“Our understanding of information processing structures and their internal and external behaviors causing their evolution in all physical, chemical and biological systems in nature and digital systems produced by humans in particular, are suggesting the need for a common framework where function, structure and fluctuations impact these systems composed of many autonomous components interacting with each other under the influence of external forces in their environment.”
What is Classical Computer Science and What are its Boundaries?
According to Jack Copeland and Onan Shagrir, “the Church-Turing thesis (CTT) underlies tantalizing open questions concerning the fundamental place of computing in the physical universe. For example, is every physical system computable? Is the universe essentially computational in nature? What are the implications for computer science of recent speculation about physical uncomputability? Does CTT place a fundamental logical limit on what can be computed, a computational “barrier” that cannot be broken, no matter how far and in what multitude of ways computers develop? Or could new types of hardware, based perhaps on quantum or relativistic phenomena, lead to radically new computing paradigms that do breach the Church-Turing barrier, in which the uncomputable becomes computable, in an upgraded sense of “computable”?
There are at least, three possible arguments pointing to the limitations of CTT.
All living organisms are autopoietic and cognitive. Autopoiesis refers to a system with well-defined identity and is capable of reproducing and maintaining itself. Cognition, on the other hand, is the ability to process information, apply knowledge, and change the circumstance.
The new science of information processing structures based on professor Burgin’s Global Theory of Information allows us to not only describe, model and explain how the genome in cellular organisms embeds autopoietic and cognitive behaviors, but also allows us to design and implement digital autopoietic machines with cognitive behaviors.
Knowledge is Related to Information as Matter is Related to Energy
As humans, we are privileged to live in multiple worlds where energy, matter, information, and knowledge interact and provide the means to execute our “life” processes. This blog discusses what the general theory of information and the theory of structural reality articulated by Prof. Mark Burgin tell us about these worlds and how we live in them.
Matter and energy are the essence of the material world which consists of physical structures that are formed through transformations of energy and matter. Material structures in the physical world carry information that represents the structure and the dynamics of the system. Biological systems have evolved from physical and chemical structures through natural selection to develop information processing structures and use them to manage their “life” processes. General Theory of Information (GTI) tells us that information to knowledge is as energy is to matter and mental structures carry the knowledge in the mental world. In this blog, we discuss what GTI is, and the tools that allow us to understand both the physical and mental worlds. In addition, GTI also points a way to enhance the current digital world humans have created with autopoietic and cognitive behaviors.
Using the tools of the General Theory of Information, the cognitive behaviors can be modeled as a multi-layer knowledge network where the functional nodes are grouped to execute the cognitive behaviors in the form of local functional nodes, clusters of functional nodes, and a global knowledge network. Information received through the senses is processed by neural networks and nodes that are fired together wire together to capture the state and evolution of the structures the information describes. The functional nodes that are wired together fire together to exhibit cognitive behaviors.
It is illuminating to learn about the worlds I, as an individual, live in. The material world and the mental worlds I live in deal with matter, energy, knowledge, and information. The digital world is an extension of the material world, to which the meaning is given by the mental world. It assigns meaning to what the physical structures such as computer networks, storage, etc. produce. The information contained in the digital world enhances the mental world creating the virtual world. With this picture, we will start to understand the various entities we interact with and their relationships, and their evolution. Hopefully, this knowledge helps us to understand the contemporary human societies we live in and allows us to improve our behaviors to enjoy the finite time we have in the material world. It is interesting to realize that each one of us is a unique entity born at t=0, but our footprints continue to exist till eternity, in a multitude of information carriers even as we cease to be a living system when we succumb to the inevitable death.
Theoretical and Foundational Problems (TFP) in Information Studies 