In the Beginning Was Information (15 page)

Theorem 29:
Every piece of creative information represents some mental effort and can be traced to a personal idea-giver who exercised his own free will, and who is endowed with an intelligent mind.

This theorem can also be expressed as follows:

Theorem 30:
New information can only originate in a creative thought process.

Examples of creative information: designing a coding system, designing a language, untrammeled discourse by means of natural languages, creating a programming language, writing a book, writing an original scientific paper, program instructions in DNA molecules, and the setting up of blueprints for living beings.

Conclusions: It should now be clear where the follies of evolutionary views lie. If someone presents a model for explaining the origin of life, but he cannot say where the creative information characteristic of all life forms came from, then the crucial question remains unanswered. Somebody who looks for the origin of information only in physical matter ignores the fundamental natural laws about information; what is more, he scorns them. It is clear from the history of science that one can ignore the laws of nature for a limited time only.

There are only four different possible relationships between sender and recipient [G4], as illustrated in Figure 23. Only intelligent beings qualify as sender or recipient (God and man), or systems constructed by intelligent minds (e.g., man, other living beings, machines like computers or communication systems, and storage media). The four possible communication channels are shown in Figure 23. According to Theorem 29, senders of creative information can only be personal beings, while machines may serve as senders of copied or reproduced information.

Figure 23: The four possible combinations of sender and recipient.

There also are cases where both the sender and the recipient are parts of a complete transmission system (Figure 24).

Figure 24: A complete transmission system in which sender and recipient are integrated. The entire system is based on conceptual ideas and always requires a mental source.

Example: In the system used for the transmission of exact (atomic) time in Germany, the atomic clock located at the Physikalisch-Technischen Bundesanstalt (Federal Institute of Physics and Technology) in Braunschweig, transmits the exact time over the transmitter designated as DCF77 in Mainflingen (near Frankfurt/Main). A specially designed code is employed (compare Theorems 6 to 11) and these signals can then be decoded by commercially available receiving equipment to provide time and date. Both the transmitter and the receiver are "systems created by intelligence" (the lower link in Figure 23). All the parts of this system have been produced by intelligent minds, as shown in Figure 24.

Chapter 9

The Quality and Usefulness of Information

Shannon’s information theory can be regarded as an extension of probability theory. He takes the bit as the unit of measurement of information, and a book with 200 pages then contains twice as much information as one with 100 pages if the pages contain the same number of letters. Meaning is completely ignored. Wolfgang Feitscher gave a striking description of this situation: "When considering semantic information, we are like a chemist who can weigh substances, but cannot analyze them." In this sense, Shannon solved the problem of weighing information, but the analysis question is still untouched. To rise above Shannon’s theory, it is necessary to define measures for semantic information which must be generally valid. We will now discuss some aspects which may pave the way for solving this difficult problem.

A semantic measure would not be a measure of quantity but of quality. It could happen that a book of several volumes may have a lower semantic evaluation than a thin brochure. A qualitative evaluation of information involves some parameters which depend very strongly on a subjective appraisal, and this has an appreciable aggravating effect on the problem. Figure 25 (page 117) depicts a graph of the semantic value of information with respect to its usefulness. There are five value levels.

1. Extremely important information:
This is the highest level because of its high apobetics content (e.g., essential and vital information).

2. Important information:
Information which is required for achieving some purpose (e.g., knowledge of planned routes, telephone numbers, address lists, and subject knowledge).

3. Valuable information:
This includes information which is of general value in the sense of being informative, constructive, edifying, or amusing (e.g., daily news, weather reports, general increase of knowledge, and novelties).

4. Trivial information:
Insignificant or meaningless information (e.g., already known or useless information, clichés, banalities, or small talk).

5. Harmful information:
Information with negative consequences, leading to false results, misconceptions, and other negative effects (e.g., deliberate or erroneous misinformation, slander, cursing, agitation, false propaganda, charlatanry, malicious gossip, expletives, sectarian doctrines, unbiblical theology, pornographic, ideological, and astrological publications, and pulp magazines).

Valuable information (1 to 3) is accorded a positive sign, and worthless information (4 and 5) a negative sign, so that now we can regard information as a signable quantity. In the x direction (Figure 25) we distinguish between usable (positive) and useless (negative) information. We thus have four quadrants for evaluating information, characterized as follows.

Figure 25: Graph representing the evaluation levels of the usability of semantic information. There is no indication of scale, so we are mainly dealing with a qualitative evaluation of semantic information. Valuable information is accorded a positive, and worthless information a negative, sign. Usable and useless information are also distinguished by their sign.

First quadrant:
This is the most important domain, since it is comprised of all information that is both useful and valuable. "Useful" means that the information is available and accessible and can in principle be implemented. On the one hand, usefulness is an objective property, but the concept of value concerns a person, an event, a plan, or a purpose, and it is always subjective.

Second quadrant:
The information in this quadrant is also valuable, as in the case of the first quadrant, but it cannot be used. There are various possible reasons for this:

– It is not yet available (e.g., cure for cancer; a book on an important theme which has not yet been written).

– It cannot be located in the gigantic flood of information.

– The author has it available, but it has not yet been transmitted (published).

– It is not of topical interest any more.

Third and fourth quadrants:
This is the domain of worthless information. At the trivial level, this is comprised of meaningless or unordered information: insignificant, inane, or nonsensical information. In the amplified harmful form, information can be false (inadvertently), deliberately falsified, or evil, and can have negative effects. The fourth quadrant indicates that such information exists, while the third quadrant depicts information that is not yet available or accessible (e.g., trash literature which is unpublished). According to certain statistics an American youth at the end of his school career attended 11,000 school periods, watched TV for 22,000 hours, during which he heard 350,000 promotional slogans, and saw 20,000 murders. That has to have injurious effects. It is, in human terms, necessary to avoid the fourth quadrant, and, in technical terms, security measures must be taken to prevent damage (e.g., error-detecting codes in data processing systems, and control procedures for preventing instability in manufacturing processes).

Chapter 10

Some Quantitative Evaluations of Semantics

We can now begin to evaluate semantic information quantitatively, after having considered the essentials at the semantics level in the preceding chapters. Let us take the semantic value S to represent a quantitative evaluation of the quality of the information. Then six quantities can be used, namely semantic quality q, relevance r, timeliness a, accessibility z, existence e, and comprehensibility v. It is obvious from these concepts that we are considering the information from the point of view of the recipient and his subjective appraisal. These quantities are normalized on a scale from 0 to 1, and they are all positive, except for q which can also take on negative values, as should be clear from the previous chapter. These six variables are now discussed briefly.

1. Semantic quality q
(a subjective concept, mainly concerns the recipient): This is used as a measure of the importance of the meaning of some information. Different qualities can be considered according to the goal and the kind of information. Some significant aspects of creative information in particular are depicted in Figure 22 (page 109). For a computer program, for example, the following criteria are relevant and crucial on the semantic level and in part at the pragmatic level:

– Efficacy of the applied algorithm (e.g., simple method of solution, speed of convergence, and absence of instability).

– Minimal computing time (this can be a decisive cost factor when time has to be paid for).

– Portability, meaning that the program can also run on other computer systems.

– Reliability, meaning that the program has been tested comprehensively and is fully debugged so that the desired results will be obtained with a high degree of certainty.

– The programming language used.

The weight of each aspect depends on both objective and subjective evaluations. For inane or nonsensical information q is taken as zero, while for the best possible information q = 1.

2. Relevance r
(subjective concept, mainly concerns the recipient): This aspect reflects individual interests in particular and it includes its relevance for achieving some purpose (e.g., an economical, a technical, or a strategic goal, collector’s value, or life purpose). If r = 1 for person A, the same information can be totally irrelevant for B (r = 0). The weather forecasts for Australia are normally of no importance for somebody in Europe (r = 0), but their relevance can increase dramatically when that person is planning to go there. For a farmer, the agricultural news has a relevance completely different from the latest research results in physics. It is obvious that relevance depends entirely on the recipient. A gale and storm tide warning over the radio is highly relevant for inhabitants of a coastal island, while continental residents who live inland are not concerned. The main problem of relevance is to estimate it correctly. If relevance has been appraised erroneously, it might have catastrophic effects. There are innumerable cases in human history where wrong decisions were made on the grounds of a faulty appraisal of the relevance of information. The cost was astronomical in terms of lives and property.