How Medicine Informs Informatics: Information is Asymmetry, Not Entropy§

ABSTRACT

A concept of information as asymmetry in multiple dimensions is based on the demonstration that causal action, not hypothetical chance events, is a parsimonious explanation of novelty. The study of heartbeat variation revealed creative features in causal processes, namely greater novelty than random variation, decrease in entropy, temporal change in pattern, and progressive increase in variance. These properties characterize a new type of process, Bios. Bios has been demonstrated at all levels of organization from Number Theory and Quantum Physics to Population Dynamics and Economics. Mathematical experiments show that Bios is generated causally by generic processes present at multiple levels of organization: (1) unidirectional action, (2) bipolar opposition (e.g. electromagnetic energy, sex, mutual feedback) and (3) conservation. These studies underlie the formulation of information as 1, 2, 3, …, N dimensional order (i.e. asymmetry and transitivity). Thus information channels flux into flow, cycle, structure, and more complex organization in nature. Human reasoning and computer logic may be guided by this logic of nature.

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