On the concept of information and its role in nature
type: Item
instance of: scholarly article
title: On the concept of information and its role in nature
zbMATH Open document ID: 1109.92005
author: Juan G. Roederer
published in: Entropy
publication date: 2003-09-15T00:00:00Z
full work available at URL: list03.htm
review text: Summary: We address some fundamental questions concerning information: Can the existing laws of physics adequately deal with the most striking property of information, namely to cause specific changes in the structure and energy flows of a complex system, without the information in itself representing fields, forces or energy in any of their characteristic forms? Or is information irreducible to the laws of physics and chemistry? Are information and complexity related concepts? Does the Universe, in its evolution, constantly generate new information? Or are information and information-processing exclusive attributes of living systems, related to the very definition of life? If that were the case, what happens with the physical meanings of entropy in statistical mechanics or wave function in quantum mechanics? How many distinct classes of information and information processing do exist in the biological world? How does information appear in Darwinian evolution? Does the human brain have unique properties or capabilities in terms of information processing? In what ways does information processing bring about human self-consciousness? We introduce the meaning of `information' in a way that is detached from human technological systems and related algorithms and semantics, and that is not based on any mathematical formula. To accomplish this we turn to the concept of interaction as the basic departing point, and identify two fundamentally different classes, with information and information-processing appearing as the key discriminator: force-field driven interactions between elementary particles and ensembles of particles in the macroscopic physical domain, and information-based interactions between certain kinds of complex systems that form the biological domain. We show that in an abiotic world, information plays no role; physical interactions just happen, they are driven by energy exchange between the interacting parts and do not require any operations of information …
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 92C05
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 92B05
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 94A15
zbMATH DE Number: 1981630
zbMATH Keywords: physical and biological interactions
zbMATH Keywords: life
zbMATH Keywords: memory
zbMATH Keywords: biomolecular information
zbMATH Keywords: neural information
zbMATH Keywords: cognition
zbMATH Keywords: consciousness and self-consciousness
MaRDI profile type: Publication
OpenAlex ID: W2095414040
cites work: Q4002087
DOI: 10.3390/E5010003
description: scientific article; zbMATH DE number 1981630