Information
Definition
A Definition of Information, by Marcia Bates:
"We know that we are continually subjected to a huge range of sensory input and internal experience of sensations and thoughts. In fact, almost anything existing in the universe, that can come into human and other animals’ purview, can be experienced as information — a bird call, our friend’s "Hello", the rock we trip over, the intuition we have about the honesty of someone we are talking to, a book we read.
The definition of information used here, therefore, goes to the very basis of any living being’s awareness:
Information is the pattern of organization of matter and energy.
Though this definition is quoted from Edwin Parker (1974, p. 10), this approach to the concept was endemic at the time. Parker does not elaborate his definition, and no more recent theoretical development of this approach to information has been found. I believe this definition has much undeveloped potential. Information is the pattern of organization of the matter of rocks, of the earth, of plants, of animal bodies or of brain matter. Information is also the pattern of organization of the energy of my speech as it moves the air, or of the earth as it moves in an earthquake. Indeed, the only thing in the universe that does not contain information is total entropy; that alone is pattern-free. Because human beings can potentially act on or be influenced by virtually any imaginable information in the universe, if we want a truly fundamental and broadly applicable definition of information for our discipline, we must begin with one just this broad in meaning and application."
(https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/articles/NatRep_info_11m_050514.html)
Typology
Types of Neural-Cultural Information
Marcia Bates:
"As noted, neural-cultural information is encoded in the brain and nervous system. In animals and, in particular, in human beings, three fundamental modes of embodied information are identified: in experience, in actions in the world, and in communicatory expression. Each is discussed in turn in this section.
Experienced Information
If we were to look into the brain of a person looking at a classroom chair, we would not see a miniature chair; rather, we would see only neurons firing. However, the person looking at the chair does see a chair. So the neurons firing in the person’s brain create an embodied subjective experience of seeing the chair, an experience utterly unlike what is going on in the brain to create that experience. A stubbed toe, which produces another round of neuronal activity, is not felt as neurons firing by the person experiencing the incident; rather, that person feels the pain of a stubbed toe — and in the toe — not in the brain.
So, to feel our own experiences, the brain must create some pattern of neuronal firing that produces consciousness and the associated sense of experiencing life. The question of the nature of consciousness and the mind/brain relationship is one of the most hotly debated questions in all of science and philosophy currently (Chalmers, 1996; Damasio, 1999; Dennett, 1991; McCauley, 1996; Varela, Thompson, Rosch, 1993, and many others). There is no agreed-upon understanding at this time in those fields, and no attempt is made to solve this challenging question here.
Here, for our purposes, we will simply consider subjective experience, including the experience of remembering, to be the first on a list of kinds of embodied information that result from neural encoded information. Again, all the stored knowledge, life experience, etc. that a person (or other animal) has is encoded in neural pathways of the brain. Life as experienced and remembered by the individual is embodied in whatever degree of consciousness or awareness that individual has.
One final point about experienced information: We experience our thoughts and activities as a conscious self, while, in ordinary practice, all our other knowledge and memories are out of consciousness. Experienced information is not solely what we experience with conscious awareness, however. We can also experience a variety of kinds of out-of-consciousness information that are nonetheless active in creating our current experience. For example, when a pianist is asked by her music teacher to "play with more feeling," she can bring forth a variety of out-of-awareness knowledge and experience that will enrich her playing and give it more feeling. She could not articulate how she does this, she does not know what she draws upon, but she can do it — and the student with less training and experience cannot do it. So something in her encoded neural information was brought to bear and embodied in her playing.
Enacted Information
We may experience our lives mentally in private, but when we start acting in the world, our genetically endowed talents and life knowledge become visible to the external world. When an animal enacts information, it acts in the world, utilizing whatever capabilities and experience it can from its neural stores. Fish cannot hide nuts and squirrels cannot breathe under water, but each type of animal is capable of embodying many other types of skills or behaviors, which it does lifelong. Animals enact their neural information by carrying out all the activities of their lives. Throughout the history of animals on the planet, much learning, especially that transferred from mother to offspring, has come about by observing and copying enacted information.
Human beings, who possess extraordinarily extensive knowledge, can enact vast numbers of different types of behaviors. Not only do we carry out the usual animal behaviors of eating, birthing, fighting, etc., but we have also developed a huge range of skills, from plumbing to brain surgery, as well as social institutions — religions, the arts, business, government, science. Aside from the physical buildings that often house these activities, the institutions themselves fully exist only when human beings use their knowledge and experience to enact the institutions in real time. Thus enacted information can occur in isolation or in social contexts, where it becomes a part of the larger texture of social behavior.
Demonstrating how much of power and other human relations and choices are embedded within social institutions has been one of the great achievements of the social sciences in the last twenty to thirty years. These social institutions exist by being renewed, reinforced, and gradually changed through time by the people involved in enacting them on a daily basis.
For example, the welfare office in a typical United States city exists physically only as a building. But what counts for the people working and seeking help there is the daily enaction of roles and relationships in real time in the interactions among people in that office. If the society sees welfare as a necessary evil, and welfare recipients as people who are getting resources they do not deserve — the assumption in much of the United States today — then everyone involved will enact that relationship in countless ways in the daily activity of the welfare office. The office will be dirty and not air-conditioned. Supplicants will be required to wait many hours and will be treated rudely. In resentment, they will react with hostility, leading the staff to become still more negative in their relations, and so on. These unfortunate results do not happen by accident. They arise out of pre-existing collective social assumptions and attitudes, and the people involved carry out the social consensus about the institution of welfare in their daily enactment of work or supplication at the welfare office.
Expressed Information
This form of embodied neural-cultural information consists of the pattern of organization of communicatory scents, calls, gestures, and ultimately, human spoken language used to communicate among members of a species and between species. Thus, expressed information has a quintessentially social function. Other than in a few cases, such as a spontaneous cry of pain or fear, all expressed information is intentionally communicative to others in the environment. Animals mark territory with scent, produce mating calls and danger calls, primates gesture expressively, and humans use spoken language and body language in order to communicate an extraordinarily rich variety of meaning. In humans, communication through expressed information is enormously important, and is supported by brain structures that make language possible. For all these reasons, expressed information, technically a subset of enacted information, has been separated out for independent consideration.
Types of Exosomatic Information
Exosomatic information, that is, information stored externally to the body of animals, is a type that is core to the interests of information science. Embedded and recorded information are described below.
Embedded Information
If we survey all that results from the presence of living things on earth, we find many objects and other visible effects of the presence of animals. The spider makes its web, the bird builds a nest, the human being makes tools, utensils and other artifacts. Embedded information is that enduring information created or altered by the actions of animals and people in the world. It may be incidental, as a path through the woods, or deliberate, as a fashioned artifact. The changes and added structure found in the nest, the cell phone, or the house all constitute embedded information — information that would not exist without the agency of animals. Because animals act, they leave evidence of their presence. (See also Dawkins’ discussion of the "extended phenotype," 1982.)
The study of the embedded information of artifacts has been a prime means of learning about other cultures in the human sciences, especially about extinct cultures. Just as cultures develop socially-shared attitudes and institutions that are enacted, so also do people develop socially shared design styles and artifacts that are often remarkably stable in character through time and over wide geographical areas. We can learn much about people by studying these characteristics of the enduring physical remains of their cultures. Though these objects may be seen to carry embedded information, there is only so much understanding the objects can provide. We can deduce, perhaps, how a flint knife was made, but may not be able to determine how a lost pottery-glazing technique was carried out. In short, the embedded information is generally not left by its creators to be informative, but rather is informative as an incidental consequence of the activities and skills of the people leaving the artifacts. We deduce what we can, and often must forego some other knowledge we might wish to extract.
Embedded information is not limited to earlier cultures, however. Quite the contrary, the impact, in embedded information, of the current human cultures on the planet is beyond measure. Every building, every object, every plowed furrow that human beings have left on the planet is a kind of embedded information.
Recorded Information
Recorded information is communicatory or memorial information preserved in a durable medium. While an animal scent mark in the woods may be thought to be intended to communicate "This is my turf; stay off," we will limit the discussion of recorded information here to human products.
The use of symbols is primary to human beings (a symbol is "[s]omething that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention...," American Heritage, 2000), and constitutes a powerful and extensively used capacity on our part. Written language is an obvious form of communicatory information, but over the centuries, people have used our symbol-making capacity in countless ways. See, for example, Wilkinson (1994), who characterizes nine broad classes of symbolism in Egyptian art, only one of which is linguistic. (Examples of others are form, size, color, action.) Recorded information may have begun with drawings or carvings; however, the most revolutionizing form of recorded information was almost certainly the technology of writing, which was followed in later years by musical and mathematical notation, and other sorts of recorded information. (Compare HjÃrland, 2002.) Other forms of recorded information, such as photography, film, audio recordings, and many more, need to be incorporated in a general theory of recorded information for information studies.
Relationships among the Forms of Information
The crucial difference between embedded and recorded information is communicatory intent. The activities of the animal — enacted information — produce embedded information, the durable effects of enaction. (There are many non-enduring effects as well, such as the displacement of air past my legs as I walk.) The activity of using language, or other communicatory means — expressed information — has its enduring equivalent in recorded information. (Along these same lines, Heilprin Goodman, 1965, distinguished "short-duration" and "long-duration" messages. This is not to make the simplistic assumption that writing is simply spoken language written down. Written language is generally formulated differently from spoken language.) Putting these relationships schematically: Enacted information creates embedded information as its durable result, and expressed information leaves recorded information as its durable result. Further, just as expressed information is a communicatory subset of enacted information (as there are many non-communicatory forms of enaction), so also is recorded information a communicatory subset of embedded information, since there are many non-communicatory (that is, not intentionally communicatory) forms of embedded information. Though written language is central as a form of recorded information, it is not the only form. A monument to a battle, for instance, may be primarily intended to be communicative about the event and only secondarily seen a work of art. Embedded and recorded information may appear in or on the same artifact.
Recorded information is distinguished here from expressed information because the invention of writing and the development of the technologies to produce durable recorded information appear to have had an immeasurable impact on human cultures and on the speed of development of those cultures. No longer do humans have to try to memorize all that their culture knows; now a lot of that information can be kept in durable form outside the body. The durability and storage efficiency of such information have enabled a great leap in human information processing. The impact on human cognition of written records has been discussed at length by Ong (1982), Havelock (1980), and others."
(https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/articles/NatRep_info_11m_050514.html)
Discussion
Marcia Bates, from the conclusion:
"Information is the pattern of organization of matter and energy. All information is natural information, in that it exists in the material world of matter and energy. Represented information is natural information that is encoded or embodied. Encoded information is information that has symbolic, linguistic, or signal-based patterns of organization. Embodied information is the corporeal expression or manifestation of information previously in encoded form.
Goonatilake’s model of three broad streams of information transmission over the history of life on the planet is utilized; he calls the streams "information flow lineages." These are the genetic, neural-cultural, and exosomatic flow lines (Goonatilake, 1991).
I have proposed several fundamental forms of information and have assigned them to the Goonatilake flow lines. These are: genetic information in the genetic line, experienced, enacted, and expressed information in the neural-cultural line, and embedded and recorded information in the exosomatic line. Genetic and neural-cultural information are encoded, respectively, as the genotype and as nervous system structures and action potentials. Genetic and neural-cultural information are embodied, respectively, as the phenotype and as experienced information (experience, consciousness), enacted information (actions), and expressed information (communication).
Exosomatic information, that is, information stored externally to the body, has been developed in complex ways by human beings, and has been differentiated here as embedded information (the pattern of organization of the enduring effects of the presence of animals on the earth) and recorded information (communicatory or memorial information preserved in a durable medium). Recorded information is the chief focus of the information professions, and embedded objects and embodied phenotypes are the chief foci of the curatorial professions, including museum studies and zoo management. Examples have been provided to illustrate the relevance of these terms to two further areas of information studies, namely, information seeking behavior and information genres. It should be possible to develop comparable examples for other areas of information studies."
(https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/articles/NatRep_info_11m_050514.html)
More information
- Source of the definition: Bates, Marcia J. "Fundamental Forms of Information,"
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(8) (2006): 1033-1045.