What Is Information?

[jammycakes (James McKay)]

@aarceng

I take it then that you are referring to “Shannon Information” in which H(S) measures the optimal compression of the source messages. However this is actually not information but the entropy of the source message, S. As such, it is information ABOUT the message but it is not a measure of the semantic information IN the message. In fact the message need not have any semantic meaning.

Yes Chris, it is Shannon information that I’m talking about when I talk about “information.” Good to see you’re on the ball there.

There was a thread here a couple of years ago (exactly!) that had a much more rigorous treatment of this subject. You may want to take a look at it:

Information = Entropy

As a quick introduction, my field of study is computational biology, with specific expertise in applying information theory to biology. My PhD is specifically in “Information and Computer Science”, with emphasis (in my case) on information. I graduated in 2007 from the PhD and have been working full time here since 2009. One of the most surprising things for me over the last several years is the shift in anti-evolution arguments towards “information theory” arguments. Here is where great confus…

You’ll need to read through it (at least the original post) to grasp it properly, but the basic gist of it is that the claim that mutations can not add new information – in whatever sense you choose to define information – is either unproven, unprovable, or wrong.