A few more thoughts on Floridi’s brilliant work, The Philosophy of Information (PoI) (2011):

WIENER: “[Information is] a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustment felt upon it” (91).

WHEELER: “Wheeler appears to endorse an information-theoretic, metaphysical monism: the universe’s essential nature is digital, being fundamentally composed of information as data/dedomena instead of matter or energy, with material objects as a complex secondary manifestation” (91).

It’s difficult to see how Ontological Neutrality “ON” (no information without data representations)** isn’t material, matter-energy (90). Isn’t the suggestion that it could be something other than matter-energy a Platonism or metaphysics? This critique then begs the question: 

Can information represent its own ontological category even if information is always already material, e.g., matter-energy? What would make this category distinct?

**See for example 1.6 Ontological neutrality

Addendum:RE FI.9 “Informing does not require truth.”

A dog’s bark is information.
A dog’s bark is neither true nor false
Therefore informing does not require truth.

An aesthetic opinion is information, e.g., “This painting is beautiful.”
An aesthetic opinion is neither true nor false
Therefore informing does not require truth.

Questions to be answered: Why must the General Definition of semantic Information (GDI) include a necessary truth condition? Why can’t truth-values supervene on semantic information, that is, following misinformation? Isn’t there always some truth in a lie, some information in misinformation? Floridi suggests analogously (as I read him anyway) that “because information is indicative also when it is not there (the lack of some data may also be informative in itself), small patterns can also be significant if they are absent” (The 4th Revolution 17).

In The Philosophy of Information (2011), Luciano Floridi posits eighteen open problems for the Philosophy of Information. I would like to address one of these problems: “What is the ontological status of information?” My strategy is to approach the problem as a reply to Wittgenstein’s famous observation, “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him,” since, taken at face value, Wittgenstein misconstrues taxonomic epistemology as ontological fact and ignores the informational as its own ontological category.  

Wittgenstein goes into the talking lion problem already biased by biological-behaviorist definitional categories (i.e., an Aristotelean language-game): a talking lion’s speech acts are intricately woven into—as—a lion’s experience (what it is to be a lion) to which humans ostensibly have no access, i.e., no access to the form of life that is talking lions’ shared behavior, that which would constitute “the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language” (P.I. 206). Yet experientialist demarcation rooted in preconceived taxonomic notions of human and lion collapses if on some level or to some degree (e.g., physically, experientially) a human’s scream and a lion’s roar share some pragmatic function. Interestingly, Wiener observes that “social animals may have an active, intelligent, flexible means of communication long before the development of language” (157). So if, for example, one discounts these taxonomic prejudices, one could argue that a lion’s roar and a human’s scream share some “family resemblance” in the Wittgenstein sense, phonologically rather than morphologically. Otherwise it would seem that Wittgenstein contradicts himself, especially given his Beetle in a Box thought experiment that rejects private language and makes psychical inner workings irrelevant. What matters here is that the information exchanged is between lion and human information systems. Information passed from talking lion to human can yield human understanding without meaning made between them. That is to say, reciprocal recognition is not necessary for unidirectional understanding, i.e., one party’s—the human’s—inference. A lion need not constitute a human Other for human understanding of lion talk. Interspecies communication may be one reason why Brandom says that “propositional contents have a pragmatic priority, not only in the setting of assessments of the significance of speech acts, but also in the setting of attributions of intentional states that do not evidently depend on linguistic practices” (Making It Explicit 83, emphasis mine). Hence, we ostensibly understand a computer’s message without knowing what it is like to be a computer whether or not a computer is conscious or has “BAT-itude" (Nagel et al.). One might even consider an autopoietic, self-generating quantum computer whose “essence” is alien to human experience even when the computer is created by a human. There is still understanding. .

Information is particularly important here since such taxonomic epistemology doesn’t differentiate between information, meaning, and understanding, a difference that would suggest that the all-or-nothing “only humans have language” falls short as an experientialist category or hard descriptor. A definition is helpful:

“Information is the form in all concrete objects as well as the content in non-existent, merely possible, thoughts and other abstract entities. It is the disembodied, de-materialized essence of anything. [ … ] Sadly, there is no isomorphism [mapping], no information in common, between words and objects. This accounts for much of the failing of analytic language philosophy in the past century. Although language is an excellent tool for human communication, its arbitrary and ambiguous nature makes it ill-suited to represent the world directly. Language does not picture reality.” (The Information Philosopher)

Here informational ontology contradicts Wittgenstein’s conclusion in at least two ways. First, if information is its own ontological category or, as Norbert Wiener argued, “information is information,” the body (e.g., lion’s vs. human’s), life-experiences and all, is not wholly responsible for meaning (challenging, too, McLuhan’s equally famous observation that medium and message are inseparable). Therefore taxonomy is limited. [Note: part of this paper will explore the possibility of even proving information’s immateriality.] Second, information passed from talking lion to human can generate human understanding without meaning made between lion and human, i.e., without normativity. That is to say, reciprocal recognition (Brandom et al.) is not necessary for unidirectional understanding, i.e., one party’s—the human’s—inference. Likewise one ostensibly understands a computer’s message without knowing what it’s like to be a computer whether or not a computer is conscious or has BAT-itude (Nagel, Hofstadter, Dennett et al.). One might consider an autopoietic, self-generating quantum computer whose “essence” is alien to human experience even when the computer is created by a human. There is still understanding.

…   

Addendum:

“The odors perceived by the ant seem to lead to a highly standardized course of conduct; but the value of a simple stimulus, such as an odor, for conveying information depends not only on the information conveyed by the stimulus itself but on the whole nervous constitution of the sender and receiver of the stimulus as well. Suppose I find myself in the woods with an intelligent savage who cannot speak my language and whose language I cannot speak. Even without any code of sign language common to the two of us, I can learn a great deal from him. All I need to do is to be alert to those moments when he shows the signs of emotion or interest. I then cast my eyes around, perhaps paying special attention to the direction of his glance, and fix in my memory what I see or hear. It will not be long before I discover the things which seem important to him, not because he has communicated them to me by language, but because I myself have observed them. In other words, a signal without an intrinsic content may acquire meaning in his mind by what he observes at the time, and may acquire meaning in my mind by what I observed at the time. The ability that he has to pick out the moments of my special, active attention is in itself a language as varied in possibilities as the range of impressions that the two of us are able to encompass. Thus social animals may have an active, intelligent, flexible means of communication long before the development of language.” (Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, p. 157)

“But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. [ … ] If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that nature does not know it!”
(Feynman, Six Easy Pieces, qtd. in Floridi)

Does Feynman here make a rare mistake, a Cartesian oversight that forgets that a thought, too, is part of the universe? That is to say, of course nature knows it. But then what is knowing if knowing is nature? As nature, as part of the universe, is a thought something self-reflexive, autopoietic, or … thoughtless? Perhaps Feynman is correct.