96
6 In Search of Reality
the physical universe would be shapeless and without sense or structure—a
kind of wasteland.
Facts and Information
It is hard to speak of anything in our day without bringing up the idea of
information. The concept of information in its contemporary form is a scientific
idea that first emerged in a technical paper by Claude Shannon in 1948. The
most important aspect of Shannon’s idea was that information is a quantity
that can be precisely measured. He was specifically interested in how much
information can be transmitted per second by a channel of communication
such as a telephone line. But it was immediately evident that one could use
Shannon’s concept to quantify the amount of information in a strand of DNA,
to determine how much information is needed to decipher a code, or how
much information it takes to learn a new concept. The notion of quantifiable
information is now ubiquitous in every branch of learning and is a staple of
everyday conversation. 5
The key idea is that information can be coded as a sequence of symbols of
any kind. Since it is possible to translate mechanically from one set of symbols
to another, it has become conventional to transcribe information in series of
0s and 1s. In essence, however, wherever there is some variation or modulation
of a physical medium, there is potential information: It measures the amount
of modulation or differentiation. Though information requires a material base
to support the variation, information proper is not material but the pattern of
the variation. For example, the airmass is the support for sound, but it is the
pattern of vibration that is the actual sound. In fact, the very same sound can
ride on any material support, for example on the groove of an old phonograph
record, as the great inventor Edison realized.
This notion of information is of great value in science, but it falls far short of
our intuitive idea of what should be meant by information. For us, information
should be informative: It ought to bring us knowledge of things outside of us. It
is in this sense that we wish to think of information in this book. We shall regard
information as a non-material “something” which brings us new knowledge.
We have already noted that “the Map is not the Territory”. In this metaphor,
the territory stands for the external world separate from any observer. In contrast, the map is the description of the world, in images or words, acquired by
a living observer. The first is matter, the second is information. Common sense
lulls us into the belief that a solid object’s form and structure are an inherent,
indwelling aspect of the material object itself. However, as argued in Chapter 5,
6 In Search of Reality
the physical universe would be shapeless and without sense or structure—a
kind of wasteland.
Facts and Information
It is hard to speak of anything in our day without bringing up the idea of
information. The concept of information in its contemporary form is a scientific
idea that first emerged in a technical paper by Claude Shannon in 1948. The
most important aspect of Shannon’s idea was that information is a quantity
that can be precisely measured. He was specifically interested in how much
information can be transmitted per second by a channel of communication
such as a telephone line. But it was immediately evident that one could use
Shannon’s concept to quantify the amount of information in a strand of DNA,
to determine how much information is needed to decipher a code, or how
much information it takes to learn a new concept. The notion of quantifiable
information is now ubiquitous in every branch of learning and is a staple of
everyday conversation. 5
The key idea is that information can be coded as a sequence of symbols of
any kind. Since it is possible to translate mechanically from one set of symbols
to another, it has become conventional to transcribe information in series of
0s and 1s. In essence, however, wherever there is some variation or modulation
of a physical medium, there is potential information: It measures the amount
of modulation or differentiation. Though information requires a material base
to support the variation, information proper is not material but the pattern of
the variation. For example, the airmass is the support for sound, but it is the
pattern of vibration that is the actual sound. In fact, the very same sound can
ride on any material support, for example on the groove of an old phonograph
record, as the great inventor Edison realized.
This notion of information is of great value in science, but it falls far short of
our intuitive idea of what should be meant by information. For us, information
should be informative: It ought to bring us knowledge of things outside of us. It
is in this sense that we wish to think of information in this book. We shall regard
information as a non-material “something” which brings us new knowledge.
We have already noted that “the Map is not the Territory”. In this metaphor,
the territory stands for the external world separate from any observer. In contrast, the map is the description of the world, in images or words, acquired by
a living observer. The first is matter, the second is information. Common sense
lulls us into the belief that a solid object’s form and structure are an inherent,
indwelling aspect of the material object itself. However, as argued in Chapter 5,