What is Information?

[Georgia Avenue]

There's an interesting bit of this thread that deals with this question, but it sort of petered out...I think it's central to all of these ID questions, as well as questions about Faith in general.

Here's how I begin to think about it: Information is observed order. When two people pass it, this "communication" is based on shared precepts, language, in which the two people have faith that they share. I assume we mean the same thing when we talk about, say “Blue” or “Turquoise” even though we may picture different things. Now take this analogy out to physical phenomena: we don’t speak the language of wind or stars or Hypoxanthine so we try to create one: math-based experimental science. But this, like the languages with dictionaries, is based on some axioms which are apparently a priori (some might say evolutionarily inspired). So, where does this common ground come from?

1. We cannot easily say that God created it, because we in fact did first. If we discovered it in nature this may be because the nature that created our consciousness contains a commensurable order. So as another poster said, our biological processes, including Information Interpreting (discovering order), are results of one original physical process, The Biggy Big Bang-o, therefore it’s no surprise that the world seems “ordered” to us.

However: 2. Materialism offers no explanation that explains the possibility of Incommensurability or Illogic. Why doesn’t everything make sense? Why are some things ordered, and some not? What about the concept of Dis-order, or Irrationality, how is it possible that a mind designed by an ordered nature could either create or discover things which do not, indeed CANNOT be explained?

So then: Where does order come from? It seems to neither be imposed upon nature by Man’s conditioned mind (2.) nor hidden in nature for Man to discover by God (1.)…

Anyway, just some thoughts…I think this is a key element in my favorite question: What is a Soul?

Inflame (con fuego) !

Read a book about the biology behind neuroscience for #2, it does indeed answer many of these questions. Or give you an idea of where the answers might be headed. I believe there's a good one in Layman's terms called "How Brains Think", don't know the details though.

[Georgia Avenue]

I will check that out. I have read some books about Neuroscience, or that mentioned it, (no actual Neuroscience, tho', too tough on my little ol'brain). But my problem is by definition impossible for Neuroscience to answer on its own, without at least an attendant philosophy (a philosophy that exists only to say: “Neuroscience don’t need no stinking philosophy”…).

Here’s what I’m asking: How can atoms and particles become an understanding of themselves? Science’s answer right now is: “Dunno, but they do!” That seems to be easily as big a copout as “God sez so right thurr in the Bibble, that’s why!”

I'm not asking: how can a brain have arisen out of chance and evolution...that seems clear, if not entirely indisputable. I'm asking: how can Man actually understand the universe if he is a part of it? Either he doesn't really see or understand it, or he is something more than material.

We don't understand the universe, we interact with parts of it and dimly perceive the rest.

As for the "how can atoms think", it's late and I don't want to get Hyper-Cerebral Electrosis
My contention is that you're thinking of atoms in the brain on the wrong level of abstraction. Your question is a similar one to "How can silicon atoms play chess against a human?"

<font color="white">Hyper-Cerebral Electrosis is an urban legend by the way</font>

[Georgia Avenue]

It's late? What are ya, European? Or do you mean "It's late I've been at work all day and have done none..."? Maybe its just me.

ANYway, your point about the computer is just what I mean.

We can design a piece of silicon to do every step of the kind of thinking that is required to play a game with fixed rules like chess, but a computer would never be able to, say create an entirely new move. It can't gather information and process it creatively. It can only regurgitate.

This is sort of a sideline, but it relates to your answer about thinking:

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We don't understand the universe, we interact with parts of it and dimly perceive the rest.

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I think this answer is slightly contradictory.
To interact with some part of the universe, we must be in contact with it. But the WE is our brain. And the IT is the numena of the universe, the stuff. So if our interactions are to be trusted, and the info we gather to be taken as intimately related to the stuff, then we must be said to understand that part of it, no? I think you just rephrased what I was saying, basically. There’s still a disconnect between the input: perception // and the result: information. So far we have not been able to represent that function of humanity, and how could we? It would first require an understanding of understanding which don’t really exist yet, and which I say is improbable.

By the way, watch out for that Exploding Skull Syndrome…it’ll get you even worse if you take the brown acid!

[Siegmund]

Forgive me if I don't see much connection between "what is information?" and questions about faith - unless we're simply going to define "taking something on faith" as "assuming something is true before we have enough information to prove it."

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Here's how I begin to think about it: Information is observed order.

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This is actually a good way of putting it into plain English.

The usual measure of order and disorder, in science and mathematics, is entropy: in principle, we count the number of possible states of a system that are consistent with what we know about it. The larger this number is, the more there is about that system that remains unknown to us; if we succeed in reducing this count to 1, we have managed to completely specify every last detail of the system.

For any practical purpose, the numbers involved are huge; usually we take logarithms but even then the numbers for a 'big' system are still huge. There are also extensions of the idea to cover things varying continuously over a range.

But to answer the question "what is information," we don't much care about the absolute size of this number, or care whether we are taking logs, or logs of logs, or any other 1-1 function of this number. Information about a system is anything which causes you to reduce this count.

In poker, hearing a predictable player raise means that we cross 72o off the list of possible hands he could hold. Discovering for the first time that the sky is blue places constraints on what gases are present in the upper atmosphere. If you already know the exact compositon of the atmosphere this isn't new information; but in the days after the basic laws of optics were known but before high-altitude aircraft and rockets were invented, this imparted a great deal of new information to scientists.

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(snip) So, where does this common ground come from?


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If I receive new information about the world, my list of possible states of the system -- speaking loosely, my list of possible ways the world can work, or possible explanations for alleged miracles or whatever -- gets shorter.

If you receive new information, your list gets shorter.

One way we can make both of our lists shorter is to compare our lists, and strike out anything which appears on only one of the two lists... since the true state of things, whatever that might be, has to be consistent with *everything* that *anyone* observes.

Scientists and mathematicians spend some of their time making new observations and deductions - one way to shorten their lists - and some of their time attending conferences, publishing papers, and reading other people's publications. Every time we speak or publish we shorten someone else's list; every time we read someone else's article, attend someone else's lecture, or receive editorial comments on an article we submit, we shorten our own list.

What you call "common ground" is simply an artifact of the fact that, as time goes on, the most obvious pieces of information get passed around to almost everyone, so the most ridiculous explanations get crossed off of almost everyone's list. We are all trying to peel our lists down to a single explanation of the life, the universe, and everything.

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So then: Where does order come from? It seems to neither be imposed upon nature by Man’s conditioned mind (2.) nor hidden in nature for Man to discover by God (1.)…


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"Order" is simply a name for observing that a given system exhibits a lower number of states that might have been expected based on the number of elements it contains.

By extension of this general idea, mathematicians speak of partial orderings and total orderings to refer to particular types of restrictions on the way the elements of a set can be arranged, and of various types of measures which can be used to compare the sizes of sets, the entropies of systems, and so on.

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Anyway, just some thoughts…I think this is a key element in my favorite question: What is a Soul?


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Forgive me if I can't see much of a connection between "what is information" and "what is a soul."

Returning to the question of faith - it does indeed seem like a natural definition of "belief" or "faith" is "to voluntary confine one's attention to a subset of one's list, " pretending to have stricken off some items from that list when you haven't actually received information telling you that you can. This can be a valuable hypothetical exercise as long as you remember you've done it. If however you discard those other items outright, you risk having accidentally crossed off the one true state of the system from your list and made a mess of the entire exercise.

[Georgia Avenue]

Very interesting response. I like that "List" concept...I've never heard it put that way...Is what you're saying any relation to Karl Popper's ideas? I've only read a bit of him, but it seems similar, this idea that the Truth is the most likely thing...

The only thing I can say about the connection between information and The Soul is that: Any assertion about the methods by which human thought apprehends the world, is an assertion about the make-up of a human--this includes the idea: Man has no soul, he is a complicated machine which is capable of organizing his observations into lists of hypotheses and following the most likely. What human understanding is, is based on what they are… if what they are is material, that changes the possibility of true knowledge to zero. Perhaps you would like to say: THIS is how our reason works, no matter what our consciousness might consist of, but that’s just good ol’analytical evasion techniques.

I need to read your post again to understand it. Thanks again.