Ontological Information Information In The Physical World

This book is about the nature of information. It touches on many core issues of philosophy of the mind, ontology, and epistemology, and draws in several domain-specific concepts from physics, mathematics, thermodynamics, computer science, and biology. The terms used in this book, such as the mind, a conscious agent, meaning, and knowledge are used with very precise meanings because they can be easily misinterpreted. A proper understanding of these terms can be gained from the referenced literature. But more specifically, this book is about the concept of information as physical phenomenon. The book is a unique exposition of the concept of information as physical phenomenon. It provides the detailed analysis and synthesis of the current conceptualizations of information demonstrating the lack of common definition and their incompleteness. The detailed argument is provided why information may be defined as a physical phenomenon and why this type of information may be seen as fundamental to our understanding of this concept.

This book is about the nature of information. It touches on many core issues of philosophy of the mind, ontology, and epistemology, and draws in several domain-specific concepts from physics, mathematics, thermodynamics, computer science, and biology. The terms used in this book, such as the mind, a conscious agent, meaning, and knowledge are used with very precise meanings because they can be easily misinterpreted. A proper understanding of these terms can be gained from the referenced literature. But more specifically, this book is about the concept of information as physical phenomenon.The book is a unique exposition of the concept of information as physical phenomenon. It provides the detailed analysis and synthesis of the current conceptualizations of information demonstrating the lack of common definition and their incompleteness. The detailed argument is provided why information may be defined as a physical phenomenon and why this type of information may be seen as fundamental to our understanding of this concept.

"This book provides cutting-edge research on reality, its nature and fundamental structure, represented both by human minds and intelligent machines.--striving to describe a world model and ontology; organized human knowledge; powerful reasoning systems; and secure communication interoperability between human beings and computing reasoning systems promising the profound revolution in human values and ways of life"--Provided by publisher.

This provocative new book attempts to resolve traditional problems of identity over time. It seeks to answer such questions as "How is it that an object can survive change?" and "How much change can an object undergo without being destroyed?" To answer these questions Professor Heller presents a completely new theory about the nature of physical objects and about the relationship between our language and the physical world. According to his theory, the only actually existing physical entities are what the author calls "hunks," four dimensional objects extending across time and space. This is a major new contribution to ontological debate and will be essential reading for all philosophers concerned with metaphysics.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed short papers, workshops and doctoral consortium papers of the 23rd European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems, ADBIS 2019, held in Bled, Slovenia, in September 2019. The 19 short research papers and the 5 doctoral consortium papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 103 submissions, and the 31 workshop papers were selected out of 67 submitted papers. The papers are organized in the following sections: Short Papers; Workshops Papers; Doctoral Consortium Papers; and cover a wide spectrum of topics related to database and information systems technologies for advanced applications.

This book seeks to work out which commitments are minimally sufficient to obtain an ontology of the natural world that matches all of today’s well-established physical theories. We propose an ontology of the natural world that is defined only by two axioms: (1) There are distance relations that individuate simple objects, namely matter points. (2) The matter points are permanent, with the distances between them changing. Everything else comes in as a means to represent the change in the distance relations in a manner that is both as simple and as informative as possible. The book works this minimalist ontology out in philosophical as well as mathematical terms and shows how one can understand classical mechanics, quantum field theory and relativistic physics on the basis of this ontology. Along the way, we seek to achieve four subsidiary aims: (a) to make a case for a holistic individuation of the basic objects (ontic structural realism); (b) to work out a new version of Humeanism, dubbed Super-Humeanism, that does without natural properties; (c) to set out an ontology of quantum physics that is an alternative to quantum state realism and that avoids any ontological dualism of particles and fields; (d) to vindicate a relationalist ontology based on point objects also in the domain of relativistic physics.

Originally published in 1992. The history of Western philosophy can be seen as a battle between those that insist that the "physical universe" exists and those would claim that there is a much larger "world" which contains atemporal and nonspatial things as well. The central part of this book, and the battle, concerns the existence of universals. Starting with the mediaeval definition of the issue found in Porphry and Boethius, the author then considers modern and contemporary versions of the battle. He concludes that what is at stake between naturalists and ontologists is the existence and nature of a number of important categories, like structures, relations, sets, numbers and so on.

Researchers in areas such as artificial intelligence, formal and computational linguistics, biomedical informatics, conceptual modeling, knowledge engineering and information retrieval have come to realise that a solid foundation for their research calls for serious work in ontology, understood as a general theory of the types of entities and relations that make up their respective domains of inquiry. In all these areas, attention is now being focused on the content of information rather than on just the formats and languages used to represent information. The clearest example of this development is provided by the many initiatives growing up around the project of the Semantic Web. And, as the need for integrating research in these different fields arises, so does the realisation that strong principles for building well-founded ontologies might provide significant advantages over ad hoc, case-based solutions. The tools of formal ontology address precisely these needs, but a real effort is required in order to apply such philosophical tools to the domain of information systems. Reciprocally, research in the information sciences raises specific ontological questions which call for further philosophical investigations. The purpose of FOIS is to provide a forum for genuine interdisciplinary exchange in the spirit of a unified effort towards solving the problems of ontology, with an eye to both theoretical issues and concrete applications. This book contains a wide range of areas, all of which are important to the development of formal ontologies.