Informavore
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The term informavore (also spelled informivore) characterizes an organism that consumes information. It is meant to be a description of human behavior in modern information society, in comparison to omnivore, as a description of humans consuming food. George A. Miller [1] coined the term in 1983 as an analogy to how organisms survive by consuming negative entropy (as suggested by Erwin Schrödinger [2]). Miller states, "Just as the body survives by ingesting negative entropy, so the mind survives by ingesting information. In a very general sense, all higher organisms are informavores."
An early use of the term was in a newspaper article by Jonathan Chevreau [3] where he quotes a speech made by Zenon Pylyshyn. Soon after, the term appeared in the introduction of Pylyshyn's seminal book on Cognitive Science, Computation and Cognition [4].
More recently the term has been popularized by philosopher Daniel Dennett in his book Kinds of Minds [5] and by cognitive scientist Steven Pinker [6].
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Miller, George A. (1983), “Informavores”, in Machlup, Fritz & Mansfield, Una, The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary Messages, Wiley-Interscience, pp. 111-113, ISBN 047188717X
- ^ Schrödinger, Erwin (1944), What is Life?, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521427088
- ^ Chevreau, Jonathan (1984-03-30), “Some A1 applications wishful thinking”, The Globe and Mail
- ^ Pylyshyn, Zenon (1984), Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science, MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-16098-6
- ^ Dennett, Daniel (1997), Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding of Consciousness, Basic Books, ISBN 0465073514
- ^ World Wide Words: Informavore, <http://www.worldwidewords.org/turnsofphrase/tp-inf3.htm>. Retrieved on 2008-01-12
[edit] External links
- "informavore" at Word Spy
