Information: Course and Recourse

Abstract

The principal aim of this paper is to find guidelines, for the author himself and also possibly for the wider community of information theorists, along which to arrange conceptually the various ideas on information. At the surface level, there seems to be no fundamental unity that links these papers; mine is no exception. Every author assumes this or that particular meaning for the term “information”, then, in turn, they discuss an entailed twin evolution through geological and cultural ages: in other words, the genesis and recognition of information. What is this thing “information”, after all? We could perhaps say “scientific information” instead. This technical term was introduced by Leon Brillouin (1956), perhaps the first to think systematically about the difference between “information” understood in the narrow sense of a measure, and the other thing, which everybody talks about. In fact, he suggested distinguishing entropic (“bound”) and “free” information, and he argued that the latter is just arbitrary. So information is anything we wish. Now I shall reconsider the question in an even wider context to seek another meaning.

Eadem mutata resurgo

(Although changed, I rise again the same. Inscription on the tombstone of J. Bernoulli, student of the logarithmic spiral)