Tag: Information
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I am writing this book primarily for Americans in whose environment questions of information will be evaluated according to a standard American crierion: a thing is valuable as a commodity for what it will bring in the open market. This is the official doctrine of an orthodoxy which it is becoming more and more perilous for a resident of the United States to question. It is perhaps worth while to point out that it does not represent a universal basis of human values: that it corresponds neither to the doctrine of the Church, which seeks for the salvation of the human soul, nor to that of Marxism, which values a society for its realization of certain specific ideals of human well-being. The fate of information in the typically American world is to become something which can be bought or sold.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society -
When we consider a problem of nature such as that of atomic reactions and atomic explosives, the largest single item of information which we can make public is that they exist. Once a scientist attacks a problem which he knows to have an answer, his entire attitude is changed. He is already some fifty percent of his way toward that answer.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society -
Messages are themselves a form of pattern and organization. Indeed, it is possible to treat sets of messages as having entropy like sets of states in the external world. Just as entropy is a measure of the disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Clichés, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society -
Information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustment felt upon it. The process of receiving and of using information is the process of our adjusting to the contingencies of the outer environment, and of our living effectively within that environment. The needs and complexity of modern life make greater demands on this process of information than ever before, and our press, our museums, our scientific laboratories, our universities, our libraries and textbooks, are obliged to meet the needs of this process or fail in their purpose. To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man’s inner life, even as they belong to his life in society.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society -
The commands through which we exercise our control over our environment are a kind of information which we impart to it. Like any form of information, these commands are subject to disorganization in transit. They generally come through in less coherent fashion and certainly not more coherently than they were sent. In control and communication we are always fighting nature’s tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful; the tendency as Gibbs has shown us, for entropy to increase.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society