ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Complex Syst.
Sec. Complex Systems Theory
Volume 3 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcpxs.2025.1612142
The Value of Information in Multi-Scale Feedback Systems
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
- 2Laboratoire Traitement et Communication de l’Information, TELECOM ParisTech, Paris, France
- 3IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
- 4University of Hartford, West Hartford, Connecticut, United States
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Complex adaptive systems (CAS) can be described as systems of information flows dynamically interacting across scales to adapt and survive. CAS often consist of many components that work towards a shared goal, and interact across different informational scales through feedback loops, leading to their adaptation. In this context, understanding how information is transmitted among system components and across scales becomes crucial for understanding the behavior of CAS.Shannon entropy, a measure of syntactic information, is often used to quantify the size and rarity of messages transmitted between objects and observers, but it does not measure the value that information has for each observer. For this, semantic and pragmatic information have been conceptualized as describing the influence on an observer's knowledge and actions. Building on this distinction, we describe the architecture of multi-scale information flows in CAS through the concept of Multi-Scale Feedback Systems, and propose a series of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic information measures to quantify the value of information flows for adaptation. While the measurement of values is necessarily context-dependent, we provide general guidelines on how to calculate semantic and pragmatic measures, and concrete examples of their calculation through four case studies: a robotic collective model, a collective decision-making model, a task distribution model, and a hierarchical oscillator model. Our results contribute to an informational theory of complexity, aiming to better understand the role played by information in the behavior of Multi-Scale Feedback Systems.
Keywords: adaptation, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, Complexity
Received: 15 Apr 2025; Accepted: 23 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Di Felice, Diaconescu, Zahadat and Mellodge. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ada Diaconescu, Laboratoire Traitement et Communication de l’Information, TELECOM ParisTech, Paris, 75013, France
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