21 August 2021

Out of Context: On Information (Definitions)

"Information is a set of marks that have meaning." (Edmund C Berkeley & Lawrence Wainwright, Computers: Their Operation and Applications", 1956)

"Information is carried by physical entities, such as books or sound waves or brains, but it is not itself material. Information in a living system is a feature of the order and arrangement of its parts, which arrangement provides the signs that constitute a ‘code’ or ‘language’." (John Z Young, "Programs of the Brain", 1978)

"Information is recorded in vast interconnecting networks. Each idea or image has hundreds, perhaps thousands, of associations and is connected to numerous other points in the mental network." (Peter Russell, "The Brain Book: Know Your Own Mind and How to Use it", 1979)

"Neither noise nor information is predictable." (Ray Kurzweil, "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence", 1999)

"Most of the information is fuzzy and linguistic in form." (Timothy J Ross & W Jerry Parkinson, "Fuzzy Set Theory, Fuzzy Logic, and Fuzzy Systems", 2002)

"Information is assimilated to the slots of a mental model in the form of ‘frames’ which are understood here as ‘chunks’ of knowledge with a well-defined meaning anchored in a given body of shared knowledge." (Jürgen Renn, "Before the Riemann Tensor: The Emergence of Einstein’s Double Strategy", "The Universe of General Relativity" Ed. by A.J. Kox & Jean Eisenstaedt, 2005)

"One advantage of the use of fuzzy models is the fact that their complexity can be gradually increased as more information is gathered. This increase in complexity can be done automatically or manually by a careful commission of the new operating point." (Jairo Espinosa et al, "Fuzzy Logic, Identification and Predictive Control", 2005)

"In a physical system, information is the opposite of entropy, as it involves uncommon and highly correlated configurations that are difficult to arrive at." (César A Hidalgo, "Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies", 2015)

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