I think you are equivocating on two different meanings of the word
information. There is semantic meaning which we often refer to as
information but it is not the technical definition of information. I will
see if I can illustrate this
At 03:07 PM 12/23/97 -0700, John W. Burgeson wrote:
>Glenn said,
>
>" What do I mean when I say, "is, is, is, is, is, is," There
>simply is no information there to be extracted"
>
>That is, of course, an assumption I might make.
>It is not the only assumption I might make!
>
>What do my Catholic friends mean when they recite the rosary? The chief
>difference apparent (to a non-English speaking person) is the length of
>the repetitive message.
I am not an expert in the rosary but there is more information in each
repetition of "Hail Mary full of Grace," than there is in the content of
"is" The sequence is longer and has a longer period of repetition. The
sequence takes a larger algorithm to compress it so it does have more info.
"Om" of our Eastern friends has the same information content as 'is' but
less than "Hail Mary"
>
>I'll cite another.
>
>Here is my Christmas greeting to you -- and all on the LISTSERV.
>
>ABCDEFGHIJKMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
>
Technically there is a lot of information in that sequence. It is not very
compressible. The sequence,
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
is quite compressible and has no information. Remember, information is not
equivalent to semantic meaning. Meaning is a convention agreed upon by two
people. Information is an objective mathematically defined term.
>Is this a "junk" message or is there content?
Neither. there is no message in the sense of there being a semantic
meaning. There is no content, but there is lots of information.
glenn
Adam, Apes, and Anthropology: Finding the Soul of Fossil Man
and
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm