info & physics

From: <[email protected]>
Date: Tue 21 May 2002 - 11:34:39 CEST

On May 13th, John Collier wrote:
>Because of the great divide concerning whether
>information exists "out there" independently of
>an interpreter or whether it is something that is
>created only through interpretation or
>intentionality, I have become increasingly
>reluctant to talk of information.

John's comment is interesting as it is summerizes
a position shared by many. And I feel this position
is partly a consequence of a lack of separation
between information and meaningful information.
In order to establish this separation and try to
clear the point, we need to articulate the three
different levels of complexity that are a signal,
an information, and the usage of an information
by a system.
First, a signal is well understood as a variation
of energy (ex: burst of thunderstorm).
Second, an information is a content of the signal:
a content of a variation of energy (ex: amplitude
of thunderstorm noise). Information is quantifiable,
as Shanon has shown: counting the different possible
configuration in energy variation. So information
is carried by a signal.
Last point is less obvious and deserves a little
analysis. It is about the usage of an incident
information by a finalized system. At this point
comes up the notion of meaning generation in the
system (can also be read as an interpretation of the
incident information by the system. You will
interpret the thunderstorm noise because your
finality is to stay dry).
This says that a meaning is a meaningful
information generated by the finalized system when
it receives an incident information.
We can modelize the finalized system as a system
submitted to a constraint that is to be satisfied (to
stay dry).
The meaningul information generated by the system
can then be defined as the connection between the
constraint of the system and the received information.
(connection between staying dry and the noise of
thunderstorm we hear: rain is comming).
The meaningful information will be used by the system
to satisfy it's constraint (look for a shelter to stay
away from the rain).
So a meaningful information is the result of a
meaning generation by a system (i.e. a result of an
interpretation by the system).
And we can now try to reword John's comment:
"A meaningful information cannot exist "out there"
independently of an interpreter. But a non meaningful
information can exist "out there", before being received
by a system that will generate a meaningful information
built up from the received information and the
constraint of the system (interpreted by the system)".
This basis is quite general. But defining correctly the
constraint of the system is clearly the hard part.

Regards

Christophe Menant
Received on Tue May 21 13:01:38 2002

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