Seeing Information as a Systems Process
And Why It Matters
In Systems Processes Theory, or at least my version of it, information isnʻt a thing, like a book, or website, or a lecture. It is a universal process of forming within. When input changes a system, the system is literally in-forming. As systems theorist Gregory Bateson famously said, information is “a difference that makes a difference.”
Heat and light from the Sun hit the cycling Earth and inform the state of the atmosphere. The changing state of the atmosphere informs organisms.
Living systems process information. Photons, shot out of the Sunʻs nuclear fusion reactions, light the Earth, and are picked up by our optical neurons. Our brains form the four-dimensional predictions that we experience as reality. The Earthʻs systems, our neurons, regions in the brain, whole brains, and selves are informed.
Like distribution, circulation, and evolution, information is about change through time. Information results in the appearance of structure, what we call knowledge, some of which can be replicated and reused.
This is not the standard definition, but after five years of research within the context of Systems Processes Theory, I landed on this one.
Ironically, in my book Seeing, I ignored my own definition. I was very casual about saying “flows of” or “input of” or “output of” information, matter, and energy. More accurately, matter and energy, as input to a system, inform the system.
Informing is the opposite of entropy. Organizing vs. disorganizing. Claude Shannonʻs seminal 1948 paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” shows how a formula for information is the same as for entropy.
Despite Shannonʻs initial disagreement, this paper is the basis for what became known as “information theory.” Shannon showed engineers how to more effectively transmit messages through noisy channels. Messages can be expressed in binary digits, bits–on/off, yes/no, true/false, and can be measured in terms of how much they “reduce uncertainty” and “surprise” the receiver,
But communication involves shared context, shared messaging–patterns that inform, and feedback. Communicating is mutual informing.
My definition stands.
The question then becomes, “Who cares?”
Every action does not just influence. It informs. What I do, every act, matters.
