Beyond Bohm 2024, Part 2 – Is There a Unifying Notion of Information?

Is There a Unifying Notion of Information?

with Jens Allwood.
Comments by Michael Richter and Paavo Pylkkänen

Sunday August 25
9:00am PDT  | 12:00pm EDT  | 5:00pm BST  |  6:00pm CEST 
2-hour session.

The session is live and you will be sent the RECORDING.

In this session we will explore the following questions: Is there one all-encompassing concept of information or are there several different concepts of information? Do different disciplines have different notions of information? Is there a unifying notion of information? Can a unifying concept of information help us solve important disciplinary and interdisciplinary problems?

Jens Allwood is professor of Linguistics at the University Gothenburg. He is also professor of communication studies at Strömstad Academy. He is born in Moline, Illinois, USA in 1947. He is active as a researcher and professor emeritus in projects at the University of Gothenburg and in the Company Communication Development J.A. & E.A. HB. He is the director of Marston Hill Intercultural Center for Quality of Life, chairman of the board of the Immigrant Institute and editor in chief of the Journal of Intercultural Communication (on-line, open access). He has worked as researcher and teacher in linguistics, specialized in semantics, pragmatics, corpus linguistics, multimodal communication and intercultural communication. He has coordinated and participated in a large number of national and international research project in semantics, pragmatics, corpus linguistics, studies of spoken language, multimodal communication, intercultural communication and development of research and research education. He has been the chairman of the department of linguistics, section manager of the Interdisciplinary center SCCIIL (semantics, cognition, communication, information, interaction).

Paavo Pylkkänen, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in Theoretical Philosophy and Director of the Bachelor’s Program in Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is also Associate Professor of Theoretical Philosophy (currently on leave) at the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience and Philosophy, University of Skövde, Sweden, where he initiated a Consciousness Studies Programme. His main research areas are philosophy of mind, philosophy of physics and their intersection. In his book Mind, Matter and the Implicate Order (Springer) he proposed that new notions emerging from quantum physics (especially Bohm and Hiley’s interpretation) provide new ways of approaching key problems in philosophy of mind, such as mental causation and time consciousness.  In 2018-2020 working as the Vice Dean of Research at the Faculty of Arts he had the main responsibility for developing the new profiling area Mind and Matter for the University of Helsinki https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/mind-and-matter. Paavo Pylkkänen has been a visiting researcher in Stanford University, Oxford University, London University, Charles University Prague and Gothenburg University and was a member of the Academy of Finland Center of Excellence in the Philosophy of Social Sciences (TINT). https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/paavo-pylkkänen/publications/

Michael Richter is a Researcher at the Institute of Computer Science at Leipzig University (Department of Natural Language Processing), and at the Institute of Applied Computer Science (InfAI) in Leipzig. His fields of research include Models of Communication in natural language; information theory; corpus linguistics, lexical semantics; text mining; application of information theory in digital humanities; and syntax models of natural language.