The Metaphysics of Chinese Information Philosophy: A Critical Analysis of Wu Kun’s Philosophy of Information

Compared with other transdisciplinary frames of information Wu Kun’s philosophy of information differs in its metaphysical framework in that it has a background in a conception of Dialectics of Nature coming from the old Stalin textbook system but also a part of the renewal of thinking in China appearing through the thought liberty movement in the 1980s, which among other things also added a modern view of information to Chinese thinking. Still it is a philosophy in a distinctive
Chinese style. Wu’s philosophical system begins by re-dividing the field of existence and founding a new ontological area or aspect of being, which he called the world of information and named it objective unreality. This, ontological framework, different from that in the West, made the concept of information in his system different from the information concept in Shannon’s and even Wiener’s
sense. Wu’s philosophy of information represents a search for a proper ransdisciplinary framework of information covering objective laws, subjective meaning and intersubjective normativity on an extended view of dialectical materialism. But still it is in this framework—as so many others— difficult to integrate a first person phenomenological and experiential view of the narrative meaning aspects of cognitive and communicative systems.