What is information?
One of the most common Creationist ploys used to sway the lay public is the appeal to information.Information is merely what we call our description of an object or ideaInformation Theory: Information theory (IT) is the field of mathematics that deals with the quantification of information passed during communication. In the simplest case you have a sender, a message being passed over a (possibly noisy) communications channel, and a receiver trying to reconstruct the original message. Measuring the information content is a way to determine the veracity of the communication or the uncertainty in the message recovery. For a digital message the information content is related to the natural log of the number of symbols sent and is usually expressed in bits: A binary string of length 32 will have an information content of 5 bits. Note that the information content has nothing to do with any meaningPhysical Information: This is the usage most laymen are familiar with. How much information does an object contain? Since there is no inherent quality of matter called information the answer is the information content depends on how thoroughly we as observers describe the object.Biological information: The deliberate equivocation between information and meaning is a favorite Creationist ruse.
One of the most common Creationist ploys used to sway the lay public is the appeal to information.Information is merely what we call our description of an object or ideaInformation Theory: Information theory (IT) is the field of mathematics that deals with the quantification of information passed during communication. In the simplest case you have a sender, a message being passed over a (possibly noisy) communications channel, and a receiver trying to reconstruct the original message. Measuring the information content is a way to determine the veracity of the communication or the uncertainty in the message recovery. For a digital message the information content is related to the natural log of the number of symbols sent and is usually expressed in bits: A binary string of length 32 will have an information content of 5 bits. Note that the information content has nothing to do with any meaningPhysical Information: This is the usage most laymen are familiar with. How much information does an object contain? Since there is no inherent quality of matter called information the answer is the information content depends on how thoroughly we as observers describe the object.Biological information: The deliberate equivocation between information and meaning is a favorite Creationist ruse.
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