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Information

Eugenio Sarti

I. Terminological Clarifications - II. The Codification of Information - III. The Transdisciplinarity of the Concept of Information: Technology, Biology and Physics. 1. Information in the Context of the Relation between Human Beings and Machines. 2. Information in the World of Living Organisms: Genetic Information. 3. Information in the Physical Universe: Information and Natural Laws 4. An Overall Outlook. - IV. The Theory of Information - V. The Birth of Informatics - VI. Telematics and Internet. - VII. The Society of Information - VIII. Information within Theological Reflections.

I. Terminological Clarifications

Terms such as “to inform”, “information”, “form” and “formulation”, which are used daily in common language, were used first by classical and medieval philosophers. Today, they are widely used by technicians in the computer world, in communication and in logic. Given the variation in their usage, it will be necessary to begin with an analysis of these terms to clarify the use I will make of them in the course of this present study.

The word “to inform” means, in a more common sense, to transmit knowledge, “to inform someone by giving them news, dates and the like”. Frequently, this term has a practical nature, since whoever informs expects the listener to use the information received and modify his or her behavior as a consequence. In fact, to transmit knowledge which does not demand a practical and direct response, other verbs are preferred, such as “to explain”, “to describe”, “to teach”. This practical emphasis of the verb “to inform” seems connected to the original significance of the word, which is related to the expression “to model according to a form”. In fact, “to inform” derives from “form” (lat. in-formare, that is ,to “give form”). There is, therefore, an original “operative” value in it: the information — understood as the action of informing — produces a form. Today, this meaning is certainly lessened, but not completely abandoned, and sometimes elevated to the cultured language: we say, for example, “to inform one’s own conduct to moral values”. Yet this practical emphasis is not exclusive, because information is at the root of every transmission of knowledge, even in a theoretical sense: we learn as we are informed. Information is therefore a vehicle for knowledge. Lets now look a little more closely at the sense of the two words “form” and “information”.

The semantic field for the term “form” is very wide. As has been highlighted by various dictionaries, it comprises specific uses in innumerable disciplines such as biology, geography, crystallography, botany, electronics, mathematics, meteorology, and the science of construction, as well as the multiplicity of meanings in the linguistic sphere. Nevertheless the original philosophical significance of the word is put into relief, defined with reference to the Greek morphé: the appearance of an object, sufficient to characterize it externally; in philosophy, the active principle of distinction of the essence, dynamically contrasted with the matter. Indeed, in the classical philosophical context (above all Aristotilean) “form” was normally correlated to “matter”. The relationship is that which passes between potentiality and realization, a bit like clay when it assumes the shape of a brick: the work of an external agent takes the brick from a potential state (shapeless clay) to its present state (clay in the shape of a brick).

As regards the term “information”, it includes the two principal aspects already contained in the words “inform” and “form”. The first is «an act consisting of the giving to a being the “substantial form”, vegetative life, sensitive or intellectual; an act that determines its nature, that makes it pass from potency to act». In this sense, information is “actualization” of the matter as potency, that which links the matter to the form in the sense seen above. But we can also see a second significance for information: «the act by which news is given or received, that is, knowledge, notions». It has already been pointed out that it is really this meaning that is today, unquestionably, more common and immediate. It is interesting to note that, within the framework of classical Aristotilean-Thomistic philosophy, these two significances are closely linked. In fact, if, in the first sense, the form actualizes the matter (as potency) giving rise to objects in the physical world, in the second sense, form, regarding intelligibility, actualizes the (potential) intellect, giving rise to knowledge. In the modern language there remain only residual links with the original significances, but we will see, proceeding in stages, that they are again finding space in our culture, principally as a result of scientific research and technological advancement.

There is another link between information and form: to be transmitted, the information must, in fact, be “formulated” (therefore we are led to a new concept, that of “formulation”), that is, fixed according to a “code” which is shared between the transmitter and the receiver. The word “code” (with its derivations “coded” and “to codify”) is very important. It is not intended here in the usual significance of “organic set of laws” (as for instance when we speak of the Civil Code or of the highway code), but rather in the significance, become now equally common, of “system of signals”, or of signs or symbols that for preliminary conventions are destined to represent and to transmit information between the source (emitter) of the signals and the point of destination (receiver). Stated simply, “to codify” means to provide information with a “form” recognizable by the receiver. Such is, for example, the natural language between people who speak the same mother tongue: the form is given by the words, by the grammatical and syntactical constructions and by their “codification” both in terms of the sounds of vocal transmission and the graphic symbols used in written transmission. Such are also the scientific languages, and in particular the mathematical language which occupies a position of absolute predominance in technology and in some natural sciences (the so-called “mathematized” sciences).

Scientific language poses another problem of sharing, which also exists in common practice, dealing with the “context” in which information is placed, that is, the patrimony of previous knowledge to which the information makes an implicit appeal, which must already be known to both the receiver and to the sender. Therefore the information, in order to be received, must be situated within an adequate “texture of knowledge”, so that the formal structure, in which the information must be placed in order to be received, can also be very complex ( SYMBOL, III).

There exists, thus, a double link between information and form: information can transmit form, but it must be codified, in turn, by a form. The “forming” information contains codified the “form” that it will give to the “matter”. But, on the other hand, the code is, itself, a form: codifying gives form to the information, and this form represents the form that will be given to the receiving matter. Therefore, the information stabilizes a relationship between the two forms, in which one “signifies” the other: it contains a form, and is, itself, contained in a form. Thus, the information-form relation is a circular relation. But it is also more. If we look at the code that represents and carries the information, we find that it also, as a form, realizes an information that contains a code of a higher level, more general and synthetic. We can think, for example, of the syntax with which the genetic code is codified, or that of the language of this text. And so it continues, so that we can see the whole as a great architecture in which information and form are stratified in levels one on top of the other. Every form has the function, in some way, of the archetype (or analogous to a superior level) of the form of the inferior level, so that the whole of reality appears organized according to a vertical order, a hierarchy of forms that, at least in analogy, reflect the hierarchy of the existing beings.

II. The Codification of Information

Information presents itself as something immaterial, but needs material carriers to travel and to be conserved. The memorization of information on technical supports and its transmission for a distance have posed problems for codification that are worth exploring. Until the end of the 18th Century voice and writing were almost exclusive for the transmission of information. In vocal transmission, the concepts are codified in words and grammatical constructions and syntaxes, and these are translated into intelligible sounds by the receiver. The codification and the de-codification happen at a cerebral level. In written transmission something else happens. The sounds of the words are represented with graphic symbols and these, by means of a technical process, are printed on the page; whoever receives them must understand how to read what is written. We have here a double formalization: of the concept in words and of the words in graphic symbols (for example, the Latin alphabet). There is also, at least potentially, a double impression on the material support, that is, a double “formation” of the material, first (at least potentially) in sounds and then in signs on the page.

This multiple codification, at other levels, becomes more complex when it begins to transmit the information over a distance, in general by electrical means. In the original realization of the telegraph, an operator closes and opens a switch and so transcribes, by a succession of electrical impulses, a message that has been received in written form; these impulses travel along a conductive cable and, at the receiving end, make a machine print on a strip of paper. A second operator reads it and transcribes it into letters of the alphabet, words and sentences. It is, therefore, a new phase of codifying and de-codifying, that is again entrusted to “specialists” who know nothing of the message they are transmitting, but know how to write in the alphabet of impulses suitable to travel through electrical cables; the alphabet, instead, is probably indecipherable for the person who generated the message and the person who received it.

It is interesting to observe that this codification through impulses is typically “binary”, not different from those used a century later in computers and then in the greater part of telecommunications systems In Morse code, every letter of the alphabet is represented by an ordered succession of two elementary symbols: a dot and a line, a short impulse or a long one. But optical telegraphs, used since ancient times especially within a military perspective, also used codified forms of only two (or very few) symbols (light or dark, smoke or no smoke). So the binary code, of which our technology boasts as its own a brilliant discovery, in reality is not a recent invention, but a continuation of a method used by our distant ancestors!

In the telephone, a different process takes place. The variations of pressure of the sound wave, emitted by the voice, are translated by the membrane of the microphone into variations of electrical currents and these are transformed into variations of pressure by the membrane of the receiving device (that is properly called “telephone”). The variations of the current are proportional to the variations of the pressure. Forcing the significance of the terms a little bit , we can speak here of an “analogic codification”, in the sense that the profile of variations of the currents is “analogous” to that of the atmospheric pressure produced by the emission of the voice. Also in this case, the product of the codification itself is not even intelligible to the person who transmits or to the person who receives (moreover, it is not even perceptible to the senses); it is not generated by a human operator but rather by a machine. It should be noted that this same analogic codification is used in the recording of records (vinyl discs) and magnetic tapes: the waveforms of the sound are reproduced in a track in the first case and, in the second, in the level of magnetization of a layer of iron oxides.

In radio and TV transmissions a further codification is introduced: the “modulation”. To be diffused by the antennae, the message must be “carried” by a high frequency electromagnetic wave. For this purpose, an electronic circuit generates a signal (a wave of constant amplitude) appropriate to transmission, which is then modified in order to represent the original information. Therefore, in this case, there is a sequence of codifications, that, for example, could be schematized like this: information to be transmitted → Vocal emission → Conversion into an electric signal (microphone) → Modulation (and transmission) → (Reception and) demodulation → Acoustic reproduction (loudspeaker) → Listening by the receiver’s ear → Information received. In every one of these phases a different material (the vocal chords, air, the current in the microphone, the electromagnetic wave, etc.) is “formed” in a different form, and all the forms represent the same information. But only the extremes are perceptible and significant for those who transmit and receive them: in the middle there is a “gray zone” in which the information is hidden in a form inaccessible to perception. Therefore, the technique inserts into the process an irreparably artificial element which is non-human. This differs from the technique of printing, in which whoever knows how to read can decipher the message and so be informed.

In electronic computers, something happens which is different from what happens with telephones and record discs, but more similar to the telegraph. All the information, of whatever kind — the word of a verbal message, punctuation mark, mathematical number or operative symbol, graphic signs and musical notation — is dealt with in the same way. It is codified in a sequence of bits: to be precise, of elementary entities that can be only “0” or “1”. The ASCII code, frequently used for text, uses sequences of eight bits (1 byte) to represent the letters of the alphabet, numbers, punctuation marks and a certain number of graphic signs and symbols: the capital letter A, for example, is represented by the sequence 01000001, while the lower case a is represented by the sequence 0110001. The figures can be codified in a variety of ways. Those conceptually more simple (although unwieldy because of the number of bits they employ) consist in the subdivision of the figure into a large number of elementary smaller areas, and to each of them is attributed a “word” which is formed of many bits that serve to individualize the color, shades and luminous intensity.

The bits are then transformed into electrical impulses which circulate in the computer circuitry which can modify their sequence by executing operations on them — for example, if they represent mathematical entities — or stably conserve their sequence, as magnetized points in the “memory” (see below, V). At other times the bits are transmitted over distance by electric cables or optical fibres, or converted into electromagnetic waves and broadcast. Or they become microscopic pores on the underside of a CD, a compact disc, which an optical reader re-converts into music or computer programs.

Because the basic element of codification, the bit, can only take one of two values, this code is termed “binary” or “digital”: in our case the numbers “0” or “1”. At first adopted for numerical computers (once called “digital calculators”), it is now spreading into all technical sectors of computing and information transmission, in which it substitutes the codification I have called “analogic”. Thus the CD has replaced the vinyl disk, while, more and more frequently, in telephone communications, our vocal inflections are codified into sequences of bits. Even television, the last great area in which the analogic codification process still survives, is beginning to convert itself to the digital form.

The reason for this is simple, and is well exemplified by the CD, which is much smaller than the vinyl disk, yet nevertheless permits a much higher quality of reproduction. It transmits a broader frequency band, without distortion and with a wider “dynamic”: to be precise, with a major difference in the acoustic level between “very soft” and “very loud”. This higher quality of digital information depends on a more basic fact: once codified into digital form, the information is somehow indestructible. Analogic information is, on the other hand, subject to deterioration. If, while on the telephone, some disturbance occurs (on the telephone line itself or in the neighboring environment) the quality of some words is lost and, therefore, the significance of what is heard is also partially lost; if the analogic disk is scratched, the listening quality is also compromised. This does not happen with “digitalized” information. It will be evident later on that it is always possible to codify the information in a way that renders it immune to disturbances that would otherwise disrupt an analogic counterpart. It is possible to compute and transmit information in a “perfect” manner: once digitalized, the information participates in the “perfection of number”, the actual perfection of mathematics. The digital code introduces, in a particular way, a perfection into the technical world.

III. The Transdisciplinarity of the Concept of Information: Technology, Biology and Physics

As a transmission of knowledge, information has initially been considered as an activity specific to subjects capable of and aware of understanding. The list of the subjects capable of information is growing progressively longer, raising notable problems regarding the relationship between information and knowledge, until at times the very meaning of the word “knowledge” becomes problematic. I will therefore explore this extension of meaning and conclude by mentioning some resonances within the philosophical field.

1. Information in the Context of the Relation between Human Beings and Machines. It is easy to see that the technical world today is dominated by the concept of information, so much so that information itself has become the characteristic element. At first the technical tool had been seen only as a means for the transmission of information between humans, but successively we have begun to speak of information also for communication between man and machine: the designer and the production technician communicate to the automatic machine the information relative to the fabrication of a product: for example, the paddle of a turbine. It is interesting to observe that here, in the technical activity and in the role that the information has, we can recognize the four Aristotilean causes ( MECHANICS, V.3). In fact, information involves, as has already been noted, primarily the “formal cause”; but it also contains the commands that will be imparted to the machine: to be precise, the “efficient cause”, that is applied to the metal that cuts (the “material cause”) and realizes the artificial object. The role of the “final cause” would appear if we asked ourselves, for example, what aim the technician proposes when he creates the paddle of the turbine, wheteher it is the production of electrical energy, the propulsion of an airplane or something else, and what then would be the aim for which the airplane is destined. But it is not necessary to think about machines based on numerical control, which only constitute perhaps an extreme example: every technical project, even on paper, contains all the necessary information for the production of the object. In this way, technology itself reclaims the original significance of the word information: to be precise, “that which gives form”. The information inherent to the constructive process gives form to the object constructed.

In the field of information engineering it must be recognized that, with the development of informatics techniques, the word information has also been applied to the communication between machine and machine. At first, information science, and now information engineering (that is to say what we designate as a whole with the name of “informatics”), concerns the information circulating inside computers and between computers connected in a network. At this point, if we could ignore the fact that computers manipulate “human knowledge” — an element frequently ignored, but not at all secondary — the information-knowledge equivalence would seem lost. Those who occupy themselves with  artificial intelligence tend to speak of “knowledge” also for machines, without further reference to the operator who uses them. But the question remains, therefore, even in this case, if we speak in an actual sense and not only metaphorically ,of an “intelligent knowledge”, something that would seem excluded by the irreducibility of the relationship between semantics and syntax (see below, IV).

2. Information in the World of Living Organisms: Genetic Information. Information circulates not only in the world of human beings, but also in the animal world, and even in that of the vegetable. Ethology has demonstrated that animals communicate among themselves, exchanging information useful to the life of the group or for their defense from other aggressors. These are messages exchanged between animals of the same species or sent to animals of a different species which are capable of decoding them and of developing a corresponding behavior. Something similar also happens in communication between animals and human beings: many people speak of some form of “dialogue”, sometimes very refined and sensitive, with domestic animals. Communication among animals often involves an exchange of very complex information: the bee that has discovered a source of food, for example, describes to its companions, with a beautiful “dance”, the topography of the place towards which it wants to direct them.

A quite interesting semantic extension of the concept and properties of information today is that which regards  biology. It has been discovered that the life of every organism, whether simple or complex, depends in an essential way on the circulation of biochemical signals, neuro-electric and perhaps of other types, that transmit the necessary information to the harmonious development of the vital processes. Scientists tend to see the living organism as a gigantic chemical laboratory on one hand and, on the other hand, as a very complicated network of transmissions of information necessary for its functioning. In this respect, even more crucial is the discovery of the genetic information that presides over the formation of new organisms ( GENETICS, II-III). This discovery of the role of information in the maintenance and transmission of life has been, for biology, a great conquest, because it has allowed the progression from a simple description of the phenomena to an analysis of the way in which thay are caused. Two important aspects here appear. The first is that the information presides over the formation of new organisms; therefore it “gives”, “communicates” form (we find again the connection between the two meanings of the word: “to give form” and “to communicate”). The second, is that it presides over the ordered development of the vital processes. To be precise, information plays a role of “organizer”. Certain diseases, for example, that we perceive as “pathologic disorder”, are the result of a mistaken reading of information.

The presence of information and of the exchange of information necessary to the functional processes of living organisms seems to be in strict connection with that unique property of life which concerns its tendency to conserve and reproduce itself. Life is the center of an intrinsic finality within nature, in which information plays a decisive role, regulating the processes of coordinationation and orientation ( FINALITY, II). And so life seems to be the center of “information” at many levels. First of all, at the level of a single living individual, whose specificity within the environment and the biological, chemical and physical elements that make existence possible, is the depository of a particular “form”, that which gives unity and meaning to the living subject. Secondly, at the level of complex codified information that ensures to the subject all that is necessary to develop its vital functions, making it the final point of reference of their reciprocal coordination and in the relationship with other information coming from the environment.

3. Information in the Physical Universe: Information and Natural Laws. An ulterior transdisciplinary extension of the concept of information, although of a rather different nature, occurs in the physical and chemical sciences. In this case the “communication” does not occur between living organisms, nor between human beings and the results of the really clever technology in which they have inserted an automatic language, but rather between the non-living world and us. The researcher acquires a certain knowledge of the physical world thanks to the information that he or she finds in some ways codified within nature, under the form of properties or laws. We therefore have here a different way to understand information, that no longer comes from an active subject, but is extracted, so to speak, from the object studied by the the subject that studies it. If it is true that the researcher “imposes a form” on nature through the mathematical formulation of “scientific laws”, it is also true that his or her knowledge “is informed” by the “laws of nature” and by those objective properties, independent of the subject, that make possible their formulation in terms of numerical constants or scientific algorithms (  LAWS OF NATURE, V). The researcher can impose a form not only by means of mathematical algorithms, but also through “models”, that will subsequently be verified through experience. The role of modeling is rather important for chemistry, i which it makes it possible to represent and catch forms that are non deducible from the physical standpoint only. In fact these forms involve properties and information emerging only when turning attention to the molecular structure or the compound in its entirety, as if it were a truly new object of study ( CHEMISTRY, IV).

The rising interest in the consideration of the scientist’s activity as an extraction of a certain type of information contained in nature is witnessed by the modern debate on the intelligibility of natural laws and on the significance of the constants of nature. The expression “cosmic code” has been coined to refer to the fine-tuning between the laws that describe the physical principles of phenomena, especially regarding their delicate coordination that allows the existence of the universe itself and, in it, of a chemical and biological niche adequate to host life. But in a much more general line, for the moment leaving out of consideration the philosophical meaning that can be associated with the intelligibility of natural laws or to their coordination, there remains the undisputed fact that the universe is not composed only of matter and energy, but also of information. In other words, the physical universe is not something indeterminate, indefinite or utterly chaotic; instead, it exists with specific properties. In other words, the universe conveys a certain amount of information. Even in this case we find the original meaning of the term: information is that which gives form to matter-energy and also makes the material world knowable, intelligible; and so scientists explore the natural world, giving it the form of the laws with which they describe it. However, the progressive improvement of the knowledge of the laws will be guided by the forms it will receive from nature itself.

4. An Overall Outlook. From the preceding considerations and by the diversified list of meanings that the concept of information evokes, some important relationships seem to emerge. The first is the relationship of circularity existing between information and order. As such, “forming” information produces order: the organism produced by the genetic code appears as an “ordered” system of tissues and vital processes; it is, on the contrary, the biological alterations, and especially those that we define as diseases, that are perceived as “disorder”. Conversely, information is also “described” by an order: the laws present in nature describe the order of the universe (  LAWS OF NATURE, II). If this order — recognized as the coordination of the whole in its parts or as a code — were understood as something original, then it would manifest the “presence of information”, that is, it would reveal the universe as either a producer of, or a material support for, information. A second relationship is that which points in a more explicit way toward the notion of finality. According to original Aristotilean thought, formal cause and final cause are closely linked; the existence of a “formality”, that is of a “piece of information”, in the physical or biological universe, would also indicate the existence of a “finality”. In the light of the relationship between information and knowledge, once finality is understood as a kind of “transport of information”, it would also be adequate to be known, deciphered and recognized by human beings, analogously to the information of which they are subjects and producers.

IV. The Theory of Information

When, at the end of the 1940’s, there was a warning of the need to give order and a scientific base to the technology of information, that was being tumultuously developed during the Second World War, it was necessary to establish a way to measure the “quantity of information”, a necessary operation, even if a little debatable, since information appears as something essentially qualitative and in certain cases subjective (news represents an increase of information only for those who still do not have the knowledge of what it communicates).

Claude Shannon (1916-2001) proposed in 1948 a solution that, although in a very summary and schematic way, held an account of this necessity “to measure” the information with respect to the subject that receives it. In fact, he linked the measure of the information carried by an event to the probability that the event had or had not to happen. If an event is very probable, the fact that it occurs does not “tell us” much: it does not appreciably enrich our knowledge. If, instead, that very probable event does not occur (or its contrary takes place), it is a cause of surprise and reflection: by increasing our knowledge it thus “informs us” all the more. The mathematical formula adopted to measure the quantity (or the contents) of information is identical to that used in thermodynamics to measure entropy, apart from a change of sign. To measure the quantity of information, the term that was initially proposed was “negentropy”, although it did not have much success for understandable euphonic reasons. Today, for such measurement, the word “entropy” has simply been adopted, though moving towards some misunderstanding. The same word signifies, in fact, two opposing things: in thermodynamics an increase of entropy is equivalent to an increase in disorder, while in the theory of information it indicates an increase of order. It thus merits further explanation. In an “isolated system” — to be precise, in a set of bodies without exchange of energy with the external environment — the thermodynamic entropy measures the energy linked to the temperature, that is, the disordered motion of the atoms that compose it: the second principle of thermodynamics says that each irreversible energy transformation implies an increase of the entropy, that is, of the “disorder” ( TIME, II.4). Conversely, it has been seen that the concept of information is linked to the concept of order: genetic information, for example, is carried by the order in which the “bases” follow along the double helix of the DNA (  GENETIC ENGINEERING, III). Another example would be a message codified in binary form; information is given by the order of the sequence of bits with values of “0” and “1”. A greater amount of information is therefore represented by a greater level of order. If, during the transmission of a message, some interference accidentally transforms a “0” into a “1”, or vice versa, we have simultaneously, a reduction of order and a loss of information: to be precise, a decrease of the entropy of the message.

The correspondence between the thermodynamic entropy and the entropy of information is not only formal. It stems from the understanding, in terms of “information”, that we have of those structures in which the physical world is organized. The information of the crystalline structure of ice, for example, is represented by the reciprocal position of its atoms, that is to say, by the fact that their thermal agitation is bound up to develop them around the nodes of a lattice. If the ice melts, the information contained in the lattice is simultaneously destroyed — therefore, the entropy of the information reduces — while the thermal agitation of the particles – to be precise, the thermodynamic entropy — increases.

The quantification of information and the mathematical treatment that follows it (whose foundation is also due to Shannon) permit the solution of some fundamental technical problems found when one wants to transmit a message on a certain support (a “channel”, in technical language). The rate by which it is possible to transmit a signal, codified into binary form for example, is limited by the technical characteristics of the channel. A telephone line (a “twisted pair”, as it is called, because it is made up of two wires) can transmit a certain number of bits per second and no more; a radio broadcast can transmit more, and an optical fibre cable even more still, but always in a limited number. Aong the factors that contribute to produce these limits is the “noise” of the channel: the probability that the “interference” (of the same type we sometimes hear on the telephone, which makes less intelligible what the speaker is saying) transforms some 1’s into 0’s or some 0’s into 1’s. The errors increase with the rate of the transmission, and, beyond a certain rate, the errors can be irreparable. Shannon has demonstrated that there exists a theoretical limit rate (called “transmission capacity”) below which all the errors introduced by interference can be corrected, while over that rate it is no longer possible to do so.

On the other hand, interest is evident in transmitting information at the greatest possible rate, so producing for the same quantity of transmitted information, a saving in the technical equipment. This interest becomes a necessity when the transmission rate is predetermined, as happens with television images. The problem has two aspects. On the one hand, it deals with not transmitting more bits than the bare minimum: to not transmit “redundant” bits, that is to say, superfluous bits which do not contribute to the information. If a sequence of data must be transmitted, each of which is independent from those which precede it, it is obvious that each data must be codified with all the bits necessary to describe it. But often the data depends on each other (we can say that they are inter-connected). In television transmissions, for example, the fact that the images have a certain extension makes each point resemble, as a rule, the surrounding points. And so it is not important to transmit all the information associated with every point; it is enough to codify the difference existing between one point and the preceding one. This difference is in general small and, therefore, requires few bits. On the other hand, affecting the information through errors must be avoided. It is a question, therefore, as shown by Shannon, of taking the best advantage in correcting errors, provided that the rate does not exceed the capacity of the channel. For this, information theory has developed very refined “error correction codes” which permit the transmission rate to come much closer to the theoretical limit of the channel’s capacity.

The example of the television image allows something else to be added. It is known that the human eye is less sensitive to some characteristics of an image, so that they can be disregarded, without the observer being able to distinguish the compressed images from the original one. The same could be said of a person listening to musical transmissions. In this case, one could harmlessly “compress” the message, thereby reducing the quantity of information. Obviously, one could not do the same thing for numerical data, as a loss of information would render it useless. Therefore, the way in which a message is codified depends very much on its nature, on the significance it has for the person who receives it, and on the manner in which it is perceived. That is, it depends on its “semantics”. This is a fundamental limitation in the transmission and computation of information, a limitation that even the systems of artificial intelligence cannot overcome. Transmission and computation of information by technical operations concern only formal aspects of information, i.e. the “syntax” of information, while the “semantic” aspects do not flow along the chain. They stop at the point of input, and are returned to the message by the person who receives and interprets it.

V. The Birth of Informatics

The word “informatics” is a neologism, coined for its assonance with mathematics and automatics. Informatics is the technique of the construction and utilization of electronic computers. As a natural extension of its definition, it also indicates the science and technique of the computation of data and, generically, of the automatic handling of information. In accord with the aim of the present article, let us look at some structural characteristics that can reasonably be considered constant, at least for the near future. Readers more interested in this topic can find in the available computer magazines all the news concerning in particular quantitative (and thus more contingent and provisional) aspects: the diffusion of computers throughout the world, their corresponding dimensions and facilities, etc.

Informatics is tightly linked with applied mathematics and with information theory; moreover, it concerns electronic computers. One could distinguish a “theoretical informatics”, that is, the branch of applied mathematics which deals with the theory of algorithms (an “algorithm” is a sequence of operations able to bring about the solution of a problem in a finite number of steps), with the theory of formal languages and the theory of automation. We have also a “technical informatics”, which regards the construction of computers; a “practical informatics”, which studies the specific ways in which many problems can be solved by computers employing the various programming languages and other utility programs such as, for example, operating systems and data bases. The actual object of technical informatics is called hardware, while software refers specifically to practical informatics. Hardware and software are the components of every electronic computer.

The term hardware indicates the set of the electronic circuitry and electromechanical components that constitute the structure of computers. In every computer, from the smallest “handheld” calculators (that is, those that fit into the palm of a hand) to the big “mainframes”, we can distinguish three fundamental parts: the unit of computation, the unit of memory, the units of input and output. The units of input and output are the best known, since they represent the connection between the operator and the machine. For the input, that is to say, the data entry of the programs and of the data input itself, we use, for example, the keyboard, floppy disks, CD-ROM, and optical disks; for the output we have available the screen, the printer (dot-matrix, laser and ink jet), again the floppy disk, and the CD-ROM units in those machines supplied with a “disk burner”. We have also to keep in mind that between the elements of input and output, there are the “ports”, that is, the “connectors” for the connection cables to other computers (the nets of calculation, including the Internet) and to auxiliary units, such as, for example, the printers, which are generally physically separated from the computer and connected to it through a high transmission rate “parallel port”.

The memory units conserve the data and the programs and make them available to the unit of computation. Among the various types of memory units we have, first of all, the RAM (random access memory) from which the computing unit directly gets the data and to which it returns them once the computation is completed. The access velocity with which the data is read and written must be comparable with the velocity of computation. This can only be obtained with electronic circuits that are relatively expensive, and are, moreover, “weak”, that is, they lose the information when the machine is turned off. For this reason a second type of memory is required, a “mass memory” that is both permanent and with a greater capacity, where the data can be stored for an unlimited period, even when the computer is turned off. This is, in general, obtained through recording on magnetic supports (disks or, more rarely, tapes), whose access times are, however, much longer. In this memory, all the information necessary for the use of the computer, data and programs, is recorded in advance. During the running of the machine, the information is transferred, in blocks and in time for its subsequent usage, from the mass memory to the RAM. From here it is finally delivered for computation. There exist, then, the ROM memories: read only memory, and their derivatives PROM, EPROM and EEPROM which allow for a limited possibility of writing. They are used to permanently store parts of programs that are essential for the running of the machine and destined to remain unchanged for all of its life. Finally, disks and CD-ROMs, as well as the tapes and the magnetic disks used in the mainframe systems, can also be considered as control devices of an “external” memory, to be used mainly as data archives. In this way, data can be stored without cluttering up the internal memory, and can also be protected from the consequences of malfunctioning (the backup of important data).

Finally, the CPU, central processing unit, is the heart of the machine. Normally it is contained in a microprocessor that also hosts the RAM. The microprocessor is a device of very small dimensions, which, on a surface of a few square millimeters, contains many millions of elementary circuits. This extreme miniaturization, obtained with very refined techniques of photo-incision which are going to reach the limits imposed by the very structure of the matter, does not fulfil only the requirement of being packed in a small space, but also, and primarily, that of allowing a shorter running time. In fact, all necessary data processing implies delays and attenuations of the signal during the running of electric currents in the circuits and these delays can be reduced precisely minimizing the length of the connections. Microprocessors are also widely used in applications different from the real tools of calculation. Much of the automation found in industrial factories is realized with specialized microprocessors, as welll as in transport, telecommunications systems, electronic devices used in daily life, etc., so that they appear as one of the fundamental tools of the “informatization” of society, that is, of its progressive characterization as a society of information.

In the microprocessor, all the information — not only the arithmetic operations, but also the “logical” operations that control, for example, the order in which the different parts of a program are executed — results from the repetition, a great number of times, of three elementary operations (in fact, later reducible to two), namely “and”, “or” and “not”. In the English language, used for practical purposes, they are called and, or and not operators, while in mathematical expressions they are represented by the symbols ∧, / and ¬. These operations, simultaneously defined, halfway through the 19th Century by George Boole (1815-1864), from whom comes the name of “Boolean algebra”, and by Auguste De Morgan (1806-1871), constituted an extremely fertile sub-field of algebra, from both a conceptual and a practical point of view. This algebra deals with logical operations, those that deduce the “true” or the “false” value of a proposition ( LOGIC, II.1 and III). The term “true” is here intended in a purely logical sense, that is to say, as a result of the rules of logical consequentiality. The operations can easily be translated in terms of binary quantities by assigning to them, for example, the value 1 to true and the value 0 to false. Then the first two operators put into relationship two variables, A and B, with a third variable, C. The expression “C = A ∧ B” means that C is equal to 1 if A and B together are equal to 1; otherwise, it equals 0. “C = A / B” means, instead, that C is equal to 1 if at least one of the two, A or B, is equal to 1, and it is 0 only if A and B are together equal to 0. “Not”, finally, links only two variables : “B = ¬ A” means that B is equal to 0 when A is equal to 1, and 1 when A is equal to 0. Everything a computer does can be expressed through these three operations, repeated methodically an adequate number of times.

The functioning of the CPU, and therefore of the whole computer, is “synchronized”. It is governed by a clock (usually a quartz oscillator) which stabilizes the rate of the operations and is “sequential”, that is, the operations are executed, in principle, one at a time. To increase the computational velocity, a certain degree of parallelism is introduced, allowing more units to operate simultaneously. In the large computers used for scientific calculation, the parallelism can also be relatively elevated, but in these “electronic brains”, as they are called in science-fiction, there is nothing comparable to the brains of a living being in which the parallelism is total, that is, there exists a very great number of computational units (neurons) that function contemporaneously. Another difference between electronic computers and the brain of living beings is that, in the first case, the functions are “specialized”, that is, one unit is devoted to computation, another to memorization, a third to communication with the external environment, while in the second case the computing and memory functions, and in part also those of input and output, are distributed in the whole mass of neurons.

The term software indicates the set of the programs available for the computer. We distinguish between a “system software”, which makes possible the functioning of the computer, and an “application software” dedicated to the solutions of problems or to the execution of tasks entrusted to the computer. Among the programs of application software, we have the carrying out of mathematical calculations, archive management, word processing or drafting of texts, the processing of graphical images and so on. In the system software, the operating systems have a very important role, such as the very widespread Windows. The operating system is executed at the switching on of the computer and then remains available to render “intelligible” the commands that come from the application programs.

Every program (system or application software) is written in a “programming language”. This expression means, though in a rather anthropomorphous way, a system of information coding that is accessible (“understandable”) to the computer. On the same level as natural language, a programming language is characterized by a “vocabulary” and a “syntax” according to which the “words” of the vocabulary are combined to form “propositions” that have a complete sense. In reality, many languages exist at different levels of complexity. The simplest is the “machine language”, in which are written the commands to be directly given to the CPU. These commands can be of the type: «read the data from the memory, continue with operations, write the results in the memory and continue to the following command». It is important to identify the data on which to work, and this is the scope of the memory. Like every good archive, it is organized like a filing cabinet in which each folder or location has its correct address. For this reason, the elementary command becomes, more properly: «read the contents of these memory locations, execute this operation, write the result in this other location and continue to the following command». A program is nothing but a long list of such commands. And so it was until the end of the 1950’s. At that time, programming was quite a tedious process and the probability for error was very high. For this reason, languages have been produced to a much higher level in which, for example, in the programming of mathematical expressions the variables are designated with a name rather than with a memory location, and complicated operations are described synthetically, with a modality similar to those used in algebra. These expressions must then be rendered intelligible to the computer. System programs (called “translators”) are provided for this purpose. They identify the memory locations corresponding to the variables and break up the synthetic commands into sequences of elementary operations. Sometimes the translator (which is then referred to as the “interpreter”) carries out this operation, command by command, during the running of the program, whereas at other times (playing the role of the “compiler”) it produces a new program, which it will then run.

VI. Telematics and Internet

When the treatment of data involves the transmission over a distance, another neologism is used: “telematics”. In particular, what today is called the Internet belongs to the sphere of the telematics (and almost, in the common image, it is identified with it). Dealing with a “net of relations”, the Internet is difficult to define otherwise, because it cannot easily be expressed by the usual definitions with which normal technical objects are presented. The Internet originated in 1969 when the U.S. Ministry of Defence, wanting to build a telecommunications network impervious to sabotage, found the best solution to be to utilize the whole world telecommunications system, in which the messages run through itineraries more or less unknown. This elusiveness and uncontrollability remained when the system was opened to civil uses. Very schematically, it could be said that the Internet is formed by millions of nodes, constituted by computers (host computers) connected through normal telecommunications networks, the same networks through which travel telephone calls and radio and television programs. At every node, computer terminals (around 410 million in the whole world at the end of the year 2000) can be connected through “switching” lines, that is, normal telephone lines (and this is the case for domestic use), or “dedicated lines”, traditional telephone lines that do not pass through the switching devices of the central lines. It is now more and more common to have lines that can pass through special types of cable adapted for fast transmission. All these connections can also form a local network (LAN, local area network; also Intranet). The host computers of the nodes are connected permanently to the network (although the itinerary followed by the messages remains unkown). In their memories reside all the information that every user wants to place at the disposition of all the others, including the mailboxes of the users of electronic mail. The user terminals instead are connected to the nodes only when they wish to send their own electronic mail (E-mail), “to open” their own mailbox or to navigate through the “web”, that is, to explore its information contents and search for something that interests them, and to access the information placed in any node of the world.

Those who might want to specify what material objects the Internet “system” consist of, would end up, for this reason, greatly confused. In fact, only a part of the host computers (not all) and of the local connection lines are exclusively dedicated to the net; everything else is shared with other services. And so, if we look at the places where the messages can be in some moment originated, pass and arrive, it could be said that all the other telecommunications networks of the world and all the computers that at some point can be connected to it belong to the Internet network. But with equal reason, if instead we intend which hardware belongs to the Internet network and to it only, we could conclude that there is none. From a technological point of view then, the unique quality that belongs specifically to the Internet and that characterizes it, is, on the whole, immaterial. It is a “protocol”, to be precise, a set of codification rules that the messages must observe in order to be recognized by the receiver’s terminal.

For this reason the Internet is perfect “anarchy”: nobody is in control, anybody can distribute any kind of message and the police has great difficulty in preventing it from being used for illicit purposes. The Internet appears to be the result of a spontaneous and tumultuous aggregation, almost without rules for objectives created for other purposes: to transmit telephone or television signals. This is a paradox in clear contradiction with the traditional rules of technology, that would have every great technical system defined and recognizable in all of its particulars, and its functioning entrusted to an efficient, well-organized directing power. But its anarchy is also contradictory in itself, and reflects an essential contradiction of the technique. On the one hand it appears to be a fantastic thing whereby information is free from every type of conditioning by the various powers; on the other hand, it seems profoundly disturbing because it represents the extreme point of a process of “de-personalization” of technique and of its own autonomous construction, hard to control and, for this reason, possible prey to evil inhuman powers. Once more we can understand that a “culture of mankind” is necessary, mature and profoundly respectful of human dignity, to get the best from these tools of information and globalization, and that a wise vision of science and technique is also necessary to direct our future ( TECHNOLOGY, V).

VII. The Society of Information

The progressive growth of the concept of information reflects the corresponding increase of the importance of information not only in the world of science and technology, but in culture and society. Of course, no organized society has been able to restrict the circulation of information. But information had assumed, in the 20th Century, a completely different role and incidence. Beginning at the time when the diffusion of information was entrusted to the spoken or written word, to the painted, sculpted or carved picture, to the tools of material culture, etc., one can speak of history. With the advent of the printing press, the number of those who could be reached and made participants of information greatly increased. But now the technology of information, multiplying itself and being diffused by the technical tools that make possible reproduction and transmission, has profoundly changed this framework. The telegraph and the telephone (today also cellular) have made communication immediate over distances; photography and cinematography have permitted the unlimited multiplication and diffusion of images. The radio for the word, the television for the images, ensured, at least in industrialized countries, everybody be made aware of what takes place in the world “in real time”, that is, to say while things are actually happening or immediately afterward. The social implications of these transformations are at least comparable to those of the conquest of energy, which distinguished the industrial revolution, although the effect on customs and culture is perhaps greater. These tools have potentially cancelled the isolation of individuals — even though such tools cannot, themselves, overcome loliness; for this it is necessary to have a real, human culture and not only a technological one. The person at home, alone, or the Alpine climbers ascending on their own, know when to call for help at any time; the inhabitants of small mountain regions have the same possibility of knowledge as the citizens of the world’s capital cities. The network webs, above all the Internet (see above VI), have enormously increased the possibility of producing and receiving culture. Scholars can consult the on line catalogues of all the world’s great libraries without moving from their desk; their bibliographical research, that once would have required days of tedious work, can now be done in a few minutes, and articles arrive via telefax or through electronic mail.

One speaks of “cabled city” and of “intelligent house”. The first expression means that telephone cables are substituted by supports with an enormously greater transmission capacity, for example, optical fibres. On the same connection, one could speak on the telephone with several people, and the network connections could be established with a high velocity; television programs could be chosen with a freedom before unknown. The second expression signifies a computer that acts as a “control center”, receiving information coming from every part of the house controlling, from a distance, the opening and closing of doors and windows, turning the oven in the kitchen on and off, turning on and off electric lights air conditioning. Thus, it would not be necessary to move to do domestic chores. And so the city and the house are no longer regarded as material “places”, with certain dimensions and an organization of space within which to move, but rather as a network of connections in which information, rather than the inhabitants, is circulating. The motion and the space become, in a sense, “virtual”.

This is a profound transformation that invests technology, economy and society together: from an energy society we pass to an information society. Until the 1950’s, the main indicator of the well-being of a population was the consummation of energy. Then the energy crisis and environmental pollution weakened the conviction that the quality of life was positively correlated with the use of energy. Other indicators have been adopted: first the consumption of printer paper, then the number of calculators, and finally the number of connections to the Internet. Increasingly larger quantities of energy continue to be used, it is true, but it takes place with an increasing sense of guilt amid the warnings of ever-more credible scholars. Meanwhile, the progress of the stock-market is determined more and more by information industry titles rather than by those of energy. For all of this, Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) founder of cybernetics (one of the great fields of information engineering), spoke of a “second industrial revolution”. Actually, this expression had already been in use by the middle of the 19th Century, to describe the passage from steam machines to electric machines, but Wiener’s meaning seems more pertinent.

In the face of these rapid and incisive transformations, even sociology has given attention to the society of information, and has done so from many points of view. Authors such as H.M. McLuhan, J. Habermas, N. Luhmann, E. Morin, K.O. Apel and Karl Popper himself have been occupied with the communication of information as phenomena with the capacity to generate not only a new style of social life, but also a new culture. The concept of “global village” is increasingly used by sociologists and scholars. In such a “village square” people can be aware of what happens in every sphere of life and present their own ideas and initiatives. But there exists a certain circularity between anthropology and the society of information. On one hand, the informatized society is based (often implicitly) on a certain vision of the human being (at times in a reductive sense) and it conveys a specific image of people: the human being as consumer, as player, as generator of economic profit, as the subject of cultural and scientific networks, etc. On the other hand, the image of the human being, his or her living experience, seems today to be shaped by the logic of the information society; feelings, emotions and opinions evolve on the spur of informative communications, thereby generating “new cultures” and “new values”. It is sufficient to recall the debate about the influence of “virtual reality” on our behavior, needs or desires, or the change undergone by the meaning of the notion of “memory”, which has progressively moved from the sphere of life of the  spirit to that of the technology of materials.

VIII. Information within Theological Reflections

For its part, theology has had a specific interest in information regarding principally two aspects: the new developments brought about by society of information and the epistemological significance of information in the natural world.

Concerning the first aspect, the use of the mass media has always been present at the center of religious life and fervently used for the aims of catechesis and the promotion of Christian culture. One thinks of the immediate utilization of the press and of the radio, but one could even go back to the use of sacred images as a vehicle for the transmission of the contents of the faith. In the last decades, such interest is also shifting towards levels of theoretical reflection. This seems to develop essentially along two lines. The first constitutes the study of the links between the theology of Revelation and communication, between the theology of the word and the philosophy of information, to the point of giving rise to a new discipline today known as “theology of communication”. The second regards reflections concerning how the message of the Christian Gospel — characterized by the categories of personal contact, the witness of life, the refusal of every manipulation, etc. — can be conserved when employing contemporary techniques of production and diffusion of information. Beyond the rising use of tools for the production and the diffusion of religious information made at a professional level by many Church organizations, from the institutional point of view we recall the creation of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications founded by the Roman Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council. From a pastoral and theological point of view, the themes concerning the right to information, its relationships with truth and justice, its equal distribution among the Earth’s inhabitants, are part of the ethics of information and of the  ethics of scientific work. Once these ethical guarantees are assured, there will no longer be any reason to see any opposition between the “society of information” and a Christian anthropology. Moreover, it is precisely Christian anthropology that enhances the relational conception of the human being. Communication, the reciprocal enrichment of information, the exchange of giving and receiving, are seen as resources to develop and fulfil the personal being, because, according to Christian message, the human being has an intrinsic social nature and can be understood only in constructive relation with the others. The Council document Gaudium et spes (1965), after having recognized that human relationships, especially those based on service and on charity, revealed themselves to be «of great importance for men always more dependent upon each other and for a world that moves always more towards unification», recalls that the human being is social by nature, open to communication, because he or she is the image of a God who has revealed Himself as the intimate communion of three Persons (cf. n. 24). The same Second Vatican Council dedicated one of its first documents, the decree Inter mirifica (1963) to the theme regarding the tools of social communication.

The second theological aspect, that which concerns the presence of information — or of projectuality — in the universe, enters into dialogue with the philosophy of nature. Even recognizing a diversity of approaches, the Christian perspective of a world created by the divine Word, as a source of intelligibility and of significance ( JESUS CHRIST, INCARNATION AND DOCTRINE OF LOGOS, III), offers a connection with what philosophy, starting from the analysis of science, indicates regarding the intelligibility and the order of nature, and the coordination shown by many of its processes. As stated here previously (see above, III.3), one could also think that the information-order or the information-finality manifested by nature and its laws (in its various physical, chemical and biological levels), is in reality information that governs the existence and the properties of the whole universe, that is, of a unique system considered in its entirety. One could also speak of a Cause or a Reason distinct from it, as the source of the information that is contained in it and transported. In this way, theology can carry the concept of information even within the relationship between the created world and its Creator ( CREATION, III-IV), not far, perhaps, from the message of Genesis, when it speaks of God who “gives form” to our first parents (cf. Gen, 2,7 and 2,22), nor from the words of Isaiah, when he says that God has “formed” the heavens and “shaped” the Earth, not so that it would remain a desolate region, but designing it to be lived in (cf. Is 45,18).

Eugenio Sarti
(translated by Ruan Harding)

See also: COMPLEXITY; INTELLIGENCE, ARTIFICIAL; LOGIC; SYMBOL; TECHNOLOGY.

Bibliography

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