The Meaning In The Message
Everything Is Interrelated - The Message Has No Meaning Unless We Attribute Meaning To It
It sometimes amazes me how much my technological field of endeavor, AI Theory, and AI itself cross over into the realm of writing about war, politics, Israel, and the human condition. Today, I was given another reminder of how everything is interrelated.
I received an email that someone had commented on a post of mine over at Medium, where I used to post a great deal about technology and AI. The post was a simple one. “Information Theory — A Short Introduction” deals with the history of information theory. Yes, for The View From Israel readers, that is probably boring. So, let me get to the meat of the matter.
The genius mind of Claude Shannon introduced Information Theory. And to make this clear, there is absolutely nothing you would be doing on your computers or your Substacks or writing into the computer, or any electronic data, without “Information Theory.” And we will not even get into AI and LLMs as that is all based on “Information Theory” as well.
“Information Theory” is that important and critical in the modern age.
I won't dive too deep into it here, but some background is important.
Perhaps Shannon’s greatest achievement was the counter-intuitive approach to analyzing ‘information’ independent of ‘meaning.’ In short, one does not need to consider the message's meaning when dealing with information. Indeed, ‘meaning’ is superfluous to that actual content.
‘Meaning’ is, in effect, meaningless.
That knocks your socks off the first time you wrap your head around it. How can meaning be meaningless?
Well, there is a caveat here. Ahh! You knew it! There had to be a trick. Hold on, it is not what you think.
Information Theory deals with how computers deal with information, not how we, as humans and supposedly sentient beings, deal with information. We, of course, attach meaning to every piece of information, every inflection of tone, every facial expression, every body movement, every twitch of the lip or the eyes.
But let us go on a bit deeper for a moment. Follow my madness here, as I always write in The View From Israel - “there is method to my madness.” (My kids, of course, do not agree. They think I am bonkers.)
A Small Amount Of Explanation of Information Theory
So, let us back up for a few minutes to the history of Information Theory.
In 1948, at Bell Laboratories, Claude Shannon published a paper with an immeasurable impact on modern technology and data analysis. In ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication,’1 now commonly known as ‘The Magna Carta of the Information Age,’ Shannon introduced the mind-boggling notion that information can be quantified and measured. He applied Boolean logic to a whole new cosmos while adding his personal touch of genius.
Before Shannon’s paper, information had been viewed as a kind of poorly defined miasmic fluid. But after Shannon’s paper, it became apparent that information is a well-defined and, above all, measurable quantity…
… Shannon’s theory of information provides a mathematical definition of information, and describes precisely how much information can be communicated between different elements of a system. This may not sound like much, but Shannon’s theory underpins our understanding of how signals and noise are related, and why there are definite limits to the rate at which information can be communicated within any system, whether man-made or biological.’2
‘The resulting units’, wrote Shannon, ‘may be called binary digits, or more briefly, bits’.3
‘The bit now joined the inch, the pound, the quart, and the minute as a determinate quantity — a fundamental unit of measure. But measuring what? “A unit for measuring information”, Shannon wrote, as though there were such a thing, measurable and quantifiable, as information.’4
As Shannon wrote in the second introductory paragraph of ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’:
‘The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages. The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design.’5
Simply put, information theory is fundamental to everything.
‘But before Shannon, there was precious little sense of information as an idea, a measurable quantity, an object fitted out for hard science. Before Shannon, information was a telegram, a photograph, a paragraph, a song. After Shannon, information was entirely abstracted into bits. The sender no longer mattered, the intent no longer mattered, the medium no longer mattered, not even the meaning mattered: a phone conversation, a snatch of Morse telegraphy, a page from a detective story were all brought under a common code.’6
Paradoxically, by ignoring the meaning of a message and showing how insignificant ‘meaning’ is to an actual message, Shannon gave the world true meaning and the ability to handle massive amounts of data securely and coherently.
Do You See Where I Am Going With This?
Let me spell it out.
To use the electronic medium, “Information Theory” came along and said, “Guess what? There is no meaning in that message. Squeeze out every iota of superfluous information, and you will get the actual real message. Meaning is meaningless. Information is a series of bits (and later on, bytes) added to it.”
So, for those of you who did follow, and I am sure you all did, when you read a Substack, a tweet, a post, or watch a reel on Insta, your brains do the same thing. The brain squeezes out every piece of information you deem irrelevant, and you make your decisions based upon the “bits” that made an impression upon your brain cells.
Guess what “fake news” is? It is the bits and bytes of information where one realizes that there is nothing of relevance within the information, nor is it grounded in any reality.
Reading through Substacks, articles in the news, and listening to podcasts also offers the same experience. All of these use Information Theory and rely on your ability as sentient beings to interpret information as you see it, hear it, or read it.
Nothing has meaning to the information data itself. It is meaningless. The moment it hits our brains, it takes on meaning. And we put our own spin on it.
The Meaning In The Message
Here is a link to a YouTube video that is from the advertisements for this year’s Super Bowl. Listen to it.
Those are some of the questions that have arisen after the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, the group founded in 2019 by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, placed a 30-second ad during the game titled “Silence” that featured Clarence B. Jones, the longtime advisor, and speechwriter for Martin Luther King Jr. (The organization also replayed a different ad it produced last year during the pregame show.)
The ad shows Jones in his study and then, against his voiceover, displays images of a burning cross and swastika and the hashtag “#hitlerwasright.” It then shifts to showing people taking action against recent displays of hate, including Islamophobia and anti-Black racism.
This is the text of the ad:
“I’d remind people that all hate thrives on one thing: silence,” Joes says in the ad, imagining what he’d write in a speech meant for King to deliver today. “The people who will change the nation are those who speak out, who refuse to be bystanders, who raise their voices against injustice. When we stand up to silence, we stand up to all hate.”
The ad concludes with the slogan “Stand up to Jewish hate,” which then changes to “Stand up to all hate.”
Now, that message was delivered to hundreds of millions of people because of the genius of Claude Shannon. It extracts all meaning from the message; It allows the electronic medium to move it into bits to make its way instantly to the entire world. It, in essence, has no meaning until our brains make sense of it.
Hopefully, now all get the message (pun entirely intended.) Information Theory states there is no meaning in any message. Meaning is Meaningless. And this is 100% correct.
But when that information reaches its intended destination, “meaning” is then attached to the message. By removing it of its meaning in order to send it - we actually give it meaning in the end result. Paradoxical? Such is the splendor and beauty of our Universe. Full of paradoxes.
So, you can choose to leave the message in its “meaningless” state. Or you can choose to ignore the message. Or you can choose to accept that the message must be understood.
No matter what you decide, the message is clear. It is unambiguous. It requires no more than a millisecond of thought.
“When we stand up to silence, we stand up to all hate.”
“Silence Is Not An Option.”
Otherwise, you are left with this:
Which becomes this:
And here is another unequivocal message for you:
“Let Our People Go”
Shannon, C. (1948) ‘A mathematical theory of communication’, Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, July/October, pp. 379–423
Stone, J.V. (2018) ‘Information Theory: A Tutorial Introduction’, Sebtel Press, Kindle Edition, Location 82
Shannon, ref. 1 above.
Gleick, J. (2011) ‘The Information’, Pantheon Books, New York, NY, Kindle Edition, Location 66.
Shannon, ref. 1 above.
Soni, J. and Goodman, R. (2017) ‘A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age’, Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, Kindle Edition, Location 69.