges from structural information in the course of evolution processes. Emergent symbolic information exhibits the novel fundamental code symmetry which prevents the meaning of a message from being reducible to the physical structure of its carrier. While symbols turn arbitrary during the ritualization transition, their structures preserve information about their evolution history.

Structural and Symbolic Information in the Context of the General Theory of Information

“…At the same time, Feistel and Ebeling suggest the vision of structural information, in which structural information may no longer be restricted to changing just "knowledge in an intelligent system", and may more generally be defined as the capacity of a physical system, the "carrier of structural information", to cause changes in a second physical system, the "receiver of structural information" [4,5,7,8].…”

“…In contrast to this, irreversible macroscopic dynamics is commonly associated with a loss of [macroscopic] [structural] information, directly related to the growth of thermodynamic entropy (cf. [7,8]). In the sense of Planck [31], who wrote that "a macroscopic state always comprises a large number of microscopic states that combine to an average value", macroscopic structural information represents a portion of the microscopic structural information of a given system.…”

“…That is, the different structures of the same system may possess different symmetries and may follow different laws. Irreducibilities of this kind indicate emergent properties or structures (see [8] and Section 5).…”

“…It may be often quantified in terms of physical entropy [5,8,[10][11][12]. Physical structures, such as moving planets and their shining light, exist independently of life.…”

“…To achieve better understanding of information processes, it is useful to study relations between structural and symbolic information [4][5][6][7][8], or, synonymously, between bounded and free information [9], respectively. Symbolic information relies on a convention between the transmitter and receiver.…”