Center for Science in Society

Information?: An Inquiry

Tuesdays, 9:30-11 am
Science Building, Room 227
Schedule | On-line Forum | Evolving Resource List

For further information contact Paul Grobstein.

A new (summer, 2004) Center working group growing out of prior conversations in the Emergence working group and in meetings on "Information, Meaning, and Noise" in the spring, 2004 Center Brown Bag series. The objective of the group is to try and understand, and perhaps to further develop, an intuition that related problems have arisen in a diverse array of inquiries all pointing to the need for a new and more general way of understanding "information".

It is not inconceivable that [diverse biological] phenomena have an explanation in terms of permitted forms of information organization, and the mechanisms by which additional information can cause change from one form to another ... Grobstein, 1988

"It from bit" symbolizes the idea that the physical world has at bottom - at a very deep bottom , in most instances - an immaterial source and explanation; that which we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes-no questions and the registering of equipment-evoked responses; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe ... Wheeler, 1990