User:Sprocket J Cogswell/information

I've been thinking about this, but with my usual lack of diligence I've not gone looking for published scholarship by way of backup.

Cartographers call it "generalization" when they limit the amount of information conveyed in any given map. Orienteering maps show more detail than road maps, for example, because orienteers on foot like having information which a motorist might not care about, such as individual boulders, or little knolls or swales. Similarly, an Ordnance Survey map's portrayal of individual buildings and telephone booths is more interesting to a walker than an aviator. I once showed an orienteering map to an old artilleryman who was used to using topographic maps at 1:62500, or an inch to a mile. He said the 1:15000 map "was like having a chopper ride over the actual ground."

The point I'm trying to make with that is that information, like energy, is a convenient mathematical fiction more or less useful to human analysts. Just because we give something a name does not mean it actually "exists," but making the assumption that it does exist leads to all kinds of trouble. "Trouble," like "intelligence," is another one of those terms humans talk about, but which has no indication of having a separate existence.

As much as I mistrust arguments from etymology, it seems to me that information requires an entity which is informed. That entity does not need to be "intelligent." For example, an oven thermostat needs information about temperature to do its job.

So I'll come back to an "information as description" analogy. The particulars of any situation are not information, but describing them carries some value we call information. Value has no existence without an evaluator. Information theory has to do with quantifying information, which seems to amount to measuring the level of detail to which a situation is described.

For the moment, I do not see how information has any existence apart from the messages which carry it.