Understanding the universe: priceless. For anything else: there is information theory

I recently read two books:

Information: The New Language of Science (2003) by Hans Christian Von Baeyer and
Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes (2006), by Charles Seife.

Both belong to that very readable, scientifically well-researched form of literature so popular in the English-speaking world. You know you are part of the semi-mythical EP ("educated public") if you enjoy reading such books.

Both books talk about information in terms of Shannon's mathematical theory of communication, i.e., not in terms of something out there (like patterns in the environment, for example) and not in terms of something inside here (like meaningful things in one's head, for exampel). Both books are based on the same idea: information is everything. Both leave unclear whether this means that

• scientifically, everything can be explained in terms of information (theory); or whether,
• computationally, everything can be modelled or represented as if it were information (and subject to informational processes); or whether,
• ontologically, deep down everything is informational in nature.
  

But this is not their fault, for their lack of clarity is inherited by a widespread confusion in the scientific and philosophical literature.

So, proud of my EP role, would I reccommend any of the two? I would, but with a proviso.

Information is not that informative. If you are looking for a good, reader-friendly introduction to information theory, a better option is An Introduction to Information Theory, Symbols, Signals and Noise by John R. Pierce, which is still the best thing available.

On the other hand, if you are looking for an interesting exploration of the relations between physics and information, Decoding is a better book, more readable, clearer, more updated.

So I guess my suggestions is that, if you can buy only one, buy Seife's.

Italian Biotech Law Conference 2007

This year the topic of the Italian Biotech Law Conference 2007 was "ownership of bioinformation", a very thorny issue. The conference turned out to be very interesting. It was, unfortunately, too short and perhaps badly timed, as most people at IFOM seemed to be thinking more about the Easter break than research. Having said this, I probably learnt much more than I contributed, since all the papers were very insightful.

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.