has no meaning or function. On occasion one may say that information is *encoded* in the pattern at the source. The effected change can itself be a pattern. Finally, there is no such thing as a numerical *measure* of pragmatic information. Pragmatic information cannot be quantified—it represents *a correspondence* which either exists or not, or works as intended or not, but it cannot be assigned a magnitude. There are cases, of course, where a given pattern and/or the change can be expressed in numbers or bits by an external agent, but that number *is not* the pragmatic information involved.

There are only three fundamental processes through which mechanisms of information-driven interactions can emerge (Roederer 2005), involving processes at three vastly different time scales: 1) Darwinian evolution; 2) adaptation or neural learning; 3) as the result of human reasoning and long-term planning. In other words, they all involve *living matter*—indeed, information-driven interactions represent the *defining property of life* (Roederer, 2004). In this overall evolution, we note a gradual increase of complexity of the interacting systems and related mechanisms involved: from “simple” chemical reactions between biomolecules, to life-sustaining circulation systems in plants, to the ultra-complex interaction chains in the human brain.

Any 