Anthropology and Infoautopoiesis
Keywords:
Information, Infoautopoiesis, Gregory Bateson, Anthropology, Culture, NatureAbstract
A resemanticization of Anthropology, the scientific study of human culture, is needed as, since the mid-twentieth century, we live in the Information Age. An epoch prioritizing the primacy of information, on a par with matter and/or energy. A new anthropological understanding of the impact of information entails sidestepping the influence on society of particular scientific and technological developments, such as those considered in the Anthropology of Cyberculture or Technology. The goal is to discover the fundamental role of information in anthropology, in its origins and development, as well as in its present-day local and global manifestations. Infoautopoiesis is at the centre of resolving the fundamental problem of information of how we become what we become. This reconceptualization of information, making it accessible to our daily experience, allows its naturalization. Requiring, in our unavoidable homeorhetic recursive interactions with our environment, the finding of individuated meaning in all that surrounds us and of which we are a part. Necessitating all organisms-in-their-environment to labour to satisfy their physiological and relational needs. Elucidating how their interactions with their environment, from an anthropological perspective, are constitutive of information self-creation, information exchange, information relations and life.
References
Ali, Aran, From Amazon to Zoom: What Happens in an Internet Minute in 2021, Visual Capitalist, 11/10/2021 2021. Accessed 11/23 2021, Available from https://www.visualcapitalist.com/from-amazon-to-zoom-what-happens-in-an-internet-minute-in-2021/.
Aubert, Maximeet. al., ‘Earliest hunting scene in prehistoric art’, Nature, 2019.
Baluška, František, William B. Miller, Jr. and Arthur S. Reber, ‘Cellular and evolutionary perspectives on organismal cognition: from unicellular to multicellular organisms’, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, vol. 139, no. 4, 2023, pp. 503-13.
Baluška, František, Arthur S. Reber and William B. Miller, Jr., ‘Cellular sentience as the primary source of biological order and evolution’, Biosystems, vol. 218, 2022, pp. 104694.
Bateson, Gregory, Steps to an ecology of mind; collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology, New York, Ballantine Books, 1978.
Bawden, David and Lyn Robinson, Introduction to Information Science, 2nd ed., London, Facet Publishing, 2022.
BBC, ‘Tim Berners-Lee on the future of the web: 'the system is failing’, 11/16/2017 vols., YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACQ45K_orOM, 2017.
Bogdan, Radu .J., Grounds for Cognition: How Goal-guided Behavior Shapes the Mind (1st ed.), Psychology Press, 1994.
Bruun, Maja Hojeret. al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology, 1st ed. 2022. ed., Singapore, Springer Nature Singapore : Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.
Burgin, Mark, Theory of Information - Fundamentality, Diversity and Unification, Singapore, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., 2010.
Burgin, Mark and Jaime F. Cárdenas-García, ‘A Dialogue Concerning the Essence and Role of Information in the World System’, Information, vol. 11, no. 9, 2020, pp. 406.
Burgin, Mark and Wolfgang Hofkirchner (eds.), Information Studies and the Quest for Transdisciplinarity - Unity Through Diversity, New Jersey, World Scientific Publishing Company, 2017.
Capurro, Rafael, ‘Past, present, and future of the concept of information’, tripleC, vol. 7, no. 2, 2009, pp. 125-41.
Capurro, Rafael, Peter Fleissner and Wolfgang Hofkirchner, ‘Is a unified theory of information feasible? A trialogue’, Informatik Forum, vol. 1, 1997, pp. 36-45.
Capurro, Rafael and Birger Hjørland, ‘The concept of information’, Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, vol. 37, no. 1, 2003, pp. 343-411.
Cárdenas-García, Jaime F., ‘The Central Dogma of Information’, Information, vol. 13, no. 8, 2022a, pp. 365.
Cárdenas-García, Jaime F., ‘Info-Autopoesis and Digitalisation’, New Explorations: Studies in Culture and Communication, vol. 2, no. 3, 2022b.
Cárdenas-García, Jaime F., ‘Info-Autopoiesis and Digitalisation’, Proceedings, vol. 81, no. 1, 2022c, pp. 82.
Cárdenas-García, Jaime F., ‘Info-Autopoiesis and the Limits of Artificial General Intelligence’, Computers, vol. 12, no. 5, 2023a, pp. 102.
Cárdenas-García, Jaime F., ‘Labour Productivity: The Link Between Use-Value, Value, and Information’, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 19, no. 1, 2023b, pp. 327-55.
Cárdenas-García, Jaime F., ‘The Limits of Artificial General Intelligence’, Preprints.org 2023, 2023040258, 2023c.
Cárdenas-García, Jaime F. and Timothy Ireland, ‘The Fundamental Problem of the Science of Information’, Biosemiotics, vol. 12, no. 2, 2019, pp. 213-44.
Cárdenas-García, Jaime F., Bruno Soria de Mesa and Diego Romero Castro, ‘Understanding Globalized Digital Labor in the Information Age’, Perspectives on Global Development and Technology, vol. 18, no. 3, 2019, pp. 308–26.
Cárdenas-García, Jaime F., Bruno Soria de Mesa and Diego Romero Castro, ‘The Information Process and the Labour Process in the Information Age’, tripleC, vol. 15, no. 2, 2017, pp. 663-85.
Castells, Manuel, The Rise of the Network Society, vol. I, West Sussex, United Kingdom, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
Díaz Nafría, José María ‘What is information? A multidimensional concern’, tripleC, vol. 8, no. 1, 2010, pp. 77-108.
Dretske, Fred I., Knowledge and The Flow of Information, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1981.
Eagleton, Terry, The Idea of Culture, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2000.
Elhacham, Emilyet. al., ‘Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass’, Nature, vol. 588, no. 7838, 2020, pp. 442-4.
Escobar, Arturo, ‘Anthropology and the future: New technologies and the reinvention of culture’, Futures, vol. 27, no. 4, 1995, pp. 409-21.
Escobar, Arturoet. al., ‘Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture [and Comments and Reply]’, Current Anthropology, vol. 35, no. 3, 1994, pp. 211-31.
Floridi, Luciano, Information: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2010.
Floridi, Luciano, The philosophy of information, Oxford ; New York, Oxford University Press, 2011.
Francos Lauredo, Aurelio and Purificación Moscoso Castro, ‘Ciencias de la información e investigación antropológica: valor del documento oral en los estudios de identidad cultural’, Catauro – Revista Cubana de Antropología (in Review), vol. 6, no. 10, 2004, pp. 4-18.
Fuentes, Agustin, ‘The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, Ethnography, and the Human Niche: Toward an Integrated Anthropology’, Current Anthropology, vol. 57, no. S13, 2016, pp. S13-S26.
Fuentes, Agustín, ‘Integrative Anthropology and the Human Niche: Toward a Contemporary Approach to Human Evolution’, American Anthropologist, vol. 117, no. 2, 2015, pp. 302-15.
Fuentes, Agustín, ‘Distinctively human? Meaning-making and world shaping as core processes of the human niche’, Zygon®, vol. 58, no. 2, 2023, pp. 425-42.
Geismar, H. and H. Knox (eds.), Digital Anthropology, 2nd ed., Routledge, 2021.
Gibbons, Ann, ‘Lucy's Toolkit? Old Bones May Show Earliest Evidence of Tool Use’, Science, vol. 329, no. 5993, 2010, pp. 738-9.
Gleick, James, The Information - A History, A Theory, A Flood, New York, NY, Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 2011.
Greenspoon, Lioret. al., ‘The global biomass of wild mammals’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 120, no. 10, 2023, pp. e2204892120.
Hidalgo, Cesar A., Why information grows : the evolution of order, from atoms to economies, New York, Basic Books, 2015.
Highmore, Ben, Culture, 1st ed., London and New York, Routledge - Taylor & Francis Group, 2016.
Hofkirchner, Wolfgang. ‘How to achieve a unified theory of information’ A paper delivered at the What is Information? Proceedings of the First International Meeting of Experts in Information, November 6th-8th, Leon, Spain, 2008.
Hofkirchner, Wolfgang, ‘Chapter 1: The Dawn of a Science of Information’, in Wolfgang Hofkirchner (ed.), Emergent Information — A Unified Theory of Information Framework, Singapore, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., 2013a, pp. 3-34.
Hofkirchner, Wolfgang, ‘Emergent Information. When a Difference Makes a Difference…’, tripleC, vol. 11, no. 1, 2013b, pp. 6-12.
Horst, H.A. and D. Miller (eds.), Digital Anthropology, 1st ed ed., Routledge, 2012.
Ingold, Tim, ‘Evolution without Inheritance: Steps to an Ecology of Learning’, Current Anthropology, vol. 63, no. S25, 2022, pp. S32-S55.
Kikuchi, Kaitoet. al., ‘Electrochemical potential enables dormant spores to integrate environmental signals’, Science, vol. 378, no. 6615, 2022, pp. 43-9.
Kohn, Eduardo, How Forests Think - Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, 1 ed., University of California Press, 2013.
Kroeber, A. L. and Kluckhohn Clyde, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Peabody Museum Press, 1952.
Kurzweil, Ray, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, Penguin Books, 2013.
Lemonnier, Pierre, Elements for an anthropology of technology, Ann Arbor, Michigan: Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, 1992.
Lloyd, Seth, Programming the Universe, New York, NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.
Logan, Robert K., ‘What Is Information?: Why Is It Relativistic and What Is Its Relationship to Materiality, Meaning and Organization’, Information, vol. 3, no. 1, 2012, pp. 68-91.
Lombardino, Jonathan and Briana M. Burton, ‘An electric alarm clock for spores’, Science, vol. 378, no. 6615, 2022, pp. 25-6.
MacKay, Donald M., Information, Mechanism and Meaning, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1969.
Marx, Karl, Ernest Mandel and Ben Fowkes, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, London, Penguin Books Limited, 1976.
Mauss, Marcel, ‘Techniques of the body’, Economy and Society, vol. 2, 1973, pp. 70-88.
Miller, William B., Jr. ‘The Microcosm within the Microcosm within Evolution and Extinction in the Hologenome’ 2013.
Miller, William B., Jr. and John S. Torday, ‘Four domains: The fundamental unicell and Post-Darwinian Cognition-Based Evolution’, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, vol. 140, 2018, pp. 49-73.
Ortiz, Fernando, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, New York, A. A. Knoff, 1947.
Ortiz, Fernando, ‘El concepto de cultura’, Catauro – Revista Cubana de Antropología, vol. 12, no. 23, 2011, pp. 127-42.
Pappas, Stephanie, ‘Human-Made Stuff Now Outweighs All Life on Earth’, Scientific American, December 9, 2020.
Pattee, Howard H., ‘Cell Psychology: An Evolutionary Approach to the Symbol-Matter Problem’, Cognition and Brain Theory, vol. 5, no. 4, 1982, pp. 325-41.
Pattee, Howard H., ‘Evolving Self-reference: Matter, Symbols, and Semantic Closure’, in Howard H. Pattee and Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi (eds.), Laws, Language and Life - Howard Pattee’s classic papers on the physics of symbols with contemporary commentary, Dordrecht, Springer, 2012, pp. 211-26.
Pattee, Howard H., ‘Epistemic, Evolutionary, and Physical Conditions for Biological Information’, Biosemiotics, vol. 6, no. 1, 2013, pp. 9-31.
Peters, John Durham, ‘Information: Notes Toward a Critical History’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol. 12, 1988, pp. 9–23.
Pfaffenberger, Bryan. ‘Fetishised Objects and Humanised Nature: Towards an Anthropology of Technology’ 1988.
Reber, Arthur S. and František Baluška, ‘Cognition in some surprising places’, Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, vol. 564, 2021, pp. 150-7.
Sahnouni, Mohamedet. al., ‘1.9-million- and 2.4-million-year-old artifacts and stone tool–cutmarked bones from Ain Boucherit, Algeria’, Science, vol. 362, no. 6420, 2018, pp. 1297-301.
Shannon, Claude E., ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, The Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 27, 1948, pp. 379–423, 623–56.
Shannon, Claude E., N. J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner. ‘Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers’ 1993.
Solon, Olivia, Tim Berners-Lee on the future of the web: 'The system is failing', The Guardian, 11/15/2017 2017. Accessed 11/23 2021, Available from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/15/tim-berners-lee-world-wide-web-net-neutrality.
Stonier, Tom, Information and Meaning - An Evolutionary Perspective, Berlin Heidelberg New York, Springer-Verlag, 1997.
Thilmany, Jean, 5 Industries Where Big Data Brings Big Returns, The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 11/15/2021 2021. Accessed 11/23 2021, Available from https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/big-data-brings-big-returns.
Thompson, A., ‘Taking Stock of Life’, Scientific American, vol. 319, no. 2, 2018, pp. 16.
Umpleby, Stuart A., ‘Physical Relationships among Matter, Energy and Information’, Systems Research and Behavioral Science, vol. 24, no. 3, 2007, pp. 369-72.
Vedral, Vlatko, Decoding Reality - The Universe as Quantum Information, Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, 2010.
Werthner, Hanneset. al., Vienna Manifesto on Digital Humanism, May 2019 2019. Accessed 11/23/2021 2021, Available from https://dighum.ec.tuwien.ac.at/dighum-manifesto/.
Wheeler, John Archibald. ‘Sakharov revisited: “It from Bit”’ A paper delivered at the Proceedings of the First International A D Sakharov Memorial Conference on Physics, May 27-31, Moscow, USSR, 1991.
Wiener, Norbert, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, New York, John Wiley, 1948.
Williams, Raymond, ‘Culture is Ordinary’, in Ben Highmore (ed.), The Everyday Life Reader, London and New York, Routledge, 2002, pp. 91-100.
Yockey, Hubert P., Information theory, evolution, and the origin of life, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University press, 2005.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Jaime F. Cárdenas-García
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
