Kurzfassung

The presented work considers the relation of Shannon-type information to those semantic and hermeneutic aspects of communication, which are often referred to as meaning. It builds on considerations of Talcott Parsons, Niklas Luhmann and Robert K. Logan and relates them to an agent-based model that reproduces key aspects of the Talking Head experiment by Luc Steels. The resulting insights seem to give reason to regard information and meaning not as qualitatively different entities, but as interrelated forms of order that emerge in the interaction of autonomous (self-referentially closed) agents. Although on first sight, this way of putting information and meaning into a constructivist framework seems to open possibilities to conceive meaning in terms of Shannon-information, it also suggests a re-conceptualization of information in terms of what cybernetics calls Eigenform in order to do justice to its dynamic interrelation with meaning.

Vortragende(r)

Professor Füllsack holds a chair for Systems Science at the Institute of Systems Sciences, Innovation and Sustainability Research (ISIS) from the Karl-Franzens-University in Graz. The field of his studies is quite wide. It includes Informatics, Philosophy, Sociology, Mathematics and Music science at the University of Vienna. His research work is focused on Social Systems Theory, Network and Game theory, Modeling and Multi-agent simulation, Sociology, Economics and Philosophy of work. 1994 PhD in Philosophy at the University of Vienna 2003 Habilitation (Venia Docendi) for Social philosophy