Participant: Jeremy Sherman
Affiliation: University of San Francisco
Format: Plenary Speech

Bateson took pains to distinguish energy from information, which he defined as a “difference that makes a difference.” Odum countered that energy also fits that definition since all energetic behavior involves a difference in system X’s state causing a difference in system Y’s state. Are information and energy the same? Dominant approaches today suggest that they are.

Bateson’s “makes a difference” was a double entendre combining both the meaning applicable to energy and the colloquial meaning: conferring practical or adaptive advantage. Fleshing out Bateson’s second meaning, Deacon notes that unlike energy, information is always functional for a self about or representative with respect to something absent. Simplifying, if energetic work is reducible to a synchronic “change in system X makes change in system Y,” information is always a diachronically evolvable multiply realizable and ambiguous “X for Y is about Z.” For example the text, “Makes a difference” for us evolving English-speaking selves, is ambiguously about the double entendre’s two ideas. Sherman provides an intuitive overview to Deacon’s approach to information, both how it is different from energy and how information relationships could spontaneously emerge from physics and chemistry.