Philosophy of Information
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List of Participants
October 2011 Workshop Proceedings
Review October 2011 Workshop Proceedings, including presenter's materials.
Workshop Objectives
The overall objective of this workshop is to study some of the open questions within philosophy of information.
Interest in the philosophy and meaning of information goes back half a century but has rapidly increased recently with many new directions of research into the meaning, quantification and measures of information and complexity as well as a vast range of applications across the scientific spectrum.
In this conference we will focus on just one aspect of the philosophy of information: the different techniques to measure information and to identify meaningful information. Various definitions (of meaningful information) have been proposed in the recent past: sophistication, effective complexity, computational depth, self-dissimilarity and facticity. At a first glance these definitions seem to cover various aspects of the same domain. If, for example, one defines meaningful information in terms of a balance between ad hoc and structural information in a dataset then this definition automatically has consequences for self dissimilarity, the effective complexity, the facticity and the computational depth of the set. A natural question is what are the exact relations between these various definitions, and whether it is possible to reduce these concepts into one (or more) central concept/s. Another interesting question is which kind of processes in nature and society creates meaningful information: evolution, game playing, stock exchange, etc.
This one day conference will address these basic questions and will explore recent advances in the philosophy of information and its potential applications.
Conference Topics
Measuring information
How to define and quantify meaningful information
What natural (or behavioral) processes create meaningful information?
Program Committee
Pieter Adriaans (U. Amsterdam) – Co-Chair
Duncan Foley (New School for Social Research and Santa Fe Inst.)
Amos Golan (American U.) – Co-Chair
Esfandiar (Essie) Maasoumi (Emory)
Confirmed Speakers
Pieter Adriaans (U. Amsterdam)
Luis Antunes (Porto U., Portugal)
Ariel Caticha (SUNY Albany)
J. Michael Dunn (Indiana U. Bloomington)
Luciano Floridi (Oxford U. and U. Hertfordshire)
Duncan Foley (New School for Social Research and Santa Fe Institute)
David Oliver
