Re: [asa] Information and knowledge

*But, if I came to our patent attorney and said I wanted to patent
"information" he'd slap me silly*.

That's why he's a mere practitioner and not living on the olympian heights
of the legal academy. :-) (Or, that's why he's out there making big bucks
instead of trifling over ontology for peanuts).

*Information theory does not define information that way at all.*
**
You have to be more precise about what you mean by "information theory." If
you mean simply Shannon, you're right. If you mean the Philosophy of
Information and the Ethics of Information Technology, the issue is wide
open. Both of these fields build on Shannon's insights but have gone far
beyond them. There is most certainly a lively debate in this fields, which
BTW tend to be hostile to ID in general, about the ontology of information.
See generally, http://www.philosophyofinformation.net/

Again, here's a little blurb relating to my particular interests of
information law and patents. This is from the blog of Luciano Floridi, a
philosopher at Oxford, who is one of the leaders in the Philosophy of
Information field (http://www.philosophyofinformation.net/blog/) . Floridi
is commenting here on his participation in a recent conference on
biotechnology law:

In my own contribution, I argued that, ultimately, genes are literally
information (although a procedural kind of it) and that this interpretation
allows one to unify, in a single approach to informational realism, both
physics and biology. Basically, it makes a lot of sense to adopt a level of
abstraction at which all processes, properties and entities, no matter
whether just physical or also biological, are ultimately made of
information.

The previous thesis can be summarised through a slogan: in biology, the
medium is the message.

Linguistically, this means supporting the view that attributive uses of
"biological" in "biological information" (biological information is
information about biological facts) are based on predicative uses of
"biological" (biological information is information whose intrinsic nature
is biological, in the same sense in which digital information is not
information about something digital but information whose nature is
digital).

The consequence of this priority of the predicative over the attributive is
that, if genes are (a kind of) information, then ownership of someone's
genes is metaphorically reducible to a form of kidnapping or slavery. What
is at stake is not so much privacy, then, but something even more
fundamental: personal identity and integrity, and freedom.

And here is part of a book chapter by Floridi that outlines the state of the
debate over the ontological status of information. Notice the robust
critique of Landauer's materialistic view of information. Notice also that
the question of information ontology goes all the way back to Plato. What
are the "forms," after all, but information?:

*

11. The ontological status of information
*

Barwise and Seligman [1997] have remarked that "If the world were a
completely chaotic, unpredictable affair, there would be no information to
process. Still, the place of information in the natural world of biological
and physical systems is far from clear." (p. xi). This lack of clarity
prompts a whole family of problems.

It is often argued that there is no information without (data)
representation. Following Landauer and Bennett [1985]; Landauer [1987];
Landauer [1991]; Landauer [1996], this principle is usually interpreted
materialistically, as advocating the impossibility of physically disembodied
information, through the equation "representation = physical
implementation". The view that there is no information without physical
implementation is an inevitable assumption, when working on the physics of
computation, since computer science must necessarily take into account the
physical properties and limits of the carriers of information. It is also
the ontological assumption behind the Physical Symbol System Hypothesis in
AI and cognitive science (Newell and Simon [1976]). However, the fact that
information

15

requires a representation does not entail that the latter ought to be
physically implemented. Arguably, environments in which there are only
noetic entities, properties and processes (e.g. Berkeley, Spinoza), or in
which the material or extended universe has a noetic or non-extended matrix
as its ontological foundation (e.g. Pythagoras, Plato, Leibniz, Hegel), seem
perfectly capable of upholding the representationalist principle without
also embracing a materialist interpretation (see Floridi [2004a] for a
defence of this view). The relata giving rise to information could be
monads, for example. So the problem here becomes: is the informational an
independent ontological category, different from the physical/material and
(assuming one could draw this Cartesian distinction) the mental? Wiener, for
example, thought that "Information is information, not matter or energy. No
materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day"
(Wiener [1948], 132).

If the informational is not an independent ontological category, to which
category is it reducible? If it is an independent ontological category, how
is it related to the physical/material and the mental? Answers to these
questions determine the orientation a theory takes with respect to the
following problem.
*

12. Naturalised information
*

The problem is connected with the semanticisation of data. It seems hard to
deny that information is a natural phenomenon, so this is not what one
should be asking here. Even elementary forms of life such as sunflowers
survive because they are capable of some chemical data processing. The
problem here is whether there is information in the world independently of
forms of life capable to extract it and, if so, what kind of information is
in question (an informational version of the teleological argument for the
existence of God argues both that information is a natural phenomenon and
that the occurrence of environmental information requires an intelligent
source). If the world is sufficiently information-rich, perhaps an agent may
interact successfully with it by using "environmental information" directly,
without being forced to go through a representation stage in which the world
is first analysed informationally. "Environmental information" still
presupposes (or perhaps is identical with) some physical support but it does
not require any higher-level cognitive representation or computational
processing to be immediately usable. This

16

is argued, for example, by researchers in AI working on animats (artificial
animals, either computer simulated or robotic). Animats are simple reactive
agents, stimulus-driven. They are capable of elementary, "intelligent"
behaviour, despite the fact that their design excludes the possibility of
internal representations of the environment and any effective computation
(Mandik [2002] for an overview, the case for non-representational
intelligence is famously made by Brooks [1991]). So, are cognitive processes
continuous with processes in the environment? Is semantic content (at least
partly) external (Putnam)? Does "natural" or "environmental" information
pivot on natural signs (Peirce) or nomic regularities? Consider the typical
example provided by the concentric rings visible in the wood of a cut tree
trunk, which may be used to estimate the age of the plant. The
externalist/extensionalist, who favours a positive answer (e.g. Dretske and
Barwise), is faced by the difficulty of explaining what kind of information
and how much of it saturates the world, what kind of access to, or
interaction with "information in the world" an informational agent can
enjoy, and how information dynamics is possible. The
internalist/intentionalist (e.g. Fodor and Searle), who privileges a
negative answer, needs to explain in what specific sense information depends
on intelligence and whether this leads to an anti-realist view.

The location of information is related to the question whether there can be
information without an informee, or whether information, in at least some
crucial sense of the word, is essentially parasitic on the meanings in the
mind of the informee, and the most it can achieve, in terms of ontological
independence, is systematic interpretability. Before the discovery of the
Rosetta Stone, was it legitimate to regard Egyptian hieroglyphics as
information, even if their semantics was beyond the comprehension of any
interpreter? Admitting that computers perform some minimal level of
proto-semantic activity works in favour of a "realist" position about
"information in the world".

Before moving to the next problem, it remains to be clarified whether the
previous two ways of locating information might not be restrictive. Could
information be neither here (intelligence) nor there (natural world) but on
the threshold, as it were, as a special relation or interface between the
world and its intelligent inhabitants (constructionism)? Or could it even be
elsewhere, in a third world, intellectually accessible by intelligent beings
but not ontologically dependent

17

on them (Platonism)?

*

* On 4/13/07, Rich Blinne <rich.blinne@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Apr 12, 2007, at 7:22 PM, David Opderbeck wrote:
>
> Let me just dump in a little more background on my interest in this:
> there's an interesting debate in the legal scholarship about whether
> biotechnology patents should be treated differently than other chemical
> patents. Part of this debate revolves around the nature of genetic
> "information." Here's an excerpt from a recent paper on this by a leading
> patent law scholar (Dan L. Burk, The Problem of Process in Biotechnology, 43
> Hous. L. Rev. 561 (2006)). The part I'm quoting is kind of long, so to cut
> to the chase, Burk says at the end of this section: *These considerations
> of molecular architecture and information theory allow us to reformulate the
> information patenting argument to account for the recurrent peculiarities of
> biotechnology process patents. Correctly articulated, the argument should
> observe that it is the information flow that is of interest in
> biotechnology, and hence of interest in biotechnology patenting.
> *
>
>
>
> Key phrase "correctly articulated".
>
> **
> **
> Interestingly, I think Burk recognized where his argument was leading in
> relation to ID theory, even though his paper has nothing to do with ID or
> any such thing, so somewhere he dumped in a gratuitous footnote bashing ID.
>
>
>
>
> Or maybe, just maybe, Burk sees what all the rest of us see. This fails
> the smell test. Even though the paper has nothing to do with ID he was
> interested in it?!??
>
>
> In my own scholarship on biotechnology patents and intellectual property
> in general, I try to critique some of the epistemological assumptions that
> underly some aspects of approaches like Burk's. That's one reason why I
> focus on the ontology of "information" -- knowledge and "information," I
> think, are in many ways socially constructed and not person- mind- or
> medium-independent.
>
>
>
> When the lawyers evaluate my patents they look at novelty,
> non-obviousness, whether we can detect it in competing products and whether
> we are actually going to use the process. Here's what the USPTO says can be
> patented:
>
>
>
> In the language of the statute, any person who "invents or discovers any
> new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or
> any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent," subject to the
> conditions and requirements of the law. The word "process" is defined by law
> as a process, act or method, and primarily includes industrial or technical
> processes. The term "machine" used in the statute needs no explanation. The
> term "manufacture" refers to articles that are made, and includes all
> manufactured articles. The term "composition of matter" relates to chemical
> compositions and may include mixtures of ingredients as well as new chemical
> compounds. These classes of subject matter taken together include
> practically everything that is made by man and the processes for making the
> products.
>
> Burk is concerned that informationally-based patents are obvious and they
> blur the concept of process. No kidding. Now I have pushed the envelope and
> was one the first wave of software patents which according to Burk has
> similar problems. http://www.spi.org/patsur95.htm#GROUP%208
>
>
> But, if I came to our patent attorney and said I wanted to patent
> "information" he'd slap me silly. When we file a software patent we focus on
> process and not information. Even though the process was embodied in a
> computer program our patent (5,274,568) was concerned with the "Method of
> Estimating Logic Cell Delay Time". The same is true for the seven other
> software patents I have. This should also be the case for biotechnology both
> from a scientific and legal perspective.
>

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Fri Apr 13 09:08:24 2007