For the Information Scientist

I have made several attempts to formulate a theory of information, but a formal presentation of it has thus far eluded me. Analytically, the theory has taken constant refinement over some months to get to where it is. Yet what really tripped me up was mostly a matter of presentation. I wanted to deal with information as something that is specific to the subject experiencing it. The problem was that there was clearly something about that subject which created that particular experience. Since I was trying to deal with information from the perspective of my potential subject, I was blinding myself unnecessarily—the subject had no information concerning its own nature. Rather, by the standard of my own theory, there was no information about the subject’s nature, as far as it may be concerned.

It is impossible to approach a theory as though the theorist did not exist. I have come to terms with the fact that any theory of information needs to be formulated and presented under the assumption that it will be human beings who would be interested it in, and so it ought to speak to them directly about where we fit into the picture. Maybe even address why we ought to care.

No longer am I going to attempt to discuss the experience of my subject. From now on, I will speak from the perspective of a human observer, and what information they might hope to find.

So, curious minds of science, how do you go about looking at the vastness of existence and not simply become overwhelmed? The forces of the universe are a constant of all time and existence. Those forces become information when, and only when, something reacts to them. Information is like a message or a set of instructions, then, which a particular subject responds to in the specific way demanded of those instructions. This in itself is not very interesting. How it occurs is of more practical value to the researcher.

All observation must begin on the individual scale. Here we will look at two aspects of any individual subject: its primary code and its secondary code.

The primary code is the set of rules that dictates what will be treated as information by the subject, and the specific response that will result when that information is received. When you tap the knee of a human being and their leg jerks in response, the “tap” can be thought of as information. The primary code is what determined in advance that if certain stimulation took place, it would be treated as instructions to jerk your leg. Do not confuse the primary code with DNA. DNA is only part of it. Your present physical condition is equally as important. For instance, if you are paralyzed below the waist, the fact that you are genetically designed to be able to respond when your knee is tapped will not enter into it. The rule that you cannot receive the knee tap as information is not part of your DNA; but it is a part of your primary code.

Obviously, the primary code can be altered. You may once have been able to receive the knee tap as information, but then your nerves were severed or something along those lines. The set of rules that determines what you can take as information went from allowing you to take the knee tap, to no longer allowing you to take the knee tap.

So what can change a thing’s primary code and why? Obviously, the primary code is itself subject to a set of rules. The second set of rules is what I call the secondary code.

Let’s step away from biological examples and move to the area that inspired me, computers. Let’s treat HTML as our primary code. This determines what will happen if I put the bold tag and its closing tag around a set of words. But what if some hacker with a bizarre sense of humor decided to make it so that the bold tag didn’t work any more, so that no matter how much I used the HTML to make a word bold, it just remained plain and light? How would our rogue programmer have accomplished this?

The answer is that he must have been adept at the rules that govern HTML. The secondary code for HTML, then, is the programming that is the layer just below it, determining how it works.

You may begin to grasp a problem here. How information is responded to is determined by a set of rules. Those set of rules are governed by their own set of rules, which is governed by yet another set of rules. So on, into infinity or near infinity, at least. How on Earth are we supposed to attain any knowledge at all? How can you seriously call anything “primary” or “secondary”?

As with everything in science and in life, it is simply a matter of making a judgment call. It is my belief that if you focus on one set of rules as the primary code, you will be very fruitful in your investigation. When you input certain information, you will be able to learn something of how the primary code is set up to respond. When it begins to behave differently in response to an input it had been consistently reacting a particular way to previously, you will have an opportunity to learn something of its secondary code. So long as you limit yourself to observing only that which has a direct connection with the specific coding you are interested in, I believe you can be productive. Otherwise, you could follow the chain of rules and responses endlessly in either direction for the rest of your life, and never come close to either the starting or ending point, if such a thing exists. That way lies futility; knowledge is only possible with restraint and reasonable simplicity.

Though we must hold ourselves to the individual scale, there is an aggregate sale, and macro scale, that we should be aware of. This concerns everything that is not the specific subject you are observing. It is the environment that your object is in, and it concerns not just those information exchanges that directly effect the subject, but all of the forces and subjects and interactions that have no obvious relationship to it.

Another assumption that I operate under is that if you take the whole of the universe for the whole of the time it has existed, you will find that every possible combination of rules have manifested to react to everything that can possibly be treated as information—at some point in space, at some point in time.

The more limited environment at a given moment is the collective of all reactions to every object to whatever information they are exposed to at that point in time. It is completely interconnected—the reaction of one subject to information may itself be information to another. If I drop a brick on tile, the particles will react by vibrating and my ears will react to the vibrations. The fall may have cracked the tile, which changes what information some subjects may be able to get from that particular space, and so on.

How we cope with all of this is of course a fact of scientific life. You need an environment that is as controlled as practically possible, so that you can expose your subject to specific things to see how, or if, it reacts to them. You also need an uncontrolled environment to serve as a basis of comparison. Of course, the more of both of these the better, but again there will have to be certain limits to the scope of your experiment. You cannot control everything about the environment, nor can you either know of or take the time to observe every single natural environment that the subject exists in.

If you observe direct actions that result as a reaction to specific inputs, you will learn something about the primary code of the subject. If you observe a change in future reactions to the same input, you may learn something about its secondary code. Once you have gained a bit of an understanding of the primary and secondary codes, then observing the way the subject behaves in the uncontrolled environment may teach you something about what it is usually exposed to under normal conditions.

In other words, by observing a subject under good experimental conditions, we can hope to learn about two sets of rules that govern its existence, as well as the conditions of a specific environment that it is found in.

I will discuss the scientific process, and where it as a phenomenon falls into this theory, in more detail later. The theory has many other aspects that I need to address—I hope to get to some of them in this series. With any luck, the next installment will be coming along not too long after this one. Until then, I look forward to any suggestions or criticisms anyone might have to offer.