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Thread: What exactly is "Information Metabolism"?

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    Question What exactly is "Information Metabolism"?

    "Information Metabolism" is a theory that Socionics apparently incorporates, and people throw this around as a vague and nebulous "scientific-y" thing, but what exactly is it?

    It doesn't appear to have much if any scientific ground:

    Is the theory of Information Metabolism a reasonable scientific theory?

    Short answer: No.

    A literature search of Google Scholar and Web of Science for "information metabolism" finds no empirical evidence to support the theory. Furthermore, it appears that the theory of information metabolism is virtually only embraced directly by the author, Kępiński, himself.

    However: It is based on scientifically sound principles of dissipative systems, thermodynamics and negentropy, as proposed by Nobel prize-winning physicist Ilya Prigogene. In some sense, though, it is based on science in the same sense a movie may be based on a true story. It's not a triviallywrong theory, but there does not appear to be any concrete support.

    CREATES and theories resembling information metabolism theory

    CREATES does not appear to have any scientific basis or relation to information metabolism theory whatsoever. However, the link you provided cites Carnot’s principle as a basis for the theory of information metabolism:

    “the organism is an open system and its negentropy rises or falls as results of processes described by the laws of life conservation and species conservation, respectively”

    This is very similar to the principles of more modern embodied dynamical systems approaches to explaining behavior, such as the ecological psychology of Mace, Turvey and Shaw. Both ecological and information metabolic approaches appear to be epistemologically dynamicist, and therefore share an epistemological stance. They appear to differ strongly on the content theory of the cause of behavior (i.e., on what constitutes a meaningful scale for behavioral analysis): information metabolism theory draws more heavily on Freud and Jung, while ecological psychology draws on the work of James J. Gibson.

    Concluding remarks

    Information metabolism theory is not a reasonable scientific theory in 2015, but neither was it scientifically stillborn in 1970. It appears to have been a theory invented before its time; in this, it is also like Gibson, who similarly lacked both the theoretical and mathematical tools to specify and formalize ideas. The popularization of those tools in behavioral science would eventually lead to the development of ecological psychology as a full fledged school of thought in the decades after Gibson's death.

    In the case of information metabolism theory, however, it appears that either the theory was entirely subsumed into socionics and therefore no longer exists as an independent theory, or simply that no one took up the mantle as the scientific star of psychoanalytic approaches rapidly waned around the same time.

    Edit:
    There seems to have been some limited attempts to update the theory for modern dynamical systems tools around the turn of the millenium (Kokoszka, 1999; Kokoszka, Bielecki and Holas, 2001), but still nothing empirical to validate it.


    References


    • Kokoszka, A. (1999). Information metabolism as a model of human experiences. International journal of neuroscience, 97(3-4), 169-178.
    • Kokoszka, A., Bielecki, A., & Holas, P. (2001). Mental organization according to the metabolism of information model and its mathematical description. International Journal of Neuroscience, 107(3-4), 173-184.

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    Tigerfadder's Avatar
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    I think we lack this in basic learning at school. People are forced to learn but not usually encouraged to metabolize the information themselves. Its seen as lego and not as food, even when we say "food for thought".

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    @Singu As generally used in socionics it's more or less synonymous with information processing - though not the sort of computer analogy used. Use processing in place of metabolism in your search terms for more information and material. Other terms you can use would be cognitive processing, cognition. You can also compare cognitivism with behaviorism. erm, can't think of any more right now for you to look up.

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    Person A looks at the box and sees just that, a simple box held together by tape
    Person B wonders what they can do with the box, eventually they open it up and look inside
    Person C asks why the box is there in the first place, who left it here?
    Person D doesn't even register the box, instead they look at the table beneath it

    Replace box with reality and person A/B/C/D with individual types and there's your definition of Information Metabolism

    even if you don't think socionics is a valid measure of personality then at the very least you can acknowledge that we process information differently, otherwise the education system wouldn't cause so much strife among students who don't believe it's geared toward their specific learning styles. you'd agree that socionics holds water or I'd agree that it doesn't, but that's not the case. I don't know why this specific facet of socionics requires scientific grounds when the proof - not in support of the system itself, per se, but the idea that we process information differently - is in the world around you

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    Quote Originally Posted by Singu View Post
    It appears to have been a theory invented before its time
    Yes it is. This makes it (like socionics, of which it is a part), protoscience rather than pseudoscience.

    PS: science makes use of other types of proof as well, like deductive proof. One need not run an experiment to show that 1 + 1 = 2.

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    • personality is just the recognition of a patern in someone else.
    • the deal is however there are at least two possible paterns we can detect: outward behavioral patterns or inner drives that organize outer behavioral patterns.
    • analytic psychology presumes the latter.
    • analytic psychology was always intended to be therapeutic and cognitive functions were analytic constructs toward getting a handle on the inner processes.
    • information metabolism is a complimentary analytic construct.
    • socionics blends the two.
    • the goal has always been linked to the need to get a handle on the underlying mechanism that explains behavior.
    • not so as to control behavior or even predict it, but to resolve prepotent knots in the psyche so that whatever behavior manifests manifests in terms of "health".
    • "health" is not a pattern of behavior; health is well-functioning underlying psychic mechanism. well-functioning is subjective and relies on self reports of well being of the patient.




    if you understand all this you understand the irony of all these suicidal and unhappy messes saying socionics isn't real

    also, analysis is not "making something real" but breaking down phenomenon down into ascertainable pieces and assigning them coordinates on a grid, the overall effect being to organize a thing in such a way to make discourse possible

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