Philosophical conceptions of information

“The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com” Copyright Springer'I love information upon all subjects that come in my way, and especially upon those that are most important.' Thus boldly declares Euphranor, one of the defenders of Christian faith in Berkley’s Alciphron (Berkeley, (1732), Dialogue 1, Section 5, Paragraph 6/10). Evidently, information has been an object of philosophical desire for some time, well before the computer revolution, Internet or the dot.com pandemonium (see for example Dunn (2001) and Adams (2003)). Yet what does Euphranor love, exactly? What is information? The question has received many answers in different fields. Unsurprisingly, several surveys do not even converge on a single, unified definition of information (see for example Braman 1989, Losee (1997), Machlup and Mansfield (1983), Debons and Cameron (1975), Larson and Debons (1983)).Peer reviewe

Alan Turing’s Legacy: Info-Computational Philosophy of Nature

Abstract. Alan Turing’s pioneering work on computability, and his ideas on morphological computing support Andrew Hodges view of Turing as a natural philosopher. Turings natural philosophy differs importantly from Galileos view that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics (The Assayer, 1623). Computing is more than a language of nature as computation produces real time behaviors. This article presents the framework of Natural Infocomputationalism as a contemporary natural philosophy that builds on the legacy of Turings computationalism. Info-computationalism is a synthesis of Informational Structural Realism (the view that nature is a web of informational structures) and Natural Computationalism (the view that nature physically computes its own time development). It presents a framework for the development of a unified approach to nature, with common interpretation of inanimate nature as well as living organisms and their social networks. Computing is information processing that drives all the changes on different levels of organization of information and can be understood as morphological computing on data sets pertinent to informationa

Pattern recognition methods for querying and browsing technical documentation

Abstract. Graphics recognition deals with the specific pattern recognition problems found in graphics-rich documents, typical technical documentation of all kinds. In this paper, we propose a short journey through 20 years of involvement and contributions within this scientific community, and explore more precisely a few interesting issues found when the problem is to browse, query and navigate in a large and complex set of technical documents. Key words: graphics recognition, symbol recognition, document analysis, information spotting

Against digital ontology

The paper argues that digital ontology (the ultimate nature of reality is digital, and the universe is a computational system equivalent to a Turing Machine) should be carefully distinguished from informational ontology (the ultimate nature of reality is structural), in order to abandon the former and retain only the latter as a promising line of research. Digital vs. analogue is a Boolean dichotomy typical of our computational paradigm, but digital and analogue are only "modes of presentation" of Being (to paraphrase Kant), that is, ways in which reality is experienced or conceptualised by an epistemic agent at a given level of abstraction. A preferable alternative is provided by an informational approach to structural realism, according to which knowledge of the world is knowledge of its structures. The most reasonable ontological commitment turns out to be in favour of an interpretation of reality as the totality of structures dynamically interacting with each other. The paper is the first part (the pars destruens) of a two-part piece of research. The pars construens, entitled "A Defence of Informational Structural Realism", is developed in a separate article, also published in this journal