Difference between revisions of "Information"

Revision as of 14:16, May 25, 2007

Information is a message transmitted by a message sender and received and understood by a message receiver. Information can be considered to be the third fundamental quantity of the universe, after matter and energy. Information is a non-material entity, and some contest only arise from an intelligence, whilst others disagree^[1].

The mediums of information

Information is carried on matter, but is not matter itself. Rather, it is the arrangement of matter that carries the information. This can be seen in that arranging matter to carry information does not change the weight of the matter. The following is a list of ways that information is carried.^[2]

• Acoustic
  Information is transmitted by means of sound.
• Optical
  Information is transmitted by written word, flags, bar codes, sign language, bee dances, etc.
• Tactile
  Information is transmitted by physical touch, such as by braille writing.
• Magnetic
  Information is transmitted by magnetic recording mediums, such as tapes and computer disks.
• Electrical
  Information is transmitted by electrical signals, such as telephone and radio.
• Chemical
  Information is transmitted by chemical signals, such as DNA.
• Olfactory
  Information is transmitted by smell, such as animal scents.
• Electro-chemical
  Information is transmitted by electro-chemical means, such as in nervous systems.

Punching braille dots into a medium does not change the quantity of the matter, but its shape has been changed in order to carry information. Computer disks have the same quantity of matter when formatted as when files have been written to them. Information has been added by rearranging the magnetic particles, not by changing the quantity of matter involved.

Information is conveyed by symbols

Information is transmitted by means of symbols which are usually arbitrary and only carry information because the receiver of the information understands the conventions of the symbols. In the case of alphabetic languages, these symbols are the letters of the alphabet and the word built from those letters. However, different languages can use different symbols to convey the same information, or the same symbols to convey different information. For example, the word gift in English means a present, wheres in German the same word gift means a poison. For information to be understood, the receiver of the information must know what the symbols represent.

Levels of information

Information scientist has defined five levels of information.^[3]

Statistical

At the lowest level, information can be measured statistically. This is the definition of information used by Claude Shannon. It measures the amount of space required to store information. For example, the sentence "Conservapedia is the world's best encyclopedia" has more "information" than "Wikipedia is an inferior encyclopedia" because it takes more letters to write it. This aspect of information is useful for calculating the capacity requirements to store and transmit information, but fails to distinguish between noise and meaning. For example, the sentence "Conservapedia is an encyclopedia" takes 32 characters to write. The sentence "onadpelrn oyeCsens aiaia iecpvdc" also takes (the same) 32 characters, but carries no meaning.

Syntax

Information must have syntax, which is the arrangement of symbols. Not all possible combination of symbols can actually carry meaning.

Semantics

Information must have meaning to the recipient. If a syntactically-correct sequence of symbols does not have meaning, it is not information.

Pragmatics

Information has the potential to cause the recipient to take some action.

Apobetics

Information has a purpose.

Measuring information

Whilst there is no measure for information, it is possible to compare two similar pieces of information to see which has the most information. For example, compare the following two sentences:^[4]

• She has a yellow vehicle.
• She has a yellow car.

The second sentence conveys more information than the first, because the second tells you not just she has a vehicle, but that the specific type of vehicle is a car.

But also note that the second sentence, although carrying more information, is shorter than the first sentence. Thus a measure of information at the statistical level bears little if any relationship to the amount of meaningful information.

Origin of information

All information is the result of a will, and as information is not a property of matter, it has a non-material source. Thus all information ultimately has its origin in a personal mind excercising free will^[5], an intelligence.^[6]

Law of Conservation of Information

William Dembski's Law of Conservation of Information states that information cannot be created or destroyed.

Information and creation

Creationists use the science of information to argue that the information carried on the DNA of all living things must have had its origin in an intelligence (God), and could not have arisen through natural (materialistic) processes.

Bibliography

• Gitt, Werner, In the Beginning was Information, Christliche Literateur-Verbreitung e. V., Bielefield, Germany, 1997 (English edition).
• Gitt, Werner, Information, science and biology, Journal of Creation 10(2):181–187.
• Lamb, Andrew, More or less information?, 17 February 2007

References

1. ↑ http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/information/infotheory.html
2. ↑ Gitt, Werner, In the Beginning was Information, 60-61, Christliche Literateur-Verbreitung e. V., Bielefield, Germany, 1997 (English edition).
3. ↑ Gitt, pages 50-82.
4. ↑ Example taken from Lamb, 2007.
5. ↑ Gitt, page 113.
6. ↑ Bates, Gary, SETI—coming in from the cold of space, Creation 26(3):48–50, June 2004.