mdpi | Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, Rudolf Clausius, and Léon Brillouin
considered certain “values” as key quantities in their descriptions of
market competition, natural selection, thermodynamic processes, and
information exchange, respectively. None of those values can be computed
from elementary properties of the particular object they are attributed
to, but rather values represent emergent, irreducible properties. In
this paper, such values are jointly understood as information values in certain contexts. For this aim, structural information is distinguished from symbolic information.
While the first can be associated with arbitrary physical processes or
structures, the latter requires conventions which govern encoding and
decoding of the symbols which form a message. As a value of energy,
Clausius’ entropy is a universal measure of the structural information
contained in a thermodynamic system. The structural information of a
message, in contrast to its meaning, can be evaluated by Shannon’s
entropy of communication. Symbolic information is found only in the
realm of life, such as in animal behavior, human sociology, science, or
technology, and is often cooperatively valuated by competition. Ritualization
is described here as a universal scenario for the self-organization of
symbols by which symbolic information emerges from structural
information in the course of evolution processes. Emergent symbolic
information exhibits the novel fundamental code symmetry which
prevents the meaning of a message from being reducible to the physical
structure of its carrier. While symbols turn arbitrary during the
ritualization transition, their structures preserve information about
their evolution history.
