IDEA – INFORMATION

ART & ORGANISM

useful ideas

“INFORMATION”

and notes touching on

CONNECTIONS  and the creation of “MEANING“

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“As Wiener  stated  more succinctly  than  Berkeley or Hume, “Information  is information, not  matter  or energy”  (1948,  p. 155).  To be sure,  the communication of information depends  on  its transmission by measurable physical  entities. This  might  be called  a law of communication. But  the information itself is without  substance.  In terms of quantum mechanics,  one could sum it up by an  illustration used by Brian Cooney  in relation  to the currently  favored  philosophical term qualia. Excitation of the retina  by measurable  waves and  particles would  offer an  explanation of how  the  visual system might  be activated  so as to generate  the subjective  impression of the color green. But Cooney  notes, “Nothing in the materialist  universe is green” (1991, p. 208).” (from Maclean 1997)[i]

Information Management and the data-information-knowledge-wisdom pyramid

According to Rowley (2007), information is typically “defined in terms of data, knowledge in terms of information, and wisdom in terms of knowledge, but there is less consensus in the description of the processes that transform elements lower in the hierarchy into those above them, leading to a lack of definitional clarity.”  These ideas became progressively more important in the emerging field of information management and its parent discipline of Data management, a field that emerged in the 1980’s with changing technology, and its resultant specialization, “information management” involved ways of recording, storing, organizing, and retrieving data organized at different levels of integration and complexity.  “The data-information-knowledge-wisdom hierarchy emerged in this environment.  It “seemed like a really great idea when it was first proposed. But its rapid acceptance was in fact a sign of how worried we were about the real value of the information systems we had built at such great expense. What looks like a logical progression is actually a desperate cry for help.” (Weinberger 2010) 

• INFORMATION is what we pursue (recall, We are INFOVORES) and communicate the information acquired (we wish to know and to be known):  
  • THE ORIGINS of INFORMATION: a PERURBATION in ENTROPY?

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