Ever wonder what “information” really means?
Here‘s a new paper, that lays out the multiple ways the term is used in natural science.
Instead of arguing for a single valid interpretation, the paper proposes a pluralistic view where rigorous alternatives coexist — each with affordances and limits.
The numbering goes from more familiar to less familiar to a general audience, corresponding to the order we present the topics in this Perspective. These faces of information can also be arranged according to the degree to which they assume information is ‘real’ versus useful and to the degree in which they relate to concrete phenomena or abstract constructs.
The idea of ‘information’ has been instrumental to advances in multiple fields of physics and natural science more broadly.
However, despite — or perhaps because of — its pervasiveness, this key notion is used in such a wide range of settings that it is unclear whether there is coherence underpinning all these applications.
Instead of advocating for a monolithic perspective, we posit that information has come to bear a number of different technical interpretations, which are usually not sufficiently disambiguated. Following this idea, in this Perspective, we put forward a pluralistic approach towards information, wherein multiple technical interpretations coexist — each bringing its own affordances and restrictions. We outline four different technical senses in which information is currently used in scientific research, which we describe as the engineering, statistical, thermodynamic and ontological ‘faces’ of information.
Disambiguating the domain and scope of these faces may help to avoid misinterpretations. We also highlight the complementarity of distinct, yet equally valid applications of an information lens for natural systems.
Although foundational ideas for the thermodynamic and ontological faces were established before the twentieth century, the advent of the engineering and statistical faces was instrumental in revealing information’s full potential. Max-Ent, maximum entropy principle.
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