Introduction

The sense of the word “Information”#

Information, in the ordinary sense of the term, is the transmission to a conscious being of something meaningful, such as a concept, by means of a more or less conventional message and a spatiotemporal pattern (printed materials, telephone messages, sound waves, etc.). The apprehension of the meaning is the end, the communication of the pattern is the means.

Ruyer:
Now, two points. What is “meaning” and “consciousness”? For pragmatists and behaviorists, since they concentrate on action rather than consciousness, concerning “meaning”, the meaning of information is nothing other than the set of actions it triggers.  and “consciousness” while not explained, is something that causes reaction. Rather than the psychological notion of consciousness, being “informed” means effective communication of a structure. Cybernetic conception of information is built upon the pragmatist and behaviorist attitude, hence in cybernetics, any effective communication of a structure can be called information. It has the advantage of being measurable, since it is objective, and it is also consistent with the original (ordinary) sense of the word. Since information is essentially the progression of a structurally efficacious order, it's the opposite of a “de-structuration,” a breakdown, a decrease of order, namely the entropy. Hence it is the opposite of entropy.

Problem: 
I don't see a clear logical chain in this explanation. Order is that of structure, which information communicates, not of information itself. Information transmits structure, and by “structure” is seems what is meant is a “semantic sphere” where action is triggered, but as effective communication trigger action, de-structuralisation itself is also triggered by some action - while not an action that is desired. Order is that of structure, and what counts as structure depends on how one sees. However, maybe, after a particular order and structure is given, information in the sense of transmission of order becomes objective - but it is really subtle and not in the ordinary sense of the word.

Paradoxical nature of cybernetic definition#

The paradoxical nature is, rather than paradoxical, simply “unclear”. As I may have framed this, the problem is with the meaning of “order”, and I've already dealt with it in the last paragraph. 

Here Ruyer puts it in a different way, saying that the transmission is that of a “pattern” which is contrasted to “structural order” in that a pattern needs to be apprehended by a conscious being as a whole and turned into a form to be a structural order. I'll rather say that this “pattern” is really something similar to “matter” in Aristotelian sense, that is, a potential, a potential that becomes structural order only after being given a form. It's like thing-in-itself, or better, pre-measurement quantum state, or even better, “thing” in the late Wittgensteinian sense.

And Ruyer contrasts the transmission of “pattern” with apprehension by a conscious being as a whole: the transmission takes place in the machine through a step-by-step functioning, or by partial and isolated functioning. I'll rather say that the “semantic sphere” is different: for transmission, the structural order pertains to a mode that is proper to transmission, not to the apprehension. 

This also takes us to the problem of part-whole relations. For example, how does the meaning of a sentence emerges. It might seem that the meaning of a sentence only emerges after its being formed as a whole, but this way of thinking prevents us to understand how language functions, or, how it is possible for language to be learned, and how it is possible for new sentences to be constructed from words and phrases (molecular view of language-meaning a la Dummett). An answer to the problem might be emergence, but there seems to be a subtle difference. Note that emergence is always “unexpected”, while in sentence construction we rarely construct sentences with unexpected meaning - though sometimes sentences of this kind emerges accidently. Anyway, I don't think it is part-whole relationship that is crucial here, while the difference between the semantic sphere might correlate with how a whole that is essentially different from parts emerges from the assembly of parts.

The problem of origin of information#

This problem is essentially that of the neglection of consciousness & meaning. All structure/order depends on the semantic sphere that it is taken, and the semantic sphere is taken by a conscious being that apprehends meaning. A form needs to be recognized as form by a conscious being to be a form.

To common sense, I am the origin of the information; the machine is a transmission channel. Common sense would probably not venture to add, given enough time for reflection, that the “I” is the absolute creator of information. It knows very well that the sent message is not a pure creation […] The “I” is not an absolute origin, but neither is it a simple organ of transmission.

Ruyer's way of arguing this is that, cybernetic information, while can be seen as negentropy, seems to come from nowhere. Information seems to be produced, so perpetual motion of the third kind enteres the picture of information-thermodynamics. But since cybernetic information in its mathematical form is indistinguishable from statistical mechanics, there must be something self-contradictory in the definition of cybernetic information. 

Physicists explains the localization of neg-entropy  (“order out of chaos”) in terms of “local accidental concentration of order”, which is nothing but an rephrasing of the phenomenon that there is an localization of neg-entropy. As Ruyer puts it

[…] it would not be impossible for a microscopic particle to travel from A to B simply by relying on molecular agitation. But it would be unwise to rely on these kinds of fluctuations to produce a message or to travel across the ocean.

Ruyer seems to set out for the explanation of what plays the role of coal or gas in heat engines: what fuels information machines, or what is the origin of information.