Participación invitada: Interpreting the concept of information

OLIMPIA LOMBARDI

Tel Aviv y Jerusalem

Simposio; Information and its Role in Science: Physics, Biology, Cognitive and Brain Sciences; 2016

The Hebrew Universiy of Jerusalem

The word 'information' refers to a polysemantic concept that can beassociated with different phenomena. Then, my first step will be to disentanglethe varied meanings of the concept: semantic information as different fromstatistical information, and in this last case, the computational context asdifferent from the communicational context. The locusclassicus of the communicational concept of information is the famousarticle by Claude Shannon, where a precise formalism is introduced. However, inspite of the agreement concerning the traditional and well understoodformalism, the very interpretation of the concept of information is far fromunanimous. Here I will distinguish the epistemic and the physicalinterpretations, considering their advantages and shortcomings. Then I willcritically consider a recent and widespread deflationary view. Finally, I will defenda pluralist view based on a formal interpretation of the concept.In turn, during the lastdecades, new interpretive problems have arisen with the advent of quantuminformation theory, which combine the difficulties in the understanding of theconcept of information with the well-known foundational puzzles derived fromquantum mechanics itself. This research field has experienced a greatdevelopment: new formal results multiply rapidly. In this context, the questionto be answered is: are there two different kinds of information, classical andquantum? I will challenge the views that give a positive answer of thisquestion in terms of the different ways of generating and transmittinginformation. My purpose is to claim that there is a single kind of information,which can be encoded by means of classical or quantum systems.