title: Objects and processes: Two notions for understanding biological information.
abstract: In spite of being ubiquitous in life sciences, the concept of information is harshly criticized. Uses of the concept other than those derived from Shannon׳s theory are denounced as metaphoric. We perform a computational experiment to explore whether Shannon׳s information is adequate to describe the uses of said concept in commonplace scientific practice. Our results show that semantic sequences do not have unique complexity values different from the value of meaningless sequences. This result suggests that quantitative theoretical frameworks do not account fully for the complex phenomenon that the term "information" refers to. We propose a restructuring of the concept into two related, but independent notions, and conclude that a complete theory of biological information must account completely not only for both notions, but also for the relationship between them.
authors.affiliation: Posgrado en Filosofıa de la Ciencia, Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas UNAM, Ciudad Universitaria, Circuito Mario de la Cueva s/n, 04510 Mexico City, Mexico.
authors.forename: Agustín
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Mercado-Reyes
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Investigaciones en Matemáticas Aplicadas y en Sistemas, UNAM, Ciudad Universitaria, 04510 Mexico City, Mexico.
authors.forename: Pablo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Padilla-Longoria
authors.affiliation: Centro de Información Geoprospectiva, Berlín 209B, Del Carmen Coyoacán, 04100 Mexico City, Mexico; Facultad de Filosofıa y Letras, Ciudad Universitaria, UNAM Circuito Interior s/n, 04510 Mexico City, Mexico. Electronic address: agripas@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Alfonso
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Arroyo-Santos
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D019295:Computational Biology
keywords: Complexity; Information theory; Object-information; Process-information; Semantics