What is an informational environment? 105
There is an obvious, even trivial sense in which new information emerges in
our environments all the time. This sense should be kept clearly distinct from the
second way in which, I suggest, informational environments may change: with
every new dawn, there will be new information on the position of the Earth in
the Universe and on the overall conditions on our planet. With every newborn
child, new information arrives, both in terms of his or her ever-so-slightly unique
genome coding for ever-so-slightly unique traits and in terms of him or her signalling, in ever-so-slightly unique ways, current metabolic needs or a desire to
be close or not so close to mother or father. Even where the domains of natural
information concern individuals, these individuals normally do not appear as isolated entities but as members of some population, species or other natural kind
for which there are established types of informational relations, based on natural
regularities that are not contingent on the individual. In contrast, the appearance
of life on Earth will be a promising candidate for the novelty I have in mind here,
and probably the best candidate one could find in nature: genetic and developmental information, their regularities and mechanisms of mapping onto phenotypical
traits and their modes of transmission were genuinely new phenomena when they
first appeared, as were the evolving species of organisms themselves.
Apart from the phenomenon of life on Earth, the most credible paradigms of
the “new kinds of information” case will be found in artificial structures that not
only produce new signals but also introduce new ways of mapping them onto their
sources, and that are difficult to subsume under pre-existing natural kinds. Language will appear as an equally obvious and ambiguous example in this respect:
will the appearance of grammatical structures be entitled to count as the appearance of novel regularities of informational mapping, or will language only add
new channels to the uptake and transmission of whatever information there is?
The latter option might be too limited, as some information that human beings
encounter and use in their environments would not exist without the use of language in the first place, and as grammatical rules are a necessary precondition of
the existence of some of the structures that will count as sources of information.
There is a number of linguistic structures that not only embody specific mapping
rules which would not exist outside of language but whose use is also constitutive
to entities that can then be referred to by linguistic means. One might think of
the various applications of the negation transformation and its range of semantic
effects, or of performative speech acts, such as promises or orders. Other examples of the “new kinds of sources” kind of case will include formal languages or
works of art that are supposed to refer neither to natural objects nor to their subject
in any naturally established way of informational mapping.
Prima facie, it will appear a more straightforward affair to provide real-world
examples for the “new channels” than for the “new kinds of information” kind
of case, but there are some difficulties. First, consider the informational properties of measuring instruments and other observational methods in science, which
are supposed to make new modes of taking up natural information available that
could not be found in a natural environment while affecting neither the relevant
distal conditions nor the mapping regularities involved. However, the boundary to
There is an obvious, even trivial sense in which new information emerges in
our environments all the time. This sense should be kept clearly distinct from the
second way in which, I suggest, informational environments may change: with
every new dawn, there will be new information on the position of the Earth in
the Universe and on the overall conditions on our planet. With every newborn
child, new information arrives, both in terms of his or her ever-so-slightly unique
genome coding for ever-so-slightly unique traits and in terms of him or her signalling, in ever-so-slightly unique ways, current metabolic needs or a desire to
be close or not so close to mother or father. Even where the domains of natural
information concern individuals, these individuals normally do not appear as isolated entities but as members of some population, species or other natural kind
for which there are established types of informational relations, based on natural
regularities that are not contingent on the individual. In contrast, the appearance
of life on Earth will be a promising candidate for the novelty I have in mind here,
and probably the best candidate one could find in nature: genetic and developmental information, their regularities and mechanisms of mapping onto phenotypical
traits and their modes of transmission were genuinely new phenomena when they
first appeared, as were the evolving species of organisms themselves.
Apart from the phenomenon of life on Earth, the most credible paradigms of
the “new kinds of information” case will be found in artificial structures that not
only produce new signals but also introduce new ways of mapping them onto their
sources, and that are difficult to subsume under pre-existing natural kinds. Language will appear as an equally obvious and ambiguous example in this respect:
will the appearance of grammatical structures be entitled to count as the appearance of novel regularities of informational mapping, or will language only add
new channels to the uptake and transmission of whatever information there is?
The latter option might be too limited, as some information that human beings
encounter and use in their environments would not exist without the use of language in the first place, and as grammatical rules are a necessary precondition of
the existence of some of the structures that will count as sources of information.
There is a number of linguistic structures that not only embody specific mapping
rules which would not exist outside of language but whose use is also constitutive
to entities that can then be referred to by linguistic means. One might think of
the various applications of the negation transformation and its range of semantic
effects, or of performative speech acts, such as promises or orders. Other examples of the “new kinds of sources” kind of case will include formal languages or
works of art that are supposed to refer neither to natural objects nor to their subject
in any naturally established way of informational mapping.
Prima facie, it will appear a more straightforward affair to provide real-world
examples for the “new channels” than for the “new kinds of information” kind
of case, but there are some difficulties. First, consider the informational properties of measuring instruments and other observational methods in science, which
are supposed to make new modes of taking up natural information available that
could not be found in a natural environment while affecting neither the relevant
distal conditions nor the mapping regularities involved. However, the boundary to