Hi everyone,
The topic of Quality vs. Information is a great topic. But whatever
happened to Peter Lennox? I seem to remember that this was something he
liked to talk about. To equate the bits and bytes of information with
physical states of matter is right on the mark, be it quantum states of
molecules or genetic sequences. I'm sure that I've brought up before how the
equations of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics and information theory
are all closely related (I may have put it in my "End of Causality" essay on
the MoQ web site).
What I now want to point out is that information in the bits-bytes sense is
not the same as quality. In his seminal work on the theory of communications
transmission, Claude Shannon was very careful to talk only about the
bits-bytes aspect, i.e. the issue of seperating out wanted bits (signal)
from "random" unwanted bits (noise). He (to his credit) completely avoided
addressing the issue of semantic content of the signal; while the bits and
bytes are valid objects for rigorous "objective" scientific study, the
meaning contained is not-at-all objective. I can now state with some pride
that my own first contribution to the Lila Squad contained the suggestion
that meaning was synonymous with quality. (For those interested, look back
at my very first post from May 1998 -
http://www.moq.org/old_lilasquad/9805/0017.html - I should also point out
that Fintan Dunn subsequently borrowed, and somewhat perverted the idea in
his "Metaphysics of Meaning")
It is very important to differentiate between information and meaning.
Information is something that accumulates, filling databanks, libraries and
our mortal minds. If information is quality, then my telephone directory
should be one of the highest quality items in existance - more so a whole
library of directories. I can't accept this - there is no wisdom to be
gained by learning the telephone book. On the other hand, "meaning" can
often distill away huge amounts of information. Over centuries and millenia,
Man accumulated information about the movements of stars and planets in the
sky. Ptolemy did away with the need to learn this accumulated information by
reducing them to a small number of complicated mathematical rules - even
though his scheme couldn't quite explain everything. Copernicus took it
still further, reducing the number and complexity of the rules. After
Newton, all can be explained by the laws of gravitation and motion. Thus the
wisdom of Copernicus and Newton distills all those bits and bytes recorded
by astronomers since ancient times.
I now look back over this wordy posting and see that I am no Newton. If I
have to put it briefly, the path to quality is not just to accumulate
information but to understand its meaning.
Happy 2002 to everyone, and I'm still glad to be a part of this forum.
Jonathan
P.S. to Roger and Horse. I suggest that a "digest" summarizing the
"Overdoing the Dynamic" be posted in a new section of the web site. Maybe
Horse can start a mailing list to send out the digest, or even just an
announcement of where it is posted.
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