What is Information

 “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in infomation?”
― T.S. Eliot

We are living in the age of information. It is so obviously true that it can almost go unstated. Never before has access to information been so great. The global capacity for the almost instantaneous sharing of information has the potential to solve many problems. Despite the unprecendented access to information however, problems rooted in a lack of access to or acceptance of quality information still abounds. Sometimes at the extreme this is due to an active cultural supression  such as the Talibans violent reign against the education of women. Often there are more subtle forces at work that make it difficult for cultures and individuals to process information in an unbiased way,

“In the long run I certainly hope information is the cure for fanaticism, but I am afraid information is more the cause than the cure.”

― Daniel C. Dennett


In our (U.S.) society when it comes to quality information I believe we have both a bottom-up  and top-down problem. The term 'low information voter' became a common phrase in the last election. Political campaigns are organized around simple black & white soundbites trying to feed enthusiasm in their base. Our news media has become entertainment, with each channel finding a niche population that it can preach to. The goal in each case is to provide the audience with what it wants to hear and what it can easily digest. We have settled into an equilibrium whereby for the most part we (the people) recieve the information we desire. With so many tv channels and so many websites it is easy both to avoid information that makes us uncomfortable, and to find information that confirms what we already believe. This is not the way to improving our knowledge of the world let alone our wisdom.

If we are to break this symmetry I believe we need a new understanding of what information is. I believe we need a theory that accounts for information as a process rather than something merely abstract and separate from the physical world.

So what is information?  In the common sense usage of the term we think of information as being somehow disconnected from the physical world. This is also true of the technical definition of information theory put forth by Claude Shannon for use in signal transmission and computor science in 1948. Shannon also created a digital logic and the formula for his information theory in digital bits is analgous to the formula in the physical world for entropy. In fact Shannon named his formula which describes a reduction in uncertainty as informational entropy. Shannon new this formula was limited to signal transmission and indicated that it was not intended to account for the interetation or meaning in the signal.

In my view a theory of information can not be complete unless it accounts for the fact that for information to be recieved there must be an observer. Leaders in the modern field of artificial intelligence like Ray Kruzweil seem to make the assumption that intelligence can be attained from abstracted information without concern for it's physical substrate.  A good critique Kurzweils approach  can be found here , 


This is similar to the view of the brain as something analagous to an information processor.  Here is the neuroscientist David Eagleman describing one way the brain acts like an information processor,

“We open our eyes and we think we're seeing the whole world out there. But what has become clear—and really just in the last few centuries—is that when you look at the electro-magnetic spectrum we are seeing less than 1/10 Billionth of the information that's riding on there. So we call that visible light. But everything else passing through our bodies is completely invisible to us.

Even though we accept the reality that's presented to us, we're really only seeing a little window of what's happening.”

There is a reason we only 'see' a small fraction of the relations taking place in the electro-magnetic spectrum that surrounds us. We need to find a signal within all the the noise and disorder that allows us to navigate world. Joseph Brenner,  who I previously posted on would refer to this as a part of the process of the 'invisible hand' of information. As Brenner puts it:

'Understanding the ‘invisible hand’ of information should not rest exclusively on a vast catalog of computational processes and models addressing physico-molecular occurrences, but also on making integrated sense of the differentiated ways of existence that a living system enacts. The invisible hand of information is the great shaper of the natural and social world.'

The information that characterizes this proces of reducing uncertainty is not some purely non-physical abstact invisible conceptual quantity. The physical and non-physical, visible and non-visible are interdependent and non-separable. The physical structures of living systems embody within themselves informational patterns as the author and science writer James Gleick describes this nicely in his book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood :

"Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe." 

The physicist Robert Logan has an excellent recent paper that details the history of information theory titled 'What Is Information?: Why Is It Relativistic and What Is Its Relationship to Materiality, Meaning and Organization'. In this paper Logan suggests that it would be useful to think of information emerging across four levels:

   

1. Data are the pure and simple facts without any particular structure or organization, the basic atoms of information,
2. Information is structured data, which adds more meaning to the data and gives them greater context and significance,
3. Knowledge is the ability to use information strategically to achieve one's objectives, and
4. Wisdom is the capacity to choose objectives consistent with one's values and within a larger social context

First there is just the data, this is Shannon information. An observer is then neccessary to interpret the data and this is where meaning begins to emerge. Knowledge emerges when meaningful information can be put to use instrumentally by individuals. Wisdom however is more complex and more difficult. Wisdom requires the understanding of a larger context beyond an individuals actions and the direct effects they may cause. This level of information is open ended as we can never 'see' all the long range effects of our actions nor the myiad of causes behind how we act. Yet it is wise to consider  the information we expose ourselves to as well as the information we project. Do we find ourselves biased to recieve a certain type of information or knowledge? If we are to become wiser I believe this is an important question to ask,

Time permitting I hope to learn and post more on this subject as others like Terrence Deacon, and Stuart Kuafman are conducting fascinating work on the relation between information, entropy, and the emergence of life and consciousness.

“A file on a hard disk does indeed contain information of the kind that objectively exists. The fact that the bits are discernible instead of being scrambled into mush - the way heat scrambles things - is what makes them bits.

But if the bits can potentially mean something to someone, they can only do so if they are experienced. When that happens, a commonality of culture is enacted between the storer and the retriever of the bits. Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information."

― Jaron Lanier, You are Not a Gadget