Thread by @EveKeneinan

Let’s consider S.O.S., the signal of distress in Morse Code.

Most people still know this, that it consists of three dots followed by three dashes followed by three more dots.

∙ ∙ ∙ — — — ∙ ∙ ∙

This is a signal that transmits encoded information.

But how?

If a time traveler were to go back the time of Odysseus, and find himself on Odysseus’ ship, sailing straight for the channel between Scylla and Charybdis, he might try frantically signaling S.O.S.

In vain.

The information will be opaque to anyone but the sender.

Why?

Because it is a code, which encodes a specific meaning for those who are familiar with the code — it is a linguistic thing. When we say “3 dots, 3 dashes, 3 dots” or “S.O.S.” *means* “We are in Distress. Help urgently requested” we note the conventional, stipulated meaning.

The information is “read off” the carrier signal, the sounds, or perhaps telegraph pulses, or flashes of light, or even a giant S.O.S. made of rocks or drawn in the sand:

Note that the information is UTTERLY INDIFFERENT to the physical CARRIER.

There is nothing in the physical nature of sound waves, or ink, or the electrical pulses of a telegram, or sand, or rocks that relate these things to one another or to information as such.

This indicates that the information carried is not identical to the physical carrier, and indeed, is ontologically indifferent to it — the exact same information can be carried in by myriad of means.

This is no more strange than the idea that a book can store “knowledge.”

When one says “The physical arrangement of physical thing is what encodes the information” one speaks correctly.

But not if one adds “the physical arrangement just is the information.”

One can imagine a Nautical code coming into use at the same time as Morse Code in which

∙ ∙ ∙ — — — ∙ ∙ ∙

means “stay away or we will destroy you!”

Much as the word “hut” in English means a small cottage-like dwelling and in German means “hat.”

So that “Pizza Hut,” in German, is “Pizza Hat.” And indeed, the unique ROOF of the Pizza HUT is seen as MEANING a big red hat in Germany!

This difference in meaning “hut with a red ROOF”

vs

“red hat”

derives from the English “hut” vs the German “Hut” but isn’t identical with it.

What this shows is that semantic information is not necessarily linguistic. It can be e.g. pictorial.

Of course, we know this: 🚫

Signs take their meaning within the context of human beings as ontologically connected to the λόγος.

We are “the living being that has λόγος,” the ζῷον λόγον ἔχων (alternately, as Heidegger notes, we could be the living being HAD BY λόγος just as well from the Greek).

Now, suppose that during a storm certain pebbles and branches were tossed about had happened to land on a beach in a row, in this pattern:

∙ ∙ ∙ — — — ∙ ∙ ∙

Would this be a call of distress in Morse Code?

It would not. It could be justifiably be MISTAKEN for one though.

The great mathematician/inventor Archimedes was once shipwreck in the Aegean Sea, and he and some others washed up on an island.

The priority of one shipwrecked on an island is to determine whether or not it is a DESERT or INHABITED.

Archimedes found Euclid I 1 in the sand.

Here again we see one of the interesting things about information. It can be “read off” things.

The information in Euclid I 1 is instructional information for constructing an equilateral triangle.

But Archimedes read “there are men here” off the diagram.

Now the diagram did not MEAN “there are men here”, but that information could be read off it, because form the kind of thing a mathematical diagram *IS* one can infer its (efficient) CAUSE, a ζῷον λόγον ἔχων.

Natural beings too have information within them, but since information is a MEANING, it requires a thinking being to “read” this information, e.g. the rings inside the trunk of a tree carry information about its age, but only to a being that can “read” this natural sign.

Suppose 2 natural things have a relation such that a given change in one always corresponds to a change in the other.

Suppose that no one knows this.

If someone *did* know it, information about the one could be obtained from the other.

But unknown, WHERE is the INFORMATION?

The relationship, the correspondence of the two objects, from which the information could be read off certainly exists. The two objects exist.

But it seems that information, as a meaningful sign, requires there to be that which understands/interprets meaning to be at all.

Information appears to be relevantly like “evidence.” Any object, which exists on its own, may become evidence of some fact, truth, or proposition, but nothing JUST IS evidence without an interpretive context which takes it as such.

And that requires λόγος.

Information, within information theory, is defined as meaningful, well-formed data (or a datum).

A datum is a relatum.

“Well-formed” means “within a symbol or semantic system”. (= syntax)

And “meaningful” means “having semantic content.”

Relations can exist without λόγος or any conscious beings. The sun stands in the relation “more massive” to the earth, whether or not anyone knows it.

But this relation cannot become a DATUM without taking its place within a system of meaning, a syntactical-semantic system.

Just as an assertion has the structure of saying something about something, information has the structure of informing in some way about something.

Data are signs that indicate something, that mean something, and this, indication, meaning, is the domain of λόγος.

It seems reasonable enough to say that “the information was in the things” if we do not understand the “in” as a physical “in” of containment of one spatially extended object by another.

Answers may be found “in” books, but this “in” is not the way a small box is “in” a big one.

“in” is a little word that presents many hard philosophical problems.