Twenty Questions About a Unified Theory of Information: A Short Exploration into Information from a Complex Systems View

While a considerable number of scientists still today disbelieve in the feasibility of a single generic concept of information, there are several attempts to hypothesize or theorize information in a unifying manner carried out by a strong minority of scientists. However, the camp of the "unifiers" itself is heterogeneous. The 'Unified Theory of Information', as Wolfgang Hofkirchner came to term his own approach, links information to self-organization. It elaborates on arguments of dialectical philosophy in order to avoid both the pitfalls of reductionism and dualism and seeks to reconcile the 'hard' and 'soft' science perspectives of information. Among the scholars who influenced his sciences of complexity approach are- Edgar Morin, Ervin Laszlo, Werner Ebeling, Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski, Klaus Kornwachs, Klaus Haefner, Tom Stonier, John Collier, Alicia Juarrero, Edwina Taborsky, Søren Brier, Claus Emmeche, Robert Logan.