By ANDY ANDREWS
Los Alamos World Futures Institute
In part one, we looked at data and read a display of data – letters of the alphabet, numbers and spaces.
They were arranged in an orderly fashion to provide information. One particular sentence had 132 characters, 27 spaces, and two punctuation symbols. In 8-bit computer coding this amounts to 1,288 ones and zeros and if seen in computer talk would be meaningless, at least to newspaper readers.
But when ordered and presented in the form a human computer (the brain) can recognize through a sensor (the eyes), it becomes information. Unfortunately, information is more complicated.
If you search Google for the definition of information, you are told that it is “facts provided or learned about something or someone.” So the speed number provided on the dashboard of your car is information. But if you do not look at the dashboard, is it information or merely data waiting to be observed? Ignored data is not information. Google also states that information is “what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things.” Your DNA has information your body uses to sustain your existence. Being encoded in a four level system, it is much more complicated than binary.
Go to Merriam-Webster and it becomes cloudier. Information is “the communication or reception of knowledge or intelligence.” And it is “knowledge obtained from investigation, study or instruction.” Notice how the word “knowledge” is conveniently used – knowledge is information, or is it? You have a plan for a road trip and you learn that the planned route has been closed. The “information” causes you to rework the plan using your planning knowledge. And information is informing against a person (whistleblower?).
Go back to the sentence cited in paragraph one. It contains 24 words. I went to the Encarta Dictionary and looked up the meaning of each word. Then I multiplied the separate meanings and determined that the sentence has 62.643 quadrillion possible meanings as a source of information. Obviously order, spaces and punctuation significantly reduce the possible meanings and this could be described as a foolish calculation. Order and context clarifies the meaning, the information. Also, our highly complex computers (brains) evolve as we learn and our programming becomes sufficiently sophisticated to sort out the information. Yet the information is closely related to one’s skills as a sender to ensure clarity. Quoting from the abstract of “Information: what do you mean?” by Dirk K.F. Meijer, “Information is often employed as a container term that represents many different modalities ranging from information constituting a physical parameter to the daily transmission of news in human culture.”
Meijer’s paper is mainly about the field of information theory and information in the universe. Without information, mass and energy are disorganized and useless. One might ask if entropy is a measure of the lack or correctness of information. And if information includes the daily news, which could be right or wrong, is the entropy, the disorder, of human civilization growing? Add smart phones and the question becomes more concerning. There is an old parlor game in which one person it told a piece of “information” and relates it to the next person and so on around the circle. The last person states what the “information” is. Usually after some laughs, the failure of individual interpretation of the information and its translation becomes obvious. If a 24 word sentence can have 62 quadrillion interpretations, how do we know that the information is true and correct, not assessing the factor of honesty?
On receipt of information our brains process it and implement a response based on content and trust in correctness. If the speedometer reads 65 miles per hour and you are in a 55 mile per hour speed zone, you might slow down. If the speedometer has a built in error of plus or minus two miles per hour, it does not affect the decision. But if the speed zone if a no fine zone or a double fine zone, it might. Information is used in the process of decision making and control, individually and collectively. It is evaluated in context and influences action and decision. The evaluation, however, requires knowledge.
Til next time….
Los Alamos World Futures Institute website is LAWorldFutures.org. Feedback, volunteers and donations (501.c.3) are welcome. Email andy.andrews@laworldfutures.org or email bob.nolen@laworldfutures.org. Previously published columns can be found at www.ladailypost.com or www.laworldfutures.org.
