The quantity and quality of information

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This post originally appeared on ZeMing M. Gao’s website, and we republished with permission from the author. Read the full piece here.

[Recommend my two-volume book for more reading]: BIT & COIN:  Merging Digitality and Physicality

In information theories, the concept of “information” itself can be confusing and even self-contradictory. Of course, nature itself is not wrong. It’s the words that we use.

Shannon entropy is fundamentally mathematical without considering any meaning, structure, or organization with regard to information. From that point of view, one can say chaos corresponds to more information because Shannon entropy really is a measure of uncertainty or randomness in a system.

On the other hand, as humans seeking meaning, we also intuitively know that structure and organization are based on information. This is because we have meaningful or structured information in our minds that conveys specific patterns or messages.

I don’t think it’s hard to differentiate these two different aspects conceptually. But I haven’t seen good terminology for doing so. Perhaps we can call Shannon entropy “quantity of information” and organizational information “quality of information”?

But I think there needs to be better phraseology, perhaps even a different framework of descriptive theory.

This is not to say Shannon made a mistake. Had Shannon been concerned with meaning, his theory would not have provided fundamental solutions to digital information systems, which are agnostic to meaning.

But I do think we need a new description or theory to reach beyond that.

Bitcoin blockchain is fundamentally a digital system that is no longer agnostic to “meaning” as the basic digital infrastructure is.

However, unlike AI systems that simulate the semantic meaning of the human mind, blockchain seeks to maintain something more basic: truth.

Not the ultimate truth, but consensual truth. God may want people to seek the ultimate truth, but we humans always need consensual truth as well. Without the former, people may go to hell, but without the latter, society suffers insanity, which is increasingly the case already.

By “consensual truth”, I do not mean people all come to accept the same thing always and in all circumstances. But we do need common truth with regard to what is real.

Insanity is disconnection from reality by definition.

AI needs to be regulated by blockchain. Without such regulation, digital humanity accelerates to insanity.

[Recommend my two-volume book for more reading]: BIT & COIN:  Merging Digitality and Physicality

Watch: Transitioning to Web3 with AWS & BSV blockchain