about the nature of information

Dear Friends,

everyone contributing to this discussion has his/her own concept of what is
news, what is information. In some cases, the picture communicated is a
juicy, emotionally appellative one (donkey, archaic heroes, rope, lovely
feminine figure), in other cases information, this Rorschach-plate concept,
is perceived as a mysterious, transcendent, active something that has
(hidden) meanings. There are also many other mental images about what we
experience if a curiosity is satisfied. (After all, information is that
what we have received, the answer, not the question.)

As many kinds of food as many kinds of hunger, as many ways of saying "I
have received something nourishing - now I feel better". On having
received information, some subtle biochemical processes in the brain are
differing to their state before. A curious animal behaves differently to
one that has found what it has been looking for. What are we curious about?
About curiosity itself, about the ways we dream up open questions and our
ability to answer them. Let us not forget that the questions we deal with
("meaning of life", "meaning of information", "well-ordered homeostasis",
"goals of creation" and the like) are not empirical, factual questions but
philosophical ways of looking at the world.

Therefore, our answers cannot be right or wrong, they can at the most be
pleasing, trustworthy, satisfying, wholesome, general, including, and
ultimate. An explanation is never right or wrong (as Russell has pointed
out), it may be experienced fitting or less fitting. We deal with emotions
as we try to satisfy our curiosity. Emotions being what they are, namely
subjective, momentarily, diffuse in their meaning, there is an urge to
clarify their meaning. This happens by getting ever more objective,
impersonal, detached while talking about what satisfies the curious person,
about what is the meaning of the term information. This is like turning a
convention of maitre-chefs into a congress of nutritional scientists.

You can't beat numbers on their ability to radiate the image of objectivity
and solidity. This is like saying at a school of cooking "forget the taste
- what is the Joule value?". Some may find this approach tasteless,
inappropriate or revolting. They may be right. Nevertheless, if one talks
about feeding people (and in cooking, this is not an unimportant side
aspect), the stripped-down numeric value of how many does come into play.
The same is the story with biology, genetics, creation, life, heredity,
information, abduction, nature, weaving and insight. It all boils down to
numbers.

Make your own decision, whether you believe that biology is rational or
not. If biology is rational, it must be pictured in the rational world.
Then it must allow for 'needs' to be satisfied. There must be a concept of
a void into which some objects or parts fit better than other objects. Then
we can understand ourselves as rational machines which have a void (namely
a question) and look for an object that fits in (an explanation). I have no
problems imagining my brain to have some local under-concentrations of a
hormone and electrical discharges (what the layman terms "thoughts")
starting and stopping production of hormones until satisfied. I have
developed the guidelines of a biological model doing exactly this. Allowing
for local under-concentrations and sequences that initialize and stop
production of substances. This is an utterly rational approach --it is a
boringly rational approach.

The reason I keep popping up and talking about numbers is that someone
wrote that "<how> and <where> have no connection. " (Actually, it went
like "But finally, philosophically speaking,the clarification of the
*how* does not explain *time* itself.") This is simply inaccurate, or at
least not up to date. Please read again the section "Neighborhood and
Cyclicity" of my contribution, and you will find that the <how> translates
quite well into <here1>, <here2>, ..., <here_k>, where the <here> (their
number and distances among each other) are dependent on the <how>. The
number of steps along a sequence until everything is again as it was, is
what is commonly termed "time", and this is what all the discussion is
meandering around: what is the news value of <now> being <so> and of <so>
being <now>.

The answer lies in counting the maximal number of <how>s and of <where>s
and making combinations of them. Then one knows the meaning of the term
"information", without reverting to subjective poetry (nice as it may be).
The theoretical answer is there, the question is whether we are ready to
accept it or not.

Let me make another allegory. It was well and widely suspected, known and
proven that the Earth is round well before the Catholic Kings gave cash out
to that cheat from Genova: ok now you go and show it. That was the truly
revolutionary moment, not the scientific revolution, not the adventurers'
readiness to risk their life on that unproven thesis that they shall
reappear in the East. No, the real revolutionary was Isabella and Ferdinand
(Pedro will correct me if it wasn't them.)

Now we need someone who will finance the informational voyage. Let us dream
it shall be a European king (or a queen!).

Best wishes for the next post-conference session,

Karl
Received on Mon Jan 27 12:08:22 2003