Talk:Information

A couple of quibbles and a suggestion

First, I'm surprised that CreationWiki didn't already have an article with this title. It's about time!

The article treats "information" as a single thing. Most words have multiple meanings (as opposed to multiple ways of describing them). "Religion", for example, can be a way of thinking (e.g. Christianity) or a particular denomination (e.g. the Catholic religion), among other things. The same applies for "information", which, at the very least, has a lay person's sense and a Shannon sense. These are not different ways of describing the same thing, but subtly different things. This article talks about multiple definitions, but as though they are different ways of describing the same thing.

I'm not suggesting that this article needs to talk about everything that might be described as "information", but as long as it doesn't, it should explain what sort of information it is talking about.

Along the same lines, I don't think this article makes clear that Shannon information is really not the same thing as meaningful information. Meaningful information, encoded into a language, can be measured statistically, per Shannon, but the measure is of the redundancy or etc. of the symbols, not a measure of the "information content", or meaning. Shannon, for example, can be uses to measure the "information content" of a set of random symbols that have no meaning.

I seriously question the claim that "information has been defined innumerable ways". Yes, that is what the reference says, and if we really think we should we could state that "according to Robert M. Losse, information has been defined innumerable ways", but without that qualification this article is endorsing Losse's clearly-fallacious claim. I'm quibbling over the word "innumerable", which means "too many to be numbered". I am frankly highly sceptical that this is the case. Yes, I'm sure that it has been described in numerous ways, and would be happy for this article to say so, but "innumerable" ways? The phrase "information has been defined innumerable ways" is not a direct quote of Losse, so why not just paraphrase him (i.e. keep the reference to him) by saying that "information has been defined numerous ways"?

Finally, this article could probably be improved by including some of the concepts discussed by Royal Truman in a recent issue of the Journal of Creation (not yet on-line, but see here), which, if I'm remembering correctly, discuss the importance of context to deriving meaning from information. He illustrates this with an example (again from memory) of a fighter pilot given target co-ordinates which can be a very small amount of information as long as it's in the context of an approximate location already being known.

Philip J. Rayment 10:16, 7 August 2013 (EDT)

Since I began this article (I found in the wanted pages) I was already aware that it was a very difficult task. Therefore, I have two editors invited to assist in drafting it. I extend an invitation to you, dear Philip. Your observations are appropriate and I really need help so that the article becomes well-written and comprehensive. Regarding the issue 26(3) of the Journal of Creation I have bought all the issues of the Journal of Creation including this particular issue. I've planned to include a quote from this article, and there are still a few quotes from 4 or 5 books of Dembski (I am still reading the books to use in the article). Last week I managed to buy all the editions of the newspaper TJ (before Journal of Creation) and I still have two old editions of the Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal. In short, without a collaborative effort of several editors this article will not be an article worthy of CreationWiki. So, again I ask any and all help that you can give in order to build together a good article. God bless you abundantly. Luiz Alexandre Silva 12:37, 7 August 2013 (EDT)

Remark: My difficulties, in particular, are even greater because I'm not really fluent in English language. In Christ, Luiz Alexandre Silva 13:03, 7 August 2013 (EDT)