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From: j.nobel.daggett@gmail.com (LDagget)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: West Virginia creationism
Date: Sun, 7 Apr 2024 09:22:47 +0000
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Ron Dean wrote:

> Martin Harran wrote:
 
>> According to that logic, Egyptian hieroglyphs were information when
>> they were first used, stopped being information during the period when
>> nobody understood them but became information again when they were
>> deciphered in the early 19th century. Is that correct?
>  >
> I think of information as data, knowledge, programs, language, know how 
> and the senses.
> I also think information always involves mind or instinct in some 
> capacity. It seems that
> there is a broad and shifty definition of information.
 
Interesting that you lump information, data, knowledge, program, 
language, know how and the senses apparently synonyms. 


In formal treatments, data, information, and knowledge are treated
as very distinct things. 

The simplest way to illustrate is probably to use a computer example.
Data can be thought of as the bits on a computer hard drive. Simplistically,
you count the capacity in bits and that's how much data you have. 
Information is a different thing. A disk where every bit is a 0 
has information that is essentially reducible to 0,N where N is the
capacity of the hard drive. or 0 N time. A disk full of 1s has the
same amount of information, but it's different. 

This continues with the ability to repeat information as one might
do with certain schemes to protect data in various RAID storage 
schemes. The data is still the disk size, the information is recorded
redundantly. 

This should be somewhat natural to you. You claim DNA has information
but there are identical copies of DNA in billions of cells. I don't
think you believe that an egg developing into an adult is creating
information (I would quibble, but save that). 

Enough for starters. Data is not the same as information. That's
not how the words are used by people who study information.