Posted by Craig Maudlin on March 10, 1998 at 20:59:36:

In Reply to: Re: Data, Information & Knowledge posted by Yogesh Malhotra on March 07, 1998 at 10:44:57:

Hello. Attracted here from the KE_Fair, I've read this exchange with some interest. If I may, I'd like to offer a complimentary perspective on the way we tend to speak about 'information.'

We know, as the previous posts suggest, that information really only 'exists' in relation to some context. In a communications setting, we nominally have a sender, a receiver and a channel.

But before we can speak of meaningfully of information, we need to know more about the expectations of both the sender and receiver. Simply speaking, if a bit of information can be thought of as the answer to a yes-or-no question, then both sender and receiver must be in agreement as to the question.

So the question is part of the context that frames a single bit. A bit has only two states, of course, but there are no bounds to the number and complexity of the possible questions that might pertain to a single bit.

This offers another way to look at what we already know: that each and every bit within an information system can have a very large number of interpretations depending on the context in which it is evaluated.

The most basic context for information is the one we use to calculate information carrying CAPACITY. This is the context we tend to implicitly invoke when we speak about the 'bits and bytes.'

But I think we can understand a bitstream's ability to convey meaning or 'sense' when we realize that an entirely different context must be employed for the extraction of higher level semantic meaning. The bits don't change but the context must.

My sense is that, because of the tremendously difficult engineering challenges that have been overcome in recent years so as to bringing IT to it's present state, many of us have been conditioned to think mainly in terms of the capacity context. I think it is this tradition Yogesh refers to in the prior post.

According to the view I'm tentatively offering here, the difficulty is then not so much with information-theory itself as with the bad habits we've fallen into while applying that theory.

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Follow Ups:

• Re: Data, Information & Knowledge Ross Hall 13:20:39 3/11/98 (6)
  • Re: Data, Information & Knowledge Craig Maudlin 18:39:00 3/11/98 (5)
    • Re: Difficulties with Information Theory Yogesh Malhotra 23:15:05 3/11/98 (4)
      • Re: Difficulties with Information Theory Craig Maudlin 19:18:03 3/12/98 (3)
        • Re: Difficulties with Information Theory Tom Sudman 14:23:17 3/16/98 (0)
        • Re: Difficulties with Information Theory Mezei 22:27:13 3/12/98 (1)
          • Re: Difficulties with Information Theory Martyn R Jones 08:26:34 3/25/98 (0)

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