Feb
25
Information Theory
February 25, 2018 | Leave a Comment
Signal is what you want to hear and noise is the stuff that is not the signal. Sound is disaggregated from the natural world. We want to hear what we want to hear. I think this is a metaphor for how we think about life. Sound has meaning and the natural world has its own sound. We can’t find meaning in the natural world unless we have a need for it. The disaggregation of sound then is needed because it’s the only way for us to delineate what we want out of it. We encounter things every day but not everything we encounter has specific meaning.
Information and meaning are two different things which is a central part of Shannon’s argument. We have created a culture in which information is divorced from meaning. As a society, we encouraged and applauded inventions like the Macbook and the internet and IBM. We believed that this was the information we needed. But if you think about how these inventions were created, they were essentially just a series of binary codes and “u and qs”. These items, devoid of meaning, created meaning. So, is information divorced from meaning or have we not really just put the ideas together to create meaning from it? For instance, when you type a question into a search engine there are ways to make sure that your search entry is more defined. For example, using “and” and quotation marks can help your search information be conveyed in the way you want it. But ultimately, the uncertainty cannot be changed unless we stop perpetuating the cycle in which information is given.
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