Against a monistic view of information - Information in biological and physical contexts

CRISTIAN LÓPEZ; MARÍA JOSÉ FERREIRA

Helsinki

Congreso; 15° Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science; 2015

The Division of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science - University of Helsinki

At present, information is everywhere. In its everyday sense, the concept of information involves semantic and epistemic notions, such as meaning, representation and knowledge. In a technical sense, the concept is related with notions as probability, statistical correlations and algorithmic complexity. In the last half century, the scientific discourse has been permeated by an informational language that is becoming increasingly extended and fundamental. For instance, in biological sciences, the term ?information? was introduced to describe the production of proteins from genes, and has been since then a key concept in the field of molecular biology, giving rise to the familiar expression of genetic information. The concept of information has also spread into many other subdisciplines, such as ecology, cell biology, behavioral biology and evolutionary biology. In turn, the notion of information has become also central in physical sciences. In particular, quantum information promises to alter dramatically the field of communication. Moreover, it is argued that quantum mechanics itself may be entirely reconstructed in an informational language. Be that as it may, the concept of information is here to stay in the scientific discourse. But, what is information? The philosophical discussion on the matter has been focused on the search for a single answer to the question, as if ?information? had a univocal meaning, regardless of the scientific and epistemic context. This fact has led to a generalized monistic view about the nature of information. We think that this is a misguided starting point. Our aim in this presentation is to argue that the nature of information is context-dependent and definable by the rules of each scientific field. Our position leads to a pluralistic view about information that, despite giving up a unified concept, it becomes more accurate as well as more useful in the scientific practice.