# A Dialogue Concerning the Essence and Role of Information in the World System
## 2 The Dialogue
We find that it derives from the Latin stem _informatio_, which comes from the verb _informare_ (to inform) in the sense of the act of giving a form to something material as well as the act of communicating knowledge to another person [34; 35; 36; 37; 38; 39]. The first of these meanings is what allows us to see a connection of information to human labor exertion. In other words, the term information may be said to mediate the act of labor between humans and nature, i.e., the act of labor as a metabolic connection between humans and nature is the action of giving form to something material, i.e., labor _in-forms_ matter. In addition, matter _in-forms_ humans by reacting to the efforts of humans. It is a never-ending interactive process of action-sensing-action. This notion of information correlates with that of [PERSON] emphasizing the utilization of our five primary senses in our environmental interactions. Now, let us consider a description by [PERSON], of a laborer wielding an ax:  
\"Consider a tree and a man and an ax. We observe that the ax flies through the air and makes certain sorts of gashes in a pre-existing cut in the side of the tree. If now we want to explain this set of phenomena, we shall be concerned with differences in the cut face of the tree, differences in the retina of the man, differences in his central nervous system, differences in his efferent neural messages, differences in the behavior of his muscles, differences in how the ax flies, to the differences which the ax then makes on the face of the tree. Our explanation (for certain purposes) will go round and round that circuit. In principle, if you want to explain or understand anything in human behavior, you are always dealing with total circuits, completed circuits. This is the elementary cybernetic thought [23].\"  
This is a description that evolves from a cybernetic perspective of the world by [PERSON] that identifies information/differences that are pertinent, in this case, to the dynamic and evolving labor effort at hand, which is no different from many typical labor tasks, and can be ascribed as a series of material informational efforts involving the use of the human brain, nerves, muscles, and sense organs. In short, we want to argue that labor and information/differences are intimately entwined and that every artifact embodies labor and information/differences. This aspect of all human artifacts goes largely unnoticed, but it lends much credence to the fact that we can easily recognize implements manufactured by humans no matter their anthropological age. Another example is signs of butchery in animal bones that are more than 2 million years old [40; 41]. The **second information epoch** begins with [PERSON]'s landmark paper on the Mathematical Theory of Information that was central to the establishment of 'Information Theory' as a discipline [42]. This prompted the need to quantify measurements of different kinds that would allow one \"to discover the method which will give us the maximum amount of information for a given outlay of time or space or other resources\" [33] with mostly syntactic constructions that negate semantic content. In this current epoch, producers and consumers of information are not only humans but also machines that are designed and built for that purpose by humans. The production and consumption of information by humans consists in being the producers and users of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) such as wireless radios, cybernetic control mechanisms, encryption machines, and television, evolving to the technological levels that make items of common usage today such as cell phones, digital televisions, satellite communications, the internet, social media, etc. These ICTs allow messages to be composed by humans/machines, coded, and optimally transmitted as communication signals, which are received, denoised, decoded, and interpreted by humans/machines. This is the information basis of the information age.