Three Kinds of Information

I recently read Logan’s paper titled “What Is Information?” [1] with great interest. Although I agree with many of the ideas expressed in this paper, I disagree with the author on several key points:

(1) Logan repeatedly asserts that Shannon information cannot describe biological information. Strictly speaking this is not true because Shannon information can measure the amount of any information, including biological one. It is generally accepted that there are three distinct aspects to information [2]:

i) Amount (e.g., the maximum amount of the genetic information carried by a 100 nucleotide-long gene is about 4^(3,000)~ 10^(1,500) bits),

ii) Meaning (e.g., certain mutations in a gene cause the loss of the meaning of the gene in that it can no longer be recognized by transcription factors and other proteins), and

iii) Value (e.g., a hormone can have meaning in the sense that it is recognized by its receptor but has no value if its binding to the receptor does not trigger the signal transduction pathway leading to
gene expression or inhibition).

These three kinds of informations, namely, the quantitative, semantic, and pragmatic informations, may be referred to as the Shannon (quantity), MacKay (meaning), and Bateson (effects)informations.  In his paper [1] Logan provides a nice review of the concepts of information advocated by these three investigators.

If one accepts this classification of informations, it would be reasonable to conclude that, since all informations have these three aspects, so would biotic information:

According to Figure 1, biotic information and Shannon information are not mutually exclusive as Logan asserts.

(2) Logan also maintains that ‘organization’ is ‘information’.  I claim that ‘organization’ is more than information since organization is a form of work and work requires free energy dissipation [3]:

Logan:  Organization = Information

Ji:  Organization = Information + Energy

The symbol, +, here denotes a complementary relation: Information and energy are thought to be the complementary aspects of organization so that organization appears as information or energy, depending on how it is viewed or measured [3].

References:
[1] Logan, R. K. (2012). What Is Information?: Why Is It Relativistic and What Is Its Relationship to Matterraility, Meaning and Organization? Information 3(1): 68-91; doi:10.3390/i9nfo3010068
[2] Volkenstein, M. V. (2009). Entropy and Information. Birkhaeuser, Basel.
[3] Ji, S. (2012). Information-Energy Complementarity as the Principle of Organization, Section 4.1.3, Molecular Theory of the Living Cell: Concepts, Molecular Mechanisms, and Biomedical Applications, Springer, New York.