The Logical Dynamics of Information; Deacon’s “Incomplete Nature”

Abstract

In his Incomplete Nature, Deacon extends a thermodynamic concept of energy to yield a description of complex processes in which absence plays a critical role in their emergence and evolution. Starting from a quantum-mechanical picture of energy as an energy-matter duality, the critical role of potential as well as actual properties of processes is also described in the new extension of logic to real phenomena, Logic in Reality (LIR), which I have proposed. Deacon shows how an interactive operation of both Shannon entropy and Boltzmann entropy must be taken into account in information. Here, I demonstrate the complementarity of our two approaches to what is not, or not fully, present for an understanding of the dynamics of complex phenomena, especially, of intentionality, information and meaning. Deacon shows that the hallmark of information is its absent content, and LIR shows that presence (actuality) and absence (potentiality) in such processes are related dynamically. Deacon’s approach and LIR ground and extend Logan’s concepts of biotic information and the relativity of information vs. meaning. Their conjunction constitutes a new conceptual structure for exploring the relationship of information to materiality, that is, to the matter-energy that constitutes it as its carrier and/or substrate.

Keywords

• absence
• actual(ity)
• constraint
• contradiction
• dynamics
• emergence
• logic
• meaning
• opposition
• potential (ity)
• process