The Information Paradox
By Peter J. Denning, Tim Bell
Classical information theory has no room for meaning--but humans persist in assigning meaning. How can we reconcile this difference?
This Article From Issue
November-December 2012
Volume 100, Number 6
Page 470
DOI: 10.1511/2012.99.470
Since mathematician and communications engineer Claude Shannon developed information theory in the 1940s, the study of information has advanced rapidly. But along with the development of the field and its widespread effects on people’s lives has appeared a series of perplexing questions. Most scientific disciplines rely on information-processing methods to discover new knowledge, and many scientists now say that information processes appear in nature. Even so, our models of these processes assume that the processes evolve without depending in any way on the meaning of the information they contain. How can such processes generate new knowledge?
Photograph courtesy of IBM.
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