Is all information encoded?

[Suggestologist]

But this is just a quibble about whether "data" is "information" or some such thing. There is clearly data in the light from the TV, because we can stick a measuring device in front of the couch and there it is. Let's use the word data instead. Is the data in my table encoded?

That depends on what you think the data of your table being RAW (as opposed to encoded) would mean.

 

[BillHoyt]

I don't see matter-energy as information until it interacts with something that can turn it into symbols (or feelings) that can be used to model, predict, and influence the future. Does your television send information to your couch? I don't think so.

Here we go again with the "tree falls in the forest" question...

Unfortunately for the couch in this example, the instantaneous introduction of a human on the couch would imply the information moved from the TV in zero time, in violation of science and common sense. So this couch-potato POV simply minces onions and makes all realists cry.

Sorry to sound a bit Ianesque here, but... Anything that is not the thing itself is a model of that thing. It is a mapping of reality into some other space. It is, therefore, an encoding. The sense of "encoding" that Paul used in the OP, though, is different. "Plain-text" information is considered "non-encoded" in this sense, but clearly this simply means not as abstractly encoded as it would be had it been encrypted before transmission.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I don't think the word code has to mean that there was a raw form of information that was then encoded. I think we can agree that DNA is encoded, but there was no raw form of the information therein.

Well, hold on, yes there was. There was information in the environment that, due to selection pressure, found its way into the genome of those species that survived. DNA is an encoding of the response to environmental pressures.

So let's say the table itself is the raw information, and the light reflecting off it is an encoding, in photons, of that raw information. Does that work?


~~ Paul

 

[Soapy Sam]

Is sound caused by a tree falling, or by a sensory system?

The sound of a falling tree is scarcely encoded in the tree, or in the fall. If coded anywhere, it is surely in the ear?

There are physical principles and there is matter. Particles interact by exchanging other particles. Is "information " required in this scenario?

Does a rock require information about local spacetime curvature in order to know which way to fall? I think not.

Does a scientist need it in order to model the rock's fall?
Yes.


Information is in the eye of the beholder. And it is structured.
Uncoded information is noise.

Edited because "Sound" and " noise" are not synonymous in this context.

 

[BillHoyt]

Is sound caused by a tree falling, or by a sensory system?[/i]

This is where the scientist needs to step in and say that the sensory system transduces the sound. The sound is caused by air waves, which, in turn, are caused by the tree falling to the ground.

The sound of a falling tree is scarcely encoded in the tree, or in the fall. If coded anywhere, it is surely in the ear?

I agree that the encoding occurs hear. (pun intended) That's what I mean by "transduces" in the above paragraph.

There are physical principles and there is matter. Particles interact by exchanging other particles. Is "information " required in this scenario?

Now you're playing in the territory on which I was broaching with my last post. The "information" isn't bourne of whole cloth. It must inhere in the physical exchange. If not, then we have the instantaneously appearing couch potato problem I created. Suddenly we're requiring that physical principles be violated.

 

[Soapy Sam]

Or "information" is just a human concept, like beauty, which either was there all the time, or only sprang into existence in my nervous system when I gazed upon the object of my admiration.

Language is a tool. When we let it grow blunt, it stops cutting.

 

[BillHoyt]

Or "information" is just a human concept, like beauty, which either was there all the time, or only sprang into existence in my nervous system when I gazed upon the object of my admiration.

Language is a tool. When we let it grow blunt, it stops cutting.

While language may be one of our human tools, and "information" a human concept, we can't be so arrogant as to think it loses its existence without us. (clarification: I'm not suggesting, BTW, that you're being personally arrogant. I'm talking about us as a species.) Evolution's repertoire of sensory solutions is clear evidence that there is something out there to be gleaned by all lifeforms. Simple chemotaxis, thermotaxis, aerotaxis and phototaxis strongly suggest information is a real existent and not simply a human construct.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Soapy said:
The sound of a falling tree is scarcely encoded in the tree, or in the fall. If coded anywhere, it is surely in the ear?

No, the information has to be in the sound, or I would just be making up everything I hear.

There are physical principles and there is matter. Particles interact by exchanging other particles. Is "information " required in this scenario?

I'm not sure how to think about this.

Does a rock require information about local spacetime curvature in order to know which way to fall? I think not.

Matter is composed of atoms. There is a periodic chart that illustrates the information contained in the electron shells of each element. At least, I think we'd agree that there is information in the electron configurations, no? In fact, it looks an awful lot like a code: Carbon = 1s^2 2s^2 2p^2

~~ Paul

 

[Soapy Sam]

Bill, Don't worry- I don't for a moment think the universe vanishes if I take my eye off it. You are confusing reality with my bank balance.

I just wonder about this "information" thing. I think it does vanish when I forget about it. (More frequently with each passing year.)


The tree falls. Air moves. Molecules compress / separate. Does the tree make a sound? No. The sound is made in my head. Nothing about the tree went "thud". No information inherent in the tree or the process of it's fall contained the data "Thud", coded or otherwise.

The way Paul uses "information" in the OP concerns me a bit.
I don't believe there is any information in a table: I believe there is a table. If my sensory system is sufficiently screwed up, I may take it for a dog. But it can't chase rabbits.

The information defining the object is not in the object.
Information is in the eye of the beholder.

If it was inherent in the object, rather than the person, any person glancing at the tree as it fell would know it's species, age, weight and sex at a glance. Yet I find that I do not have that information, while my friend the thirteen year old botany freak does, because she knows about trees. She looks at the tree, compares it with her mental model of trees and reaches conclusions. What has changed is neurochemistry.

There seems no limit to the number of times a tree may be identified- yet if the information was inherent in the tree, surely it would eventually become exhausted?

On the other hand, one can identify a new object only once. After that, you already know what it is.

Does information (the tree's species) increase, or not when my friend tells me what it is? What when she tells her mother, who never even saw the tree? Has more information been extracted from the tree now that three people have it?

If I lift a rock, to throw in the river, I need to know its size, shape and weight. I do not need to know it's a 340 million year old dolerite. (Though there's a fair chance that I would). If I put it in a box and mailed it to America, it would become a diabase. Where, in the rock, was that information encoded?

No. Information is a human construct, like phlogiston. If it's useful, use it, but let's not confuse reality with the model. There is no information coded in reality. It doesn't need it. It's the real thing.


Paul- I think we are talking at cross purposes to some extent. The waveform which hits the ear takes its form from the shape , velocity etc of the tree as it falls- and of course air humidity, temperature etc. That waveform (air pulse, whatever we call it) impinges on my ear, causing bits to waggle. But none of the measurable data in all this fall in any way codes for what I hear. No way could anyone have predicted , before that tree fell, what sound I would hear. It's contingency. Pure chance.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Soapy said:
If it was inherent in the object, rather than the person, any person glancing at the tree as it fell would know it's species, age, weight and sex at a glance. Yet I find that I do not have that information, while my friend the thirteen year old botany freak does, because she knows about trees. She looks at the tree, compares it with her mental model of trees and reaches conclusions. What has changed is neurochemistry.

There is nothing about the presence of information that dictates that a receiver has to interpret all of it correctly. If there was, Claude Shannon would have been out of a job from the get-go.

There seems no limit to the number of times a tree may be identified- yet if the information was inherent in the tree, surely it would eventually become exhausted?

I think it is recoded and retransmitted every time light strikes it (or whatever carrier interacts with it).

Does information (the tree's species) increase, or not when my friend tells me what it is? What when she tells her mother, who never even saw the tree? Has more information been extracted from the tree now that three people have it?

The tree's species is not one of the items of information "in the tree." That is derived by humans from more basic information.

Paul- I think we are talking at cross purposes to some extent. The waveform which hits the ear takes its form from the shape , velocity etc of the tree as it falls- and of course air humidity, temperature etc. That waveform (air pulse, whatever we call it) impinges on my ear, causing bits to waggle. But none of the measurable data in all this fall in any way codes for what I hear. No way could anyone have predicted , before that tree fell, what sound I would hear. It's contingency. Pure chance.

I agree it does not code for how you hear the tree fall. But it does code for more concrete information, such as the velocity of the tree falling. How you hear the tree fall is a subjective interpretation of the concrete information. But you still received information from the tree.

This is fun, isn't it?

~~ Paul

 

[BillHoyt]

Bill, Don't worry- I don't for a moment think the universe vanishes if I take my eye off it. You are confusing reality with my bank balance.

I just wonder about this "information" thing. I think it does vanish when I forget about it. (More frequently with each passing year.)


The tree falls. Air moves. Molecules compress / separate. Does the tree make a sound? No. The sound is made in my head. Nothing about the tree went "thud". No information inherent in the tree or the process of it's fall contained the data "Thud", coded or otherwise.

The way Paul uses "information" in the OP concerns me a bit.
I don't believe there is any information in a table: I believe there is a table. If my sensory system is sufficiently screwed up, I may take it for a dog. But it can't chase rabbits.

The information defining the object is not in the object.
Information is in the eye of the beholder.

If it was inherent in the object, rather than the person, any person glancing at the tree as it fell would know it's species, age, weight and sex at a glance. Yet I find that I do not have that information, while my friend the thirteen year old botany freak does, because she knows about trees. She looks at the tree, compares it with her mental model of trees and reaches conclusions. What has changed is neurochemistry.

There seems no limit to the number of times a tree may be identified- yet if the information was inherent in the tree, surely it would eventually become exhausted?

On the other hand, one can identify a new object only once. After that, you already know what it is.

Does information (the tree's species) increase, or not when my friend tells me what it is? What when she tells her mother, who never even saw the tree? Has more information been extracted from the tree now that three people have it?

If I lift a rock, to throw in the river, I need to know its size, shape and weight. I do not need to know it's a 340 million year old dolerite. (Though there's a fair chance that I would). If I put it in a box and mailed it to America, it would become a diabase. Where, in the rock, was that information encoded?

No. Information is a human construct, like phlogiston. If it's useful, use it, but let's not confuse reality with the model. There is no information coded in reality. It doesn't need it. It's the real thing.


Paul- I think we are talking at cross purposes to some extent. The waveform which hits the ear takes its form from the shape , velocity etc of the tree as it falls- and of course air humidity, temperature etc. That waveform (air pulse, whatever we call it) impinges on my ear, causing bits to waggle. But none of the measurable data in all this fall in any way codes for what I hear. No way could anyone have predicted , before that tree fell, what sound I would hear. It's contingency. Pure chance.

Soapy,

I'd urge us all to not confuse senescence with sensation.

If you're trying to tease apart data from information, I agree with you in part. But some of your other points seem to relate more to layers of inference or layers of interpretation. The underlying reality, however, does not go away.

Your point about the tree seems to be confusing a few things also. Why isn't the tree exhausted from being repeatedly identified? The tree hasn't much to do except be there, in the path of sunlight. Its molecules must absorb some and deflect other photons. Its molecules must also give up their volatile chemicals so that we and humming birds and insects and cinnamon black bears all know where it is.

(In point of fact, though, it is neither the exact same tree nor in the exact same location at any two points in time. It is constantly recreating parts of itself while standing on a planet hurdling itself through spacetime. But that's getting really picayune...)

The insect smells the scent of flowers and turns toward that tree. It flies to find the scent's source As it arrives, the scent grows in strength. Finally, the insect gets close enough so that it spots the flowers and uses its (far greater than our) vision to spot the landing strip the tree has painted on each flower to guide that insect toward the pollen or nectar it is after. As it leaves that flower, the geometry of the flower ensures more pollen is painted on the insect's back so that when it is guided toward the next flower, it transfers the pollen to its stamen. That, in turn, ensures that the tree's hidden DNA information is recombined in a slightly new way, giving future generations of such trees the flexibility to change with an ever-changing environment.

Alas, the insect has also picked up a tree virus on its sojourn. And that virus, nothing more than a simple protein sack filled with RNA, sets "foot" on the flower petal. It changes the shape of its protein sack so that it penetrates one of the petal's cell membranes, and injects the RNA into that cell. That hijacked cell then spends its time knitting together more copies of both that RNA and the protein sacks. These self-assemble and the virus copies go onto infect other tree cells until, a year later, the tree has met its demise. One of its progeny, however, far tougher than its parent, because the insect helped the tree combine different pollen DNA with different egg DNA, survives the virus and goes onto reforest the area with trees immune to future virus invasions.

Now, please tell me again, humans created the notion of information and that it disappears from the universe just because we get alzheimers.

 

[Soapy Sam]

Yep.

I want to know how Bill gets the couch potato to appear instantaneously without violating the physical laws he wants to conserve.

In addition, I'm resistant to the idea that TVs broadcast information at all (Place tongue-in-cheek smiley here).


Does'nt the existence of pattern actually reduce the amount of information (Shannon) required to describe the universe?

The word "information" does have different meanings and I think the last few posts exemplify that.

When you said this- " don't mean to suggest that objects contain information in any physical sense. However, I do not understand how my senses can derive information from the light reflected off the table if the light doesn't transmit information about the table to begin with. This is like saying there is no information in the electromagnetic energy that my car radio just picked up, isn't it?"
If the information is not present in any physical sense, how do you think it is encoded?

I just don't think the information exists. I don't think we need it. And God is a Scotsman , and therefore parsimonious.

I think you identify a table because it has properties which you recognise as tabloid.
Now you could respond that the properties must be identified by the characteristic information which lets you identify them and which flows to you from the table. But now we are more clearly talking about photon exchange. Patterned energy. The structure of the table caused photons to reflect in patterns. Those patterns you put together into a larger pattern which mapped onto the stored model of a table- not precisely, but close enough.

So we go from physical shape (a result of the history of the object and the laws of physics), to a patterned photon reflection to a tentative identification.

So yes, the incident photons interact with your optics to create neural change. The shape of the table caused the shape of the photon pattern.
Where was the information all this time?

If the tree fell with nobody there, air molecules moved out in patterns and randomised their energy as heat in the environs. Where was the information before, during and after?

What does the concept of "information" add to, or clarify in, these descriptions?

You recognise that this is not what Shannon means by information. I have no quibble with a method of optimising signal to noise ratio in signal transmission. I just don't think a rock needs to transmit information about its petrology. electromagnetism and gravity will do that by themselves, as the smoke flies upward.

(ABOVE bit is response to Paul)
ETA-WAH! I checked this thread for an hour and you didn't post, now I start running a bath, all heck breaks loose.!
(Next bit is response to Bill)

I agree with all you say in the above post. I just think it's all adequately explained by energy transfer without any need for the notion of information, which is , yes, absolutely a human concept which vanishes when we look away. That the universe just sits there like the inertial monster it is, we do not in any way dispute.

Like I said to Paul, I have no problem with the fact that it may take us x gazillion bits to describe a lump of rock, even if we have the bestt possible algorithm for doing so .
My point is that NONE of that information is either required by, or inherent in the rock. It exists and so needs no description.

You 're cheating with the DNA thing Bill. That is stored , coded information. We already agreed that. It's a signal just like the TV broadcast, encoded and able to do it's thing if put in the correct machinery , otherwise, it's as information free as any rock.

On the side subject of scent, I once asked a perfumier how he would describe a scent on the phone. He had no idea.

 

[Suggestologist]

I don't think the word code has to mean that there was a raw form of information that was then encoded. I think we can agree that DNA is encoded, but there was no raw form of the information therein.

Well, hold on, yes there was. There was information in the environment that, due to selection pressure, found its way into the genome of those species that survived. DNA is an encoding of the response to environmental pressures.

So let's say the table itself is the raw information, and the light reflecting off it is an encoding, in photons, of that raw information. Does that work?


~~ Paul

Does it matter if we are the one's shining the light (thereby being the encoders) or whether natural lighting is the cause?

Here is my narrative which should explain my frame (of reference) for "information": Information is a nominalization of a process, the verb form is "to inform".

A informs B about C with (medium) D.

A is the coder, B is the decoder (their codecs overlap, enough to communicate at some level); C is encoded symbolically in D. In other words, D is a representation of C. In order for information to actually be tranmitted, there has to be a B capable of decoding the representation, a couch is not such a B in the context of a TV showing a movie, but a person is such a B (B_decoder). So this is my position: unless you are a cyborg (not necessarily of THE Borg), you cannot pick up the satellite TV signals that impinge upon your body, therefore you are not a B_decoder when it comes to satellite TV signals. But your satellite dish and receiver are a B_decoder in this context. Does this mean that if all satellite receivers were destroyed (chip malfunction or something), there would be no satellite signals?

When it comes to natural matter-energy interactions, there is no intent to encode, the decode is not made due to a pre-existing codec, but to trial-and-error experiential and associative learning. To say that something is a "table" transmits information only to someone whose codec overlaps with yours about what a certain sound (or letter) sequence represents.

 

[69dodge]

Originally posted by Soapy Sam
Information is in the eye of the beholder.

Yes. Because probability is.

(Here's Shannon's paper, for those who are interested.)

 

[JAK]

...
The tree falls. Air moves. Molecules compress / separate. Does the tree make a sound? No. The sound is made in my head. Nothing about the tree went "thud". No information inherent in the tree or the process of it's fall contained the data "Thud", coded or otherwise.
...

I think this takes us close to a discussion of qualia. Regardless of the interpretation of qualia, I believe that all forms of it denote "encoding."

...
Information is a human construct, like phlogiston. If it's useful, use it, but let's not confuse reality with the model. There is no information coded in reality. It doesn't need it. It's the real thing.
...

Usefulness is probably the key point. If language is anything, it is a tool for communication. And the key components of what we communicate are our relationships to the objects and the processes surrounding them. (What good is a sentence without a verb?) Chimpanzees, taught to sign words, created "water bird" to refer to ducks and "fruit drink" to refer to watermelon. A number of native american tribes refer to the horse as "god dog," "medicine dog," or "big dog," because prior to its arrival (post eohippus), the native americans used dogs to pack belongings and equipment. Horses were used similarly and were described in those terms. (One tribe apparently referred to a horse as "seven dog" because it was roughly equivalent to 7 dogs in terms of "packing" ability.

...
Information is in the eye of the beholder.
...

May I suggest that information is the filtered perception of the beholder. Why filtered? Visually, we only see a reflection of light waves. If a rose is red, it is due to the other colors being absorbed and only red being reflected. However, other frequencies of radiation may not be perceived by us at all (for instance, infra-red and ultraviolet - the latter can be perceived by some insects). In other words, we only "see" a limited amount of electromagnetic radiation.

Other senses are also selective. The magical ability of elephants to "telecommunicate" was determined in the last decade to be due to low frequency sounds which are outside of our hearing range. Similarly, dogs hear high frequency sounds outside of our range. So, our senses selectively recognize aspects of our environment.

To compound this, light is flipped upside-down as it passes through the lens of the eyes. Somewhere/somehow, the upside-down pattern is flipped again in our minds to give us the correct perspective of the objects about us.

Further, some believe that filtering continues between what is perceived and what the mind "projects" into consciousness. This prevents "information overload." Part of this filtering is referred to as "figure and ground" (gestalt psychology) or the "spotlight of consciousness" (Francis Crick & Bernard Baars).

Finally, a well-known factor of consciousness is called "habituation." This is why we become oblivious to the feeling of our shirts on our backs, shoes on our feet, and other repetitive stimuli. Again, if we were to be continuously aware of these, it would be "information overload." Our minds filter information (stimuli) not pertinent to our focus or priority (figure - not ground).

I believe the evidence strongly suggests that what is in our minds is a digitized representation of the stimuli of our external environment in contact with our sensors and filtered by our brains. What ever we perceive (thud, red, words, taste, smell, etc), it is only a digitized construct - an encoding - which is deemed useful to us (either by choice or through the "trial by fire" of natural selection) in our quest for survival.

 

[BillHoyt]

Yep.

I want to know how Bill gets the couch potato to appear instantaneously without violating the physical laws he wants to conserve.

Soapy,

It is a gedanken experiment. The claim is that the room with couch and TV has no information from the TV. The instantaneous introduction, however, suddenly appears to create information flow from the TV to the couch potato. This makes the claim contradict physics.

 

[Soapy Sam]

Soapy,

It is a gedanken experiment. The claim is that the room with couch and TV has no information from the TV. The instantaneous introduction, however, suddenly appears to create information flow from the TV to the couch potato. This makes the claim contradict physics.

Yes, I see. I would still maintain that an experiment which can't be done has limited proving power, though.

But my view is that the information is not travelling from the TV, so there is no superluminal problem.

What is broadcast from the TV is patterned energy- neither of us will quibble over that. Nor do either of us believe the observer is necessary for this to happen.
(We can collapse the wave function merely by checking the power bill, three months later).

Where we differ, I think , is that you consider it to be information.
If we accept Shannon's view of information as our sole definition, then yes, there is a measurable broadcast of information as well as a broadcast of patterned energy. But they are not the same thing. That information could be broadcast by banging two sticks in a patterned fashion, or sending smoke signals. It is information describing the signal. It is not the programme.

This is not the definition that I think most people mean to use when they talk about "information". Nor is it what Paul seems to be using when he talks about the table communicating information to his eye. Most people mean "meaningful, comprehensible data", or something similar- in this case the TV show-the programme. (Or, if the TV is off, the appearance of the TV itself.)

My argument is that nothing of that sort is broadcast by the TV. That sort of information is created inside the head of the observer and quite literally does not exist until he has created it, in response to the transmitted energy.
For that to occur, the observer is necessary.

However, since that information does not travel at all there is no problem with instantaneous transmission.
That the energy moves at light speed from the TV is never in question. That the energy is patterned is not in question. That the energy moives irrespective of any observer is not in question.
All I question is whether the information that occurs in the head of the observer ever existed in any meaningful sense in the tv set.
ETA- Indeed , the thought experiment with the instant couch potato might be seen as supporting this view.

 

[JAK]

...
That the energy moves at light speed from the TV is never in question. That the energy is patterned is not in question. That the energy moives irrespective of any observer is not in question.
All I question is whether the information that occurs in the head of the observer ever existed in any meaningful sense in the tv set.

I believe you answered your own question. TV transmissions are just energy patterns, as you pointed out. In fact, with CRTs, they are just line streams (as Farnsworth innovated in the 1920s). These streams build at least 24 full screens per second. (Original film researchers found that we deduce motion as low as 17 frames per second, but 24 fps became the standard.)

Thus, what is transmitted by the TV is a jumble of streaming bits of energy. Our minds absorb the bit stream into a patterned field whereupon we conjure an image of Mickey Mouse. This is clearly a mental construct whereby a bit stream was manipulated to affect the mind.

If this does not answer your question, then please define "meaningful sense."

 

[Soapy Sam]

I think that's a fair assessment, JAK. With a communication like a TV picture the whole situation is getting complex. The programme is clearly an artifact, as is the TV itself and the visual output from the TV. As with DNA, there clearly is coded information involved at every level. But what if the TV is turned off? There is still a visual image, but one which was never intentionally encoded by anyone except the viewer. I can't help seeing these two cases as very different.

This is a complex idea to communicate. (There's irony for you.) I'm not really saying anything about how the universe IS, but pointing out that one of our models of how things are is perhaps being pushed beyond its area of validity.

I don't think viewing patterned energy - whether patterned by DNA into the shape of a flower, by chance into the shape of a rock, or by design into a TV broadcast, as "information" is always a useful mental model. I'm uncertain that the information is there a priori. I think we create it in our minds.

I'd like to stress that this is not mystical "We create reality by observing it " nonsense. We model reality by observing it. We must never confuse the model with the real thing. How people get to that stance is beyond me.

Paul opened the thread with the words "information abounds in nature". I disagree. I think nature is just damn complex and we tend to use "information" as a metaphor for communicating that complexity. In signal analysis and noise reduction that model has great power to explain. I suggest that in other areas it has potential to confuse.

As always, I am aware that I may be the only person confused. This is possible, but I truly don't think so. And I have great experience of being confused.

 

[Suggestologist]

Where we differ, I think , is that you consider it to be information.
If we accept Shannon's view of information as our sole definition, then yes, there is a measurable broadcast of information as well as a broadcast of patterned energy.

Shannon is describing a "communication system", which implies a codec. See p.2 of the shannon1948 PDF linked to earlier in this thread.

For that to occur, the observer is necessary.

A receiver capable of decode is necessary.

All I question is whether the information that occurs in the head of the observer ever existed in any meaningful sense in the tv set.

I think you're confused about two layers of decode going on here. The TV decodes the signal into pixelated light. The person decodes the resulting light as a moving picture with assorted human meanings. The TV does receive information, because it is able to decode it, because it shares a codec with the sender.