I = ln(S). It’s a useful quantity for signal processing, but has no bearing on human-meaningful information.

He also seems to have overlooked the fact that languages themselves are systems of code.

Freeman Dyson (an extremely ancient British physicist) is about the nearest we have to an old-fashioned genius, still alive.

But Dyson is not a genius — rather a provider of scintillating partial clarifications and stimulating ideas. What has prevented him achieving genius-hood is a certain shallowness and smugness — he is just too pleasant and agreeable!

About ‘information’: having worked in this field for about 8 years, not that long ago I concluded that the concept is fundamentally mistaken.

(Much less than 1 percent of the population have any genuine understanding of the concept of information — and of these, their hold on understanding is tenuous; and I would hazard that Gleick is not one of this tiny elite. However, among those who understand, very few are able to recognize the incompleteness of the concept — all their attention and energies have been used up in understanding it.)

The concept of information proved to a pragmatically valuable for about 50 years — but it is in fact nonsense.

There really is no such thing as information separable from meaning — the illusion that ‘code’ is an independent reality is only possible by taking for granted the decoder.

There is only as much ‘information’ as the deconder can understand — the meaning, the existence of information, is a product of the information reader. And the information itself is not truly dissociable from that reader; it is not a true abstraction.

Read Dyson’s article carefully, taking care not to be distracted by the arm-waving — it is nonsense, obviously so.

The idea that we live in a world with billion-fold increases in the quantity of ‘information’ — yet that we can get no meaning from it… Nonsense!

If we don’t know the meaning, then it is not information!

This explains why the ‘decoding’ of the human genome in terms of ‘information’ has led to approximately nothing; and why Moore’s ‘law’ is compatible with a decline in computer perfomance.

Information is one of those concepts which is pragmatically ‘true’ so long as people don’t take it seriously and don’t push it too hard; but when people believe in information as an autonomous abstraction then it stands revealed as empty and question-begging (just like the related concept of ‘complexity’).