On Sun, Jan 21, 2024 at 2:31 PM Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
> * If I write "tamaontietoa" is it information or gibberish? Is it
> about something? *
>
There's no reason it couldn't be both, Shannon would say it's definitely
information, but he doesn't care if that information contains a great
profundity or is just gibberish because that is a matter of opinion and
there is no disputing matters of taste. And if you're designing the
technology to send messages through a fiber optic line mathematically you
don't need to know what the messages will be saying or if the information
in them is saying anything important, you just need to know how big it is,
and Shannon can tell you that.
>
> * > All the science of information is about encoding and decoding; it is
> not only substrate independent, it is content independent.*
>
Yes, and Shannon was the first one to realize that is not a bug, it's a
feature. Imagine the chaos that would result if Internet routers had to
understand the information and determine whether it was important or just
gibberish before they could transmit it!
John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
<https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>
wsa
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv3fwe6sBuxZ3pXiFeFfN4Od%3DsQyrvpwFkSWHJOLSNNeZw%40mail.gmail.com.
