Seven people were nothing

Further to my last post.

From John le Carré "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold". Liz is depressed by the poor attendance at the Party Meetings when she visits East Germany - they are no better then the Communist Party meetings she attended back in Bayswater, London.

At last, on the fourth day, the Thursday, came their own Branch Meeting. This was to be, for Liz at least, the most exhilarating experience of all; it would be an example of all that her own Branch in Bayswater could be one day. They had chosen a wonderful title for the evening's discussions - Coexistence after two wars - and they expected a record attendance. The whole ward had been circularised, they had taken care to see that there was no rival meeting in the neighbourhood that evening; it was not a late shopping day.
Seven people came.
Seven people and Liz and the Branch Secretary and the man from the District. Liz put a brave face on it but she was terribly upset. [...] It was like the meetings in Bayswater, it was like mid-week evensong when she used to go to Church - the same dutiful little group of lost faces, the same fussy self-consciousness, the same feeling of a great idea in the hands of little people. She always felt the same thing - it was awful, really, but she did - she wished no one would turn up, because that was absolute and it suggested persecution, humiliation - it was something you could react to.
But seven people were nothing: they were worse than nothing, because they were evidence of the inertia of the uncapturable mass. They broke your heart.

There would be a message, information, in no one turning up, but seven people is thermodynamic equilibrium.

Absence of information is the real nothing; not absence of stuff

The current New Scientist is a Special Issue on 'Nothing'. They've got five articles linked to the theme:

1. From zero to hero. About the history of the mathematical symbol for '0', and the mathematical concept of zero.
2. Nothing in common. Building maths starting from the concept of the empty set
3. The hole story. How the concept of a 'hole' as a positively-charged particle rather than just the absence of an electron was crucial to the development of solid-state electronics
4. Out of the ether. Vacuum field - how quantum mechanics leads to the understanding that a vacuum is actually seething with particles emerging and disappearing
5. Putting the ideal to work. The discovery and value of Noble gases.

An interesting topic (though already pretty familiar to most readers of the New Scientist, I would have thought), but there's nothing there about information - they've missed the big story again!

It is the absence of information that is the real nothing, not the absence of stuff.  It is similar to what I was saying about going faster than light. Stuff (matter/energy) only has any significance insofar as it carries information. A complete 'grey death' of the universe (thermodynamic equilibrium over the whole universe) would be a real nothing.

Like so much on this blog, I've got ideas about this, but other people have explored nothing and information much more rigorously.

Vlatko Vedral and Rainer Zimmermann talking about nothing. 

At DTMD 2011, Vlatko Vedral introduced some of his ideas on how informational thinking provides insights into the fundamental question of how something comes from nothing. You can pick up his presentation from the DTMD 2011 proceedings page (or directly: Abstract Presentation Podcast). Vedral, though, was challenged by Rainer Zimmermann, one of the other delegates at the workshop, during the panel session after Vedral's presentation, and you can listen to that too: Panel Discussion (42 MByte mp3 file). Specifically, Zimmermann, says

I find the categories of nothingness and non-being mixed up...so the consequence is that your God metaphor and also your card game is not correct because it is not demonstrating what you would like to demonstrate. For instance saying that God himself would not know entails that you think of the assembly of knowledge for God, or substance, or whatever you would like to call it, in an anthropomorphic way, but it is obviously not logical at all. That is actually an idea going back to Spinoza in the seventeenth century. On the other hand, the card game is not telling anything about nothingness, because what you actually show is that if you discard the means of representation in favour of another means for instance by skipping the cards and doing that in an abstract way, for instance playing blind chess..., you are not actually doing anything ontological, all you do is switch the means of representation, so in fact there is not nothingness but it is quite a lot.  Independent of the case nothingness in philosophical terms is not nothing, that is the point, it is actually the foundation of non-being. And non being is what is not but could be, it's a possibility. We had that already earlier in the keynote of Hofkirchner's field of possibilities and nothingness is the foundation of non-being. By coincidence on Friday afternoon I will give a talk on nothingness at the University of London...

(I've kept the reference to his University of London talk to point to the fact that he - Zimmermann - has been researching nothingness.  I need to find out more!)

Talk of non-being, field of possibilities, what could be, puts me very much in mind of Rubem Alves writing in The Poet, the Warrior, the Prophet of how the discovery of a dead body of man has all sorts of consequences precisely because he is dead - because he is not there (I referred to this in passing once before). However, I am aware I'm on shaky ground there, and I'm not sure Dr Zimmermann would approve!

The trouble with digital democracy

This is nice:

24 hours in photos 

This installation by Erik Kessels is on show as part of an exhibition at Foam in Amsterdam that looks at the future of photography. It features print-outs of all the images uploaded to Flickr in a 24-hour period... 

Creative Review, 24 hours in photos

In the discussion we inevitably get the 'D' word

Perhaps sites such as Flickr, and the general ease of use provided by digital cameras, are instead encouraging us to think differently about photography, to see it as a truly democratic artform.

Whenever you see a claim that something is 'democratic', you need to ask two questions:

1. IS this (whatever is being discussed) democratic, or in what sense is it democratic?  
2. If it is democratic, is it necessarily 'good'?

The point is, invariably the claim for democracy is taken as a claim to be 'good'.  People are claiming something is democratic in order to show that it is good.

In many cases, the claim of democracy comes merely from something being made cheaper than before.  So cheap flights from the likes of Easyjet and Ryanair have supposedly democratised air travel.  Being cheap is frequently the main basis for claims of the democratising effects of new technology too, but it often goes along with ease of use and the ability to share something widely. This is the case with digital photography in the example above. Digital cameras are cheap (well, you can get digital cameras at low cost), they are easy to use, and by uploading your photos to a site such as flickr they can in principle be shared with millions of people right across the world. So, is this democratic? Or in what sense is it democratic?  I don't know.

In a similar way, blogging is presented as democracy, giving anyone and everyone a platform previously reserved for the great and the good, or to journalists who had access to the media. Again, is this democratic? Or in what sense is it democratic?  But maybe this is another strand of the information inflation story.  Could there be such a thing as democracy-inflation?  Can democracy be devalued?

And as to whether being democratic means being 'good', there's a quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin, but apparently erroneously, that

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.

Whoever said it, it is a useful reminder that we can't uncritically equate democracy with good.

Information in school reports: the layered communication model

Further to my post last week, let's model the communication from teacher to parent, considering just a single subject for simplicity.

The teacher know lots about John, but inputs into the software just the name ("John", which is the address of the message), and the selection from one of fours levels, choosing in this case "m" (which is the message payload).

The software delivers a full report to the parents:

John has extended his knowledge of a variety of computer programs and he can log into the network without support.  He has explored a variety of features included in software for composing music and is aware that questions can be turned into search criteria when using data handling programs.  He has found information relating to his topic work from given websites on the worldwide web and explains patterns that govern a computer simulation

This is how I see the communication using the layered model and trapeziums to represent the coding and decoding (see my chapter in Ramage and Chapman or read the posts labelled trapezium in this blog).

The binary coding at the bottom isn't really relevant to this discussion (and could even introduce confusion between information bits and binary digits) but I think helps as a reminder of the way layers work.  So the dashed lines show the virtual communication, and we can see the virtual communication of an m which is actually communicated by a binary representation. (Further confusion here because of course the Report King software will actually be working with binary representations and the m will presumably be ascii coded somewhere - but this isn't relevant to the model.)

The interesting bit, of course, is the layer above. The pretence is that the whole paragraph that the parent reads has been communicated virtually from the teacher. The reality is very different. The teacher - hopefully - does know lots about John and could communicate a full paragraph (and much more), but actually they have encoded their entire knowledge of John into the choice of 'm' (that John is an "average to more able achiever").  It was Report King that generated the paragraph.

A key point is the mismatch between the encoding and the decoding. The binary decoding just reverses the binary encoding, but the teacher encoding is different from the Report King decoding. Not entirely different of course, because the school teaches to the National Curriculum which the Report King uses the National Curriculum to do the decoding - that's why the Report King system works at all.

Apart from the message about information inflation, which is where this discussion started in last week's post, this model draws attention to the role of the encoding and decoding in communication. For example, decoding can never be perfect (even the binary decoding might get it wrong), and since they happen at different times and/or different places in some senses they are always completely independent? That's for further exploration at another time.

Differences are the things that get into the map

Let us go back to the map and territory and ask: “what is it in the territory that gets into the map?” We know the territory does not get into the map. That is central point about which we here are all agreed. Now, if the territory were all uniform, nothing would get into the map except the boundaries, which are the points at which it ceases to be uniform against some larger matrix. What gets into the map, in fact, is difference, be it a difference in altitude, a difference in vegetation, a difference in population structure, difference in surface, or what-ever. Differences are the things that get into the map.

Gregory Bateson, Steps to an ecology of the mind, p320
http://www.seekeraftertruth.com/ebook-gregory-bateson-steps-to-an-ecology-of-mind-1972/

More musings on maps

Further to yesterday's post:

Maps can be wrong

A street shown on the map might not exist, or might not go where it is shown to go. Or there might be a street that's not shown on the map

Or they might be misleading

[Added 29/11/11, suggestion by Chris Bissell] French IGN maps don't distinguish properly between very minor roads and tracks that cannot really be driven on.

Or they might impose decisions

Maps give names to locations, but who has the authority to decide where the area boundaries are? Sometimes there is a recognised authority - eg local government boundaries - but does everyone recognise the authority?

(A little anecdote on parish council maps. A few years ago I was a Parish Councillor on the Woolstone-cum-Willen Parish Council. We decided the ancient name of Woolstone-cum-Willen no longer fairly represented the modern parish in Milton Keynes, and renamed ourselves Campbell Park Parish Council. Unfortunately I read in the local newspaper yesterday that the Parish boundaries are being revised, and Campbell Park is being taken out of Campbell Park Parish Council and moved to Central Milton Keynes. They probably can't go back to Woolstone-cum-Willen because it seems likely that Willen will also be removed from their parish.)

So maps define the territory

Parish council boundaries might not count for much in defining territory but national boundaries can be much more influential (I've touched in this before).

Also, what the maps allow or don't allow determine what can exist. If there's no way of representing something on the map (if it is not defined in the map key), it doesn't exist in the universe of the map.  But since we only know anything through the map, it doesn't exist at all until we find a map to put it on - extend an existing map by putting a new object on the map key, or draw up a new map.

So the compiler of the map is a powerful person

But the choice of which map to use also defines the territory

London is very different depending on whether you navigate with an A to Z, a map of the tube, or a bus map.

London underground

Central London bus map

Maps from the Transport for London website

Maps and information

Maps

Start from the idea that 'the territory' is everything, reality, all that stuff out there (if there is anything).

• A map is a representation of the territory. The map has a finite set of objects and relationships which can be manipulated.  The map provides the language to tell a story, which is to say to understand something.


• The territory is impossibly big: we cannot know anything except through maps. We cannot understand the territory, we can only understand maps of the territory.


• We can improve maps - make the bigger scale, put more things in them - but eventually they cease to be any use.  A 1:1 map's no good to anyone - if it were possible - it'd be just as incomprehensible as the territory


• But no one map serves all purposes, so we have more than one map. We have different maps for different activities. That does not make one map right and another one wrong.  They are all wrong, if by that we mean they are not the territory.

We take as a working assumption that there is a territory out there, but all we can do is observe whether our maps 'work' or not. If we make decisions based on the map and we get the results that the map predicts, then we reckon that the map is a good map of the territory. If it doesn't work, we reckon there's something wrong with the map.

When I travel to London I generally take both an A-Z street map and an topological map of the underground. If I travelled to parts of London that I don't know without a map I'd be completely lost.

Using the same map as someone else makes communication possible.

Information

So what's this got to do with information? Two things - and this starts to get self-referential.

• Informational ideas provide a new map.


• Maps are information. Maps exist in the universe of information.

A map built on informational ideas (including the idea that maps are information) is a useful new way of understanding the world.

Consciousness. Surely it IS the big question?

Neuroscientist Colin Blakemore talks to Jim Al-Khalili about his life and work in ‘The Life Scientific’ on Radio 4 (Link to audio file.)

It focuses a lot on animal experimentation, but I was intrigued by Blakemore suggesting that consciousness may not be the biggest question.

(5:45 minutes in)

Al-Khalili: Would you agree that maybe the biggest question of all is what is consciousness? Is the brain just a complex computer in our heads, can you really say that… the most profound thoughts or feelings are down to biochemistry? 

Blakemore: Mmm, err, well I mean consciousness looks likes, feels like, smells like, something really important and intriguing and interesting… feels as though it must be really important as a phenomenon.  I would say we are not even sure of that.  We don’t know what it is, we don’t know what it does, so we don’t know whether it is a hard problem or an easy problem really to solve, or even a relevant problem. Is it as important as knowing about what nerve cells are connected to what in the brain? Do we really need to know about consciousness in order to explain how brains work, that is a very hot issue. I think probably you are right consciousness is a big question but there isn’t a general agreement on that

Seems a bit evasive to me. Maybe it is not a problem neuroscience can address. Maybe even we don't need to know about consciousness in order to explain how brains work, but surely it is the Big Question (or part of it, anyway), as I suggested before.

Information inflation: school reports

It is said there's more information around today than ever before. It is taken as a given fact, though people argue over whether it is a good thing or not (information riches or information glut?). But is it necessarily true?

A few years back, before the financial downturn, people in the UK would say ‘there’s more money around’ to account for the fact that people seemed to be consuming and acquiring goods more than ever before.  You could have used the same expression: ‘there’s more money around’, about the Weimar Republic, in the 1920s & 30,  but it would have meant something entirely different

Stamps from the Weimar Republic, showing inflation (from left to right: 1923, 1926 & 1928)

So, is the apparent increase in information real or hyperinflation?

With money you can make some meaningful comparisons - I was once told that the price of a Mars Bar is a good benchmark - but how can you do that for information?

I've been pondering this for a while (and had a paper on the topic rejected!). Here's some evidence for information inflation.

School reports, when I was a child, consisted of one or two hand-written sentences on each subject.  The reports that my children have brought home are much more substantial: a printed booklet with paragraphs of, typically, between 50 and 200 words on each subject. At face value, I’m getting a lot more information about my children than my parents got about me.

School reports today are frequently put together with the aid of specialised software that reduces the workload on the teacher.  An extreme example of this is The Report King that can be used in England.  Using this software, all that a teacher needs to input is the name of the pupils and their grades for each subject, selected from a pre-defined set such as: h for higher achiever, m for average to more able achiever, l for average to less able achiever and sen for students with special educational needs.  The software then writes the whole report, drawing on the statements contained in the National Curriculum for England. For example,  entering m for ICT for one pupil (John), generated:

John has extended his knowledge of a variety of computer programs and he can log into the network without support.  He has explored a variety of features included in software for composing music and is aware that questions can be turned into search criteria when using data handling programs.  He has found information relating to his topic work from given websites on the worldwide web and explains patterns that govern a computer simulation

Entering the same grade for another pupil would generate a similar but different paragraph, because the software makes use of different wording and draws on different parts of the curriculum to ensure two different pupils don’t get the same report.

In terms of the Shannon model of communication, the message from the teacher is entirely specified by the name of the pupil and the grade.  Since the grade was a selection of one from four, the information content (assuming each of the four grades was equally probable) about the pupil’s performance is 2 bits.  That whole paragraph (73 words) is a symbol for the message m.

Comparing this to the hand-written sentence of times past, it is easy to see that a written sentence is likely to contain a lot more than two bits of information. Even the most harried teacher is likely to be selecting their sentence from a lot more than four possibilities.  For really effective communication, though, the face-to-face meeting at the parents evening is still, as it always was, better than the report, whether hand-crafted or computer generated.

There’s an argument that there is more information in the computer-generated report, in this case information about the National Curriculum, but it’s not about John and it’s not from the teacher.

In conclusion, just as to say 'there's more money around' due to hyperinflation is a misuse of the word 'money', so too - maybe - to say there is more information around today is a misuse of the word information.