Shadowing Practice: 1 7 What is Information - Learn English Speaking with Video

Sometimes it's useful to look at the roots of a word to figure out what it might mean.

For example, the words will and volition both descend from the root to want in Indo-European languages.

In many such languages you can still hear this meaning.

In German I want is ich will, whereas in Italian it's volio.

You can also hear the same root in our word voluntary, done of one's own free will because one wants to.

We can also do this for the word information, which is related to the verb to inform.

This descends directly from the roots in and formare in Latin,

implying the formation of something new in the mind of the person who's being informed.

It refers to teaching or instructing someone something new that they did not know before.

In ordinary language, information is commonly thought of as a noun describing a thing

that we can locate out there in the world whether a book in a library or a web page on a server.

But a pattern of energy, whether a book or a web page or a compact disc,

is only informative for an interpreter or decoder capable of decoding it.

Change the system of interpretation from English to Mandarin

and the pattern w-o-m-e-n goes from referring to female adults

or women in English to meaning we or us in Chinese which is pronounced woman.

Similarly

if you read the word B-A-D assuming it to be an

English word it means something very different from what a German would read bat to be

because in German that word would be decoded to mean bath.

So the informational content is not specified by pattern of input, but by how it is read out or interpreted.

The meaning bad or bath is not inherent to the word BAD, but depends on how it is interpreted.

Things like books and web pages

and CDs should all be thought of as potential information whose potential to become information depends on whether

and how they're decoded by decoders or interpreters that can take them as input to be decoded or interpreted.

Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, did not think of information as a thing but as a process of informing.

He simplified the idea to include a sender that sends an encoding

or message along some communication channel to a receiver who decodes it like a speaker and listener in a phone conversation.

If uncertainty is reduced from two possibilities, say zero or one, to one certainty,

say one, say the answer is yes when we were not sure if the answer would be yes or no,

that reduction in uncertainty from two possible outcomes to one actual outcome comprises one bit of information.

So information is a process

that involves a reduction in uncertainty for a receiver of inputs who gets informed by that increase in knowing.

But Shannon's conception does not capture everything about information.

For example, it misses out on meaning almost entirely.

If the question I asked was, will you marry me, and the answer came back yes, I would be overjoyed, and if it came back no, I might be devastated.

But if the question had been, do you like dogs, I might not actually care that much if the answer came back yes or no.

meaning is central to what we live for.

We don't want to hear yes when we ask someone to marry us because we just want a reduction in uncertainty.

We want to hear yes because we want to be loved by the person we love

and we want to spend the rest of our life together with them.

Another thing

that Shannon's possibility reduction conception of information seems to miss out on is its emphasis on acts of encoding and decoding.

But we don't only decode or interpret encoded messages.

Not everything is like a sentence that we decode.

Some acts of interpretation happen in the absence of any act of encoding or sending at all.

For example, a person can interpret a pile of rocks

that just happened to lie in the shape of some religious symbol as a message from God.

The pile of rocks might have been left there randomly by a glacier thousands of years ago just by chance, so lacks any objective message, intent, or meaning, but seeing

that symbol in the pile of rocks might be very meaningful to the person who saw it as a message from God.

So an encoder, or act of intentional encoding, is not necessary for information to come into existence through an act of decoding or interpretation.

In our example, the person finds the random pile of rocks meaningful, so for him, it carries or conveys meaningful information, in this case for him,

a message to him from God.

Nor is a communication channel necessary

because a receiver might decode internally generated hallucinations as a message from God or as ghosts or whatever.

The crucial point is that information arises principally from acts of decoding inputs

or interpreting signs or detecting patterns and energy that are received.

No active encoding or sending is required.

Note that information is fundamentally an epistemological construct.

It's a change in the state of the knowledge of someone

who comes to know something new who is informed by that information.

The single best definition of information that I have ever heard was proposed by the biologist Gregory Bateson.

He said, information is a difference that makes a difference.

It's a detected difference that's meaningful to an animal given its needs and goals and desires.

This definition of information is perhaps less mathematically precise than Shannon's, but it captures the centrality of meaning in the life and mind of an animal.

It's not really so much about the reduction of possibilities to one's certainty that makes information biologically meaningful.

There can be a huge reduction of possibility that's of no consequence, depending on what an animal is trying to do.

If it's looking for food, it might not matter very much that the sky has just gone from cloudy to sunny.

What matters is finding food.

In comparison to a change in the whole sky, the appearance of a tiny little fly,

say for a frog, might be more meaningful in terms of fulfilling its needs for food.

Conversely, a tiny detected difference can have enormous implications depending on the context.

For example, a detective might find a tiny piece of hair and on the basis of that, solve the case and identify the perpetrator.

So for purposes of this course, we'll think of information not as a thing, but as a process of informing where some difference is detected by a detector,

such as a neuron, and if it is a difference that makes a difference,

that detector will cause other events to happen in a cascade of such acts of informing.

Thank you.

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