Abstract
Information is encountered in two different appearances, in native form by arbitrary physical structures, or in symbolic form by coded sequences of letters or the like. The self-organised emergence of symbolic information from structural information is referred to as a ritualisation transition. Occurring at some stage in evolutionary history, ritualisation transitions have in common that after the crossover, arbitrary symbols are issued and recognised by information-processing devices, by transmitters and receivers in the sense of Shannon's communication theory. Symbolic information-processing systems exhibit the fundamental code symmetry whose key features, such as largely lossless copying or persistence under hostile conditions, may elucidate the reasons for the repeated successful occurrence of ritualisation phenomena in evolution history. Ritualisation examples are briefly reviewed such as the origin of life, the appearance of human languages, the establishment of emergent social categories such as money, or the development of digital computers. In addition to their role as carriers of symbolic information, symbols are physical structures which also represent structural information. For a thermodynamic description of symbols and their arrangements, it appears reasonable to distinguish between Boltzmann entropy, Clausius entropy and Pauling entropy. Thermodynamic properties of symbols imply that their lifetimes are limited by the 2nd law.
Highlights
The formulation of a unified theory of information still poses a fundamental scientific challenge [1,2]
Another emergent property that often accompanies symbolic information is its value, such as selective values in biology or exchange values in economy; this aspect will elucidated in more detail in the presentation of Werner Ebeling at this conference
In combination with empirical paradigms developed in population biology [10], ethology [5], evolution theory of culture and religion [11, 12], language theory [13,14] and economy [15], the striking qualitative similarity of the transition processes observed in those fields motivates their unified description from the perspective of selforganisation of information [2,3,16]
Summary
The formulation of a unified theory of information still poses a fundamental scientific challenge [1,2]. The origin of life, the appearance of human language or the establishment of social categories such as private property or money can be understood as ritualisation transitions [2,3] All these transitions have in common that as their results, arbitrary symbols are produced and recognised by information-processing devices, by "senders" and "receivers" in the sense of Shannon’s information theory, which had developed during an evolutionary process along with the actual set of symbols and of coding rules (such as “grammars” [6,7]), and replaced a related original non-symbolic causal chain. Ritualisation is understood as a universal qualitative transition from elementary structural to emergent symbolic information properties in the course of evolution processes. Another emergent property that often accompanies symbolic information is its value, such as selective values in biology or exchange values in economy; this aspect will elucidated in more detail in the presentation of Werner Ebeling at this conference
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