Info-Computationalism and Philosophical Aspects of Research in Information Sciences

Abstract

The historical development has lead to the decay of Natural Philosophy which until 19th century included all of our knowledge about the physical world into the growing multitude of specialized sciences. The focus on the in-depth enquiry disentangled from its broad context lead to the problem of loss of common world-view and impossibility of communication between specialist research fields because of different languages they developed in isolation. The need for a new unifying framework is becoming increasingly apparent with the information technology enabling and intensifying the communication between different research fields and knowledge communities. This time, not only natural sciences, but also all of human knowledge is being integrated in a global network such as Internet with its diverse knowledge and language communities. Info-computationalism (ICON) as a synthesis of pancomputationalism and paninformationalism presents a unifying framework for understanding of natural phenomena including living beings and their cognition, their ways of processing information and producing knowledge. Within ICON physical universe is understood as a network of computational processes on an informational structure.