Foundations of information science

Abstract

This article reproduces the opening session of the Madrid Conference on Scire. 2 : 1 (en.-jun. 1996). “Foundations of Information Science,” organized by the university Carlos III of Madrid and the university of Zaragoza, in July 1994 (see Proceedings in BioSystems, vol. 38, 1966). This conference has been an attempt to rescue information as a central scientific tool and to put it into a new context so as to serve as a basis for a fundamental disciplinary development. The novelty of the conference was that, instead of trying a precise “atomic” definition of information, and actually getting quagmired in it, information was understood as related to a widespread network of processes potentially involving the integration of cosmic (subatomic), molecular, cellular (neuronal), computational, human and social occurrences, demanding both a unifying and a multiperspectivistic approach. So to speak, instead of the discussion of a single particularized concept, information becomes the intellectual adventure of developing a “vertical” science connecting the different scales of “informational processes”—reminding physics itself, which from a pre-Galilean particularized term evolved towards a vertical science connecting the previously separated “celestial”, “sublunar”, and “terrestrial” occurrences. In this enlarged context, it is interesting that the meaning of information can be discussed in relation with the phenomenon of absence (functional voids or symmetry breaking). (Author)