In the Beginning was Information

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– What meaning is contained in the information being formulated?– What information is implied in addition to the explicit information?– What means are employed for conveying the information(metaphors, idioms, or parables)?b) Concerning the recipient:– Does the recipient understand the information?– What background information is required for understandingthe transmitted information?– Is the message true or false?– Is the message meaningful?Theorem 13: Any piece of information has been transmitted bysomebody and is meant for somebody. A sender and a recipientare always involved whenever and wherever information is concerned.Comment: Many kinds of information are directed to one singlerecipient (like a letter) and others are aimed at very many recipients(e. g. a book, or newspaper). In exceptional cases the informationnever reaches the recipient (e. g. a letter lost in the mail).It is only at the semantic level that we really have meaningfulinformation, thus we may establish the following theorem:Theorem 14: Any entity, to be accepted as information, mustentail semantics; it must be meaningful.Semantics is an essential aspect of information, because the meaningis the only invariant property. The statistical and syntacticalproperties can be altered appreciably when information is representedin another language (e. g. translated into Chinese), but themeaning does not change.Meanings always represent mental concepts, therefore we have:70Theorem 15: When its progress along the chain of transmissionevents is traced backwards, every piece of information leads toa mental source, the mind of the sender.
Sequences of letters generated by various kinds of statisticalprocesses are shown in Figure 38 (Appendix A1.5). The programsused for this purpose, were partially able to reproduce some of thesyntactic properties of the language. But in the light of Theorems16 and 17 these sequences of letters do not represent information.The next theorem enables one to distinguish between informationand non-information:Theorem 16: If a chain of symbols comprises only a statisticalsequence of characters, it does not represent information.Information is essentially linked to a sender (a mental source ofinformation) according to Theorems 13 and 15. This result is independentof the fact whether the recipient understands the informationor not. When researchers studied Egyptian obelisks, the symbolswere seen as information long before they were deciphered,because it was obvious that they could not have resulted from randomprocesses. The meaning of the hieroglyphics could not beunderstood by any contemporaries (recipients) before the Rosettastone was found in 1799, but even so, it was regarded as information.The same holds for the gyrations of bees which were onlyunderstood by humans after being deciphered by Karl v. Frisch. Incontrast, the genetic code is still mostly unknown, except for thecode allocations between the triplets and the amino acids.All suitable ways of expressing meanings (mental substrates,thoughts, or nonmaterial contents of consciousness), are called languages.Information can be transmitted or stored in material mediaonly when a language is available. The information itself is totallyinvariant, both as regards the transmission system (acoustic, optical,or electrical) as well as the system of storage (brain, book, dataprocessing system, or magnetic tape). This invariance is the resultof its nonmaterial nature. There are different kinds of languages:1. Natural languages used for communication: at present there areapproximately 5,100 living languages on earth.2. Artificial communication languages and languages used for signalling:Esperanto, deaf-mute languages, flag codes, and trafficsigns.71
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Werner GittIn the Beginningwas Info
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ContentsPreface ...................
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A2.1.2 Complexity and Peculiarities
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PrefaceTheme of the book: The topic
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Acknowledgements and thanks: After
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Figure 1: The web of a Cyrtophora s
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3. The Morpho rhetenor butterfly: T
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few days later another wonderful ev
Page 19 and 20: 5. The organ playing robot: Would i
Page 21 and 22: PART 1: Laws of Nature
Page 23 and 24: aspects are not covered. Models are
Page 25 and 26: 2.2 The Limits of Science and the P
Page 27 and 28: numerous mathematical theorems (exc
Page 29 and 30: mulated on earth, were also valid o
Page 31 and 32: F = G x m 1 x m 2 / r 2The force F
Page 33 and 34: The nine above-mentioned general bu
Page 35 and 36: R2: The laws of nature enable us to
Page 37 and 38: Conservation theorems: The followin
Page 39 and 40: Figure 6: Geometrically impossible
Page 41 and 42: ical bond. The half-life T is given
Page 43 and 44: PART 2: Information
Page 45 and 46: Since the concept of information is
Page 47 and 48: tents and because of the encoding p
Page 49 and 50: chemical quantities can be steered,
Page 51 and 52: and there are 468 Greek words. This
Page 53 and 54: Figure 10: The Rosetta stone.53
Page 55 and 56: As explained fully in Appendix A1,
Page 57 and 58: Theorem 5: Shannon’s definition o
Page 59 and 60: elementary sounds, but pictures are
Page 61 and 62: - Punched cards, mark sensing- Univ
Page 63 and 64: Get nymph; quiz sad brow; fix luck
Page 65 and 66: Theorem 7: The allocation of meanin
Page 67 and 68: Theorem 11: A code system is always
Page 69: Knowledge of the conventions applyi
Page 73 and 74: system must have been created by an
Page 75 and 76: We can distinguish two types of act
Page 77 and 78: a) Concerning the sender:- Has an u
Page 79 and 80: no purpose or intent; he represents
Page 81 and 82: We still have to describe a domain
Page 83 and 84: 5 Delineation of the Information Co
Page 85: Definition D5: The domain A of defi
Page 88 and 89: 6 Information in Living OrganismsTh
Page 90 and 91: code with four different letters is
Page 92 and 93: Figure 17: The way in which genetic
Page 94 and 95: 6.2 The Genetic CodeWe now discuss
Page 96 and 97: Figure 19: The theoretical possibil
Page 98 and 99: Figure 20: A simplified representat
Page 100 and 101: inevitable interactions ... The ori
Page 102 and 103: We now discuss some theoretical mod
Page 104 and 105: Genetic algorithms: The so-called
Page 106 and 107: “The final result of all my resea
Page 108 and 109: 7 The Three Forms in which Informat
Page 110 and 111: and methods of transfer (e. g. the
Page 112 and 113: 8 Three Kinds of Transmitted Inform
Page 114 and 115: languages, creating a programming l
Page 116 and 117: 9 The Quality and Usefulness ofInfo
Page 118 and 119: vertently), deliberately falsified,
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10 Some Quantitative Evaluationsof
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such diverse topics as technology,
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11 Questions Often Asked Aboutthe I
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Q10: Natural languages are changing
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A19: Biological systems are indeed
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continually shifts in order to avoi
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A23: If we are talking about true l
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The information concept was discuss
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The close link between information
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13 The Quality and Usefulness of Bi
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iguously instructed to “Let the w
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Figure 27: God as Sender, man as re
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way its understanding is also a spi
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dom prepared for you since the crea
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would be known about his Person and
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Missionary and native: After every
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the case, as shown in Figure 29; no
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and defects of the information sent
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- Man did not develop through a cha
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15 The Quantities Used for Evaluati
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him: “Today salvation has come to
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16 A Biblical Analogy of the FourFu
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with God (Ephesians 5:18-20). The p
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- energy is utilised, and- the cons
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God’s testing fire; only fruit in
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A1 The Statistical View of Informat
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Figure 31: Model of a discrete sour
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a) the factor n, which indicates th
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) Expectation value of the informat
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A1.2 Mathematical Description of St
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Figure 32: The number of letters L
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A1.2.2 The Information SpiralThe qu
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184
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186
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188
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Figure 34: The ant and the microchi
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a degree of integration of 11.72 mi
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194
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as expressing the highest possible
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H syll = 8.6 bits/syllable. (16)The
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Figure 36: Frequency distributions
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202
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the voluminous data requirements, c
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A2 Language: the Medium for Creatin
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The words of a language are linked
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(tongo), or from the same level (ba
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It should be clear from these examp
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A2.1.4 Written LanguagesThe inventi
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mation as discussed above, are foun
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“Speaking birds”: Parrots and b
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Figure 41: Speechless.(Sketched by
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we might realise. There are countle
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- The impossibility of a perpetual
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Figure 42: Three processes in close
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228
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Figure 44: Ripple marks on beach sa
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glucose is produced from 6 mol CO 2
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individual catalytic enzyme reactio
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nature: mechanical work is performe
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All human nutritional problems coul
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intricately constructed light proje
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p = 0.006/h) to produce propulsion
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leg they fly back to Canada over Ce
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south-east and fly right across the
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[E2] Eigen, M.: Stufen zum Leben- D
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[G15] Gitt, W.:[G16] Gitt, W.:[G17]
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Automatisierungstechnische Praxis 2
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H. 12, pp. 68-87[W2] Weibel, E. R.:
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Kemner, H. 146, 167Kessler, V. 11Ki
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