Fernando Flores

The informational foundation of the act

This paper presents a theory to quantify the informational value of human acts. We argue that living is functioning against entropy. Acting is presented as a set of decisions and choices to create order that we use as the foundation to develop the concept of complexity of human acts. Frequency theory of probability is then applied to characterize human acts in terms of their degree of freedom and to set up a scale of the information and predictability carried out in human decisions. A taxonomy is also included in the scale categorizing acts as destructive, mechanical, ludic or vital according to their complexity. A formulation to estimate the informational value of human individual and collective acts follows. The final part of the paper presents and discuss the consequences of our theory. We argue that technological artifacts embed information and that modernization can be understood as a one-way process to embed acts of ever increasing levels of complexity in devices. However, the total amount of information is conserved and modernity only enables us to redistribute our informational potential. Agnumetry is introduced as a method to quantify modernity. Finally we outline the relation between the informational value of production and the informational value of consumption (operative information), and between them and market value, price and money.