Dear Colleagues and Friends
I have been invited by Mark Burgin editor of
the electronic journal Information (ISSN 2078-2489; http://www.mdpi.com/journal/information) to guest edit a special issue of the journal. The objective of the special issue entitled "Information: Its Different Modes and its Relation to Meaning" is to explore the nature of information in the wide variety of forms that it takes and answer the following questions:
What is information?
Does the nature of information change depending on the context in which it is employed? For example is the information stored in DNA or on a computer the same?
Is there a difference between symbolic information like that stored in a book or on a computer and DNA which is not symbolic of RNA but catalyzes its production.
What is the relationship of information to the medium in which it is stored or instantiated?
What is the relation of information to any of the following, i.e. to meaning, to data, to knowledge, to wisdom, to science, to physics, to chemistry, to biology, to medicine, to neurophysiology, to neural networks, to psychology, to psychiatry, to evolution, to mathematics, to philosophy, to technology, to computers, to engineering, to design, to economics, to complexity, to chaos, to emergence, to commerce, to business, to knowledge management, to culture, to history, to art, to music, to the sender, to the receiver, to the channel, to systems theory, to cybernetics, to ontology, to epistemology, to consciousness, and to x where x is some other topic of interest to you.
What role did the concept of or role of information play in the work of some scholar such as Shannon, Weaver, Kolmogorov, Chaitin, McLuhan, Innis, Plato, Aristotle, Newton, Freud, Jung, Kant, Descarte, Russell, Whitehead, Pierce, Bateson, Turing, Gödel, von Neumann or any other scholar of interest to you?
Other questions that can be addressed are those raised in my paper What is Information?: Why is It Relativistic and What is Its Relationship to Materiality, Meaning and Organization, which will appear in the special issue of the journal that I am guest editing and is attached: