Information, Concept of

Note: Last Updated 7/29/2024.

Doug Powell:

     So what is information? It is communication between minds. But in order for minds to communicate, there must be a common language. The language must exist and be understood prior to any ability to communicate. For example, the language of written music (the staffs, notes, and values) must exist prior to attempting to play or even write the music. The music may exist in a composer’s head, but it cannot be communicated without the convention of notation. Every language is a set of tokens and a set of conventions for the use of the tokens. A token stands in for something intangible. For example, the number “1” is not really an actual number “1” but a token or symbol representing the number “1” which is a non-physical entity. There are no actual letters on this page, simply tokens representing the letters. In English, the tokens are A, B, C ... X, Y, Z. Because letters and numbers are non-physical entities, they have no location or appearance. That is why we need tokens to represent them. Each token has a convention or way in which to use the token. The letter “A” has certain usages that when connected to other tokens make words. Then the words are connected to make sentences, and so on. The point is this: the rules of language were established before we could use them to communicate even on the most primitive level.

     Thus, if you were eating alphabet soup and the letters in your bowl spelled “I LOVE YOU,” you would immediately understand that this is not a communication from another mind. Your soup would not be declaring its passionate affection for you. The same is true if you were to go to the Grand Canyon and you saw “STEVE WAS HERE” etched in the canyon wall, and you knew it was made naturally with wind and water through erosion; you would also know it contained no information. In fact, it would not even be English, just squiggles cut into rock that resemble the tokens and conventions used in English. But this resemblance would be entirely unintentional and therefore communicate nothing.

     What about an unlimited number of monkeys with typewriters? Given an unlimited amount of time, could these monkeys ever write Hamlet? The answer is no. Even if at some point they happened upon the exact same sequence of letters as Hamlet, it still would not be Hamlet. It would be a string of letters that resembled Hamlet, but it would be void of any information. This is because there was no intention to communicate behind the monkey’s actions; there was no true use of language, only its tokens. The tokens would be empty.

(Doug Powell, Holman QuickSource Guide to Christian Apologetics, [Nashville: Holman Reference, 2006], pp. 58-60.)

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria