>Glenn says:
>>As a point of fact, a randomly chosen sequence has more information in it
>>than an ordered sequence
>
>You must intuitively sense that this is not true. A random sequence only
>has information in it if it has had information imposed upon it by an
>outside system. There is no information in a random sequence whatsoever.
No Art, I have no such sense. (some may say no sense at all but that is
another issue)
This is an extremely important point that creationists have messed up
when it comes to information theory and evolution. I have quoted
Yockey before as saying that it is fundamentally undecidable whether
a sequence was created by a organizing agent, I. e. God or man
or whether it was created by stochastic (chance) process.
The reason is that information in a sequence is measured by how
compressable that sequence is. A sequence
aaaaaaa....
Is compressible to an extremely short sequence, and it carries no
information, either externally imposed or intrinsic.
The sequence
A cat licks its paw
and
X vxw kocvd owd lxs
have the same level of information within information theory.
Both are exactly compressible to the same degree. Is there external meaning
in the second sentence? Yes, if you do a simple letter substitution
x=a v=c w=t k=l o=i v=c d=s l=p s=w
perform this substitutions and you have "A cat licks its paws"
The sequence "zhe zhi mao wei jiao yong tong she" has the same outside imposed
information as "a cat licks its paws" That is close to how it would be said
in mandarin. But the information content is different. Meaning does not
equal information.
But if you find a sequence of random letters, and you find a sequence
that can be substituted so that a meaning can be imputed to that
sequence, does this mean that the author intended such a thing?
Not necessarily.
A highly organized sequence of letters looks exactly like a
highly random sequence of letters. A highly organized
sequence of letters has lots of information because it is
incompressible. The same goes for a random sequence.