— A Very Short Introduction Very Short Introductions
Select Quotes
Introduction
technical problems concerning the quantification of information and dealt with by Shannon’s theory; 2) semantic problems relating to meaning and truth; and 3) what he called ‘influential’ problems concerning the impact and effectiveness of information on human behaviour, which he thought had to play an equally important role. – Page 2
Chapter 1 The Information Revolution
No records, no history, so history is actually synonymous with the information age, since prehistory is that age in human development that precedes the availability of recording systems. – Page 3
During this span of time, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) evolved from being mainly recording systems–writing and manuscript production–to being also communication systems, especially after Gutenberg and the invention of printing–to being also processing and producing systems, especially after Turing and the diffusion of computers. – Page 4
Of these data, 92% were stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks, thus causing an unprecedented ‘democratization’ of information: more people own more data than ever before. – Page 6
So we are not immobile, at the centre of the universe (Copernican revolution), revolution), we are not unnaturally separate and diverse from the rest of the animal kingdom (Darwinian revolution), and we are very far from being standalone minds entirely transparent to ourselves, as Rene Descartes (1596–1650), for example, assumed (Freudian revolution). – Page 9
In many respects, we are not standalone entities, but rather interconnected informational organisms or inforgs, sharing with biological agents and engineered artefacts a global environment ultimately made of information, the infosphere. This is the informational environment constituted by all informational processes, services, and entities, thus including informational agents as well as their properties, interactions, and mutual relations. – Page 9
‘data shadow’ or digital alter ego, some Mr Hyde represented by their @s, blogs, and https. – Page 10
Human-Computer Interaction is a symmetric relation. – Page 11
This shift means that objects and processes are de-physicalized in the sense that they tend to be seen as support-independent (consider a music file). They are typified, in the sense that an instance of an object (my copy of a music file) is as good as its type (your music file of which my copy is an instance). – Page 12
Finally, the criterion for existence–what it means for something to exist–is no longer being actually immutable (the Greeks thought that only that which does not change can be said to exist fully), or being potentially subject to perception (modern philosophy insisted on something being perceivable empirically through the five senses in order to qualify as existing), but being potentially subject to interaction, even if intangible. – Page 12
Instead of individuals as unique and irreplaceable entities, we become mass-produced, anonymous entities among other anonymous entities, exposed to billions of other similar informational organisms online. – Page 15
We use and expose information about ourselves to become less informationally anonymous. – Page 15
The threshold between here (analogue, carbon-based, off-line) and there (digital, silicon-based, online) is fast becoming blurred, but this is as much to the advantage of the latter as it is of the former. The digital is spilling over into the analogue and merging with it. This recent phenomenon is variously known as ‘Ubiquitous Computing’, ‘Ambient Intelligence’, ‘The Internet of Things’, or Web-augmented things’. – Page 16
the infosphere is progressively absorbing any other space. – Page 16
The infosphere will not be a virtual environment supported by a genuinely ‘material’ world behind; rather, it will be the world itself that will be increasingly interpreted and understood informationally, as part of the infosphere. At the end of this shift, the infosphere will have moved from being a way to refer to the space of information to being synonymous with reality. This is the sort of informational metaphysics that we may find increasingly easy to embrace. – Page 17
As a consequence of such transformations in our ordinary environment, we shall be living in an infosphere that will become increasingly synchronized (time), delocalized (space), and correlated (interactions). – Page 17
Chapter 2 The Language Of Information
Syntax here must be understood broadly, not just linguistically, as what determines the form, construction, composition, or structuring of something. – Page 21
This clarifies why a datum is ultimately reducible to a lack of uniformity. Donald MacCrimmon MacKay (1922–1987) highlighted this important point when he wrote that ‘information is a distinction that makes a difference’. – Page 23
Depending on one’s interpretation, the dedomena in (1) may be either identical with, or what makes possible signals in (2), and signals in (2) are what make possible the coding of symbols in (3). – Page 24
The actual format, medium, and language in which data, and hence information, are encoded is often irrelevant and disregardable. – Page 25
They encode rather than just record information. – Page 25
And there are analogue computers. These perform calculations through the interaction of continuously varying physical phenomena, such as the shadow cast by the gnomon on the dial of a sundial, the approximately regular flow of sand in an hourglass or of water in a water clock, and the mathematically constant swing of a pendulum. – Page 26
First, bits can equally well be represented semantically (meaning True/ False), logico-mathematically (standing for 1/ 0), and physically (transistor = On/ Off; switch = Open/ Closed; electric circuit = High/ Low voltage; disc or tape = Magnetized/ Unmagnetized; CD = presence/ absence of pits, etc.), and hence provide the common ground where semantics, mathematical logic, and the physics and engineering of circuits and information theory can converge. – Page 28
Chapter 3 Mathematical Information
Information, as semantic content (more on this shortly), can also be described as data + queries. – Page 45
Subtract the ‘yes’–which is at most one bit of information–and you are left with all the semantic content, with all the indications of its truth or falsity removed. – Page 45
if there is no change of entropy then the process is reversible. – Page 47
Chapter 4 Semantic Information
But then logic and mathematics would be utterly uninformative. This counterintuitive conclusion is known as ‘the scandal of deduction’. – Page 55
A. there will or will not be some guests for dinner tonight; or B. there will be some guests tonight; or C. there will be three guests tonight; or D. there will and will not be some guests tonight. – Page 59
Generally, the more distant the information is from its target, the larger the number of situations to which it applies, and the lower its degree of informativeness becomes. – Page 59
Chapter 5 Physical Information
there is one computational operation which is necessarily irreversible, namely memory erasure – Page 65
Binary data are encoded, stored, and processed by allowing each bit to be only in one fully determined, definite state at a time. – Page 66
Chapter 6 Biological Information
But the genetic code or, better, the genes, are the information itself. Genes do not send information, in the sense in which a radio sends a signal. They work more or less successfully and, like a recipe for a cake, may only partly guarantee the end result, since the environment plays a crucial role. – Page 79
Genes do not carry information, as a pigeon may carry a message, no more than a key carries the information to open the door. – Page 79
Rather, genes are instructions, and instructions are a type of predicative and effective/ procedural information, like recipes, algorithms, and commands. So genes are dynamic procedural structures that, together with other indispensable environmental factors, contribute to control and guide the development of organisms. – Page 79
An organism tends to act upon the world in a mediated way. It actively converts (sensory) data into information and then constructively processes this information to manage its interactions with the world. All this involves the elaboration of intermediary, internal constructs, which are stored, transformed, manipulated, and communicated over variable lengths of time, from short-term memory to over a lifetime. – Page 87
Chapter 7 Economic Information
First, it is non-rivalrous: – Page 90
Secondly, by default, information tends to be non-excludable. – Page 90
Finally, once some information is available, the cost of its reproduction tends to be negligible (zero marginal cost). – Page 90
Since complete information concerns features (a)-( c) of a game (players, strategies, and payoffs), while perfect information concerns only feature (d) (moves or states), clearly there can be games with complete and perfect information, such as chess; with only complete but not perfect information, as we saw in the previous section; and with only perfect information but no complete information. – Page 98
Chapter 8 The Ethics Of Information
may need to lack (or preclude herself from accessing) some information in order to achieve morally desirable goals, such as protecting anonymity, enhancing fair treatment, or implementing unbiased evaluation. – Page 106
Examples of issues in information ethics understood as an information-as-resource ethics are the so-called digital divide, the problem of infoglut, and the analysis of the reliability and trustworthiness of information sources. – Page 106
Thus, information ethics, understood now as information-as-a-product ethics, may cover moral issues arising, for example, in the context of accountability, liability, libel legislation, testimony, plagiarism, advertising, propaganda, misinformation, and more generally the pragmatic rules of communication. – Page 106
Other issues here include security, vandalism (from the burning of libraries and books to the dissemination of viruses), piracy, intellectual property, open source, freedom of expression, censorship, filtering, and contents control. – Page 107
It suggests that there is something even more elemental than life, namely being-that is, the existence and flourishing of all entities and their global environment–and something even more fundamental than suffering, namely entropy. – Page 112
Entropy here refers to any kind of destruction, corruption, pollution, and depletion of informational objects (mind, not just of information as semantic content), that is, any form of impoverishment of reality. – Page 112
In information ethics, the ethical discourse concerns any entity, understood informationally, that is, not only all persons, their cultivation, wellbeing, and social interactions, not only animals, plants, and their proper natural life, but also anything that exists, from paintings and books to stars and stones; anything that may or will exist, like future generations; and anything that was but is no more, like our ancestors or old civilizations. – Page 113
By coming into being, an agent is made possible thanks to the existence of other entities. It is therefore bound to all that already exists, both unwillingly and inescapably. – Page 115
Inescapably, because the ontic bond may be broken by an agent only at the cost of ceasing to exist as an agent. Moral life does not begin with an act of freedom but it may end with one. – Page 115
The result is that all entities, qua informational objects, have an intrinsic moral value, although possibly quite minimal and overridable, and hence they can count as moral patients, subject to some equally minimal degree of moral respect understood as a disinterested, appreciative, and careful attention. – Page 116