Non-Information

If information is a concept that you can put boundaries around (ok, THAT is information, THAT is a houseplant), then what does the negative space around the concept look like?

Looking to the trusty Google "define:information" query, I get a list of definitions with these qualities:

• A message
• Facts
• Data plus knowledge
• Human-interpreted data

So, with my observations about the pro forma structures and instructions that all computers use, you could easily make the case that there is no information in a computer at all. Or, if you interpret "information" as meaning data plus knowledge, you could argue that a program that interprets data is actually applying knowledge, which has been translated into computer instructions.

It seems that there is a little homunculous argument going on here, if you say that computers process information. If computers process information, and information is information only because of human minds getting involved, then... what exactly makes the thing the human mind interprets anything but data? Again, maybe it's just a semantic problem, but let's try to trace the process and find the information, from the information recipient's point of view (or shall I say "information co-creator"?):

1. Someone defines the pro forma for data capture (no information yet)
2. A computer is configured to carry out the steps necessary to store and manipulate the data (no information yet)
3. A program interprets the data using a series of instructions that apply someone's knowledge to that data (this is tricky... The person who defined the algorithm that processes the data has done some knowledge-based value-add to this data. Does this mean information exists for the end co-creator? I argue not, since the final recipient is not yet in the picture.)
4. Recipient of the information sits down at her computer and discovers the computer's output, integrating her prior knowledge with this output, and now we have "information" for the first time in this process, viewed in the context of the recipient.

Going through these steps, step 3 seems a logical boundary. Information is added in the context of the algorithm producer, but not in the context of the recipient.

So, this is interesting to me. Discarding the definitions of information that say that it's "facts", you see an inherent requirement of all the other definitions. Let me give this a try.

Information: A communication within a specific context, from a source to a recipient, that causes the recipient to derive a benefit after the content of the message has been interpreted by the recipient.

Let's test this definition by creating some anti-examples:

• Someone receives a hand-written report that contains a persuasive argument that the company should sell one of its divisions. The recipient is a part time intern with no political clout. This report could be read by this person. If the intern interprets the report in terms like this: "I wonder if the company is in trouble, maybe I should quit," then the report contains information (though the information may not be what the author of the report ever intended). If, on the other hand, the intern interprets the report this way: "There's nothing I can do about this. Someone else will make this decision one way or another, I'm not even going to speculate about it. This may or may not happen, and it doesn't matter to me either way," then perhaps the report contained no information.
• A man rushes breathlessly to you on the street, and exclaims: "The aliens are here!" If you are a resident who already knows this man to be the local street lunatic, no information has been exchanged. If, on the other hand, you were a tourist in the city for the first time, you might think, "wow, this city has a lot of loonies," and information has exchanged.
• You get into the shower and turn on the water. Water comes out the nozzle. Since no source is communicating, even though you derive the benefit of a functional shower, no information is present.
• A company produces confetti that has one english word on each flake. You buy two pounds of the confetti and throw it. You pick out some words, and by coincidence the words remind you that you have left the gas on at your house. You rush to the stove and, turning off the gas, prevent a catastrophe. I don't think this is so simple. In this case, the communication has happened from a source (you) to recipient (you) via a context (reading confetti). Perhaps information can be transmitted to self. Probably so.
• A man on a desert island writes a message and folds it into a bottle. He throws the bottle into the ocean. Unbeknownst to the man, an undercurrent grabs his bottle and smashes it on some rocks. Since there is no recipient, no information.
• A person walks along the beach and observes the waves crashing against the sand. This person spontaneously creates a new form of mathematics that describes this interaction. The source in this case could be the inanimate interaction of beach and waves. You could also argue that the source is this person's observation of the waves.
• A salesman does the hard-sell to you about the benefits of their insulated windows. You are told that each non-insulated window in your house loses the equivalent in heat to a hole in your wall the size of a brick. You did not know this, but you are someone who likes to be as cold as you can possibly be anyway, so you never, ever, heat your home. You are not in the market for new windows. This factoid, then, may not be information, since you derive no benefit from having heard it.

I have not personally interpreted the concept "information" in this way before, and it's sort of fascinating.

• Information requires a recipient.
• Information requires that the recipient interprets something.
• Information requires that the interpretation creates something new to the recipient
• The interpretation, though it must be new in some way to the recipient, might be something entirely different than what the source or author of the communication originally intended.

© Copyright 2005 Steve Land. Last update: 4/21/2005; 8:22:43 AM.