Information and Existence

We hear the term information everywhere these days. I myself have used that term quite often in my previous blogs.? Now, let’s see why information is so important. Information technologists say “It’s all about information”. Let’s see how.

Let’s start from what we have in front of us. Look at your desktop for example. The system you are using is the hardware. What runs inside it is the software, or in other words programs. What do these programs use? That’s what’s information. Programs manipulate, generate and transfer information. It’s not just with the desktop. Look at any system in our common-life. Look at yourself; Your body is the hardware. You have a genetic code, blood group, blood pressure level, body temperature etc, these all are the information needed to run you. Information is not just the numbers, it’s not just the code, information is what there is.

Every system in the universe has three levels associated to it. Hardware, program (code) and the bottom level- information. Let’s look at another simple example to understand the concept completely. I have this book on C# here. The book is the hardware, it is written in English, so English or the words used are the code, so what is the information? What you understand when you read the book is the information. You are not paying for the hardware while you pay say $50 for a book, you are not paying for the words in it either, You are paying for the information lying between the words. What Information Technology does is to find ways to improve organizing, reproducing, generating, manipulating and transferring the information.

Is it just information technology that does all these stuff with information? No, all sciences, arts, and everything we do everyday is manipulation of the information in one way or another. What do physicists do? They use mathematics as a tool and find out the laws of nature. From a physicist’s perspective, the universe is the hardware, mathematical equations are the codes, and the assumptions he reach are the information. So normally we will start thinking, what is the use of information? Is that just to cure our curiosity? Information is valuable. We already know that. So if someone can generate or manipulate information in a better way than someone else he has the power. So the more information you have the more powerful you are.

In the world of Information, each and every information produced(revealed) has a comparative value. There, the value of truth need not always be greater than a lie. A well coded lie will have better value than a weakly coded truth. So if the information is accompanied with a code, that is better. If you can provide the hardware too, the value becomes even better.

In this social networking era , information is everywhere. We get information about everyone and everything over the internet. Unlike the early days, survival has larger dimensions now. According to the Darwinian evolution , only the fittest survives. These days, survival is not just about food and shelter, it’s about satisfaction and freedom. Only those who possess better information survive in a society. Others are just too insignificant creatures.

Googling on facebook.

"Google it." Nobody used to use this phrase eight or ten years ago. Google and Facebook have become a part of our everyday life. . There are websites like twitter, myspace and a many other search engines and social networking sites but, google and facebook are the sites approved by the mass of the present era, so i choose to talk about them. What do these two applications do to us? They provide us information. Someone posts on their wall about the drastic climate they have in the particular area they reside and everyone connected to them are getting information about the climate in that particular region. On your Facebook wall, more and more information is appearing each and every minute. The amount of information you accumulate is directly proportional to the frequency of your visit on your news-feed and the number of people/applications you are connected to.
Those who work in I T field has classified web applications into two categories, push and pull. Google is an example for pull application while facebook uses push technology. As the names imply users pull information from Google while facebook pushes information to users. The information that facebook pushes need not always be relevent to the needs of the user. If search engines try to give the users what they ask for, social networking sites give them what the users want to share. In many of the cases people just blurt on their walls. So, the users get what others in the network want to share. Users are constrained to think, express and form relations in certain ways. This has serious effects on the culture which forms outside computer monitor.
So, if search engines were providing everything user "wanted", why do we have webtechnologies which use pull approach? The reason is that people don't want to use that extra energy in searching if everything they want could be accessed just by opening their facebook page. Latest news about everything and everyone they know, people's personal information, flight timings, entertainment etc etc. Then, what is wrong with facebook? No, I'm not going to talk about the privacy issues. Facebook provides us the information we don't want to know. And many of the useful information get lost in the piles of junk data that fall everywhere around us.
What can we do to make facebook a better place? How can we integrate push and pull approaches to make information gathering or entertainment more effective? One possible solution will be a better and effective customization. People should be able to find their interests make the posts available more easily. Secondly they should be able to manage the information more effectively, by marking them or saving under different categories. If this is made possible, users will be able to scroll through the information which has been there for ages as well as which is getting updated every minute.

Intelligent agents, aren't we?

We are living in an era in which we have intelligent agents to handle many things we do or wanna do. There will be a lot more things possible in the near future from talking to your doctor to umpiring a cricket match. By definition an intelligent agent, in its simplest definition, is software that is given and executes a particular task and reports back to the user. They have been employed to execute tasks on behalf of a business process, computer application or an individual(1). If you thought this is gonna be a passage about those softwares, programs or robots you are wrong. It's about us.

Looking in the mirror.

At one stage or another we all might have asked ourselves the question "what are we?" . Well, some of us define our existence in philosophical terms, some others rely on spirituality, some patient ones are ready to seek it rationally and some others just give it up. The laws of nature seem to be too complicated and randomness seems to be a universal attribute of all objects. Even though physicists have been trying to find out the laws behind the universe they find it difficult to come up with a "theory of everything". Now, you must be thinking, "wait a minute, what bullshit are you gonna talk about?". This is not a theory, these are just some random thoughts popped up in my head.

Some queries.

Are we just some Intelligent agents walking on a planet which is a mere network created just for some properties like sensing, gathering or producing information? Isn't this universe a web of information just like what we are? We find information everywhere we look. We gather it, analyse it and organize it. We even create new information from what we have got. We communicate to each other. Isn't it what we get or expect to get Intelligent agents to do for us? Every other things we do are just to support our existence. The human minds are connected via telephone cables, wireless networks and satellites. That's where terms like collective mind as found by C.G Jung start making sense. We hear people saying, everything is for a purpose. If that's true, what purpose? People believe in supernatural existences like Gods and demons which they were never able to explain in physical terms. Neurologists say God is just another thought induced in the brain(2). And experiments like Langton's ants show very interesting patterns can arise from very simple rules. If we are following rules, what kinda rules are they? Who compiled those rules?

The Super-programmers

If there exist another bunch of beings who use us, what would they look like? How do they interact with us to control information? The possible answer is , 'Exactly like we interact with intelligent agents.' The intelligent agents we have created interact with each other as well. We have agents to predict weather, talk to us about the weather, etc etc. We can be doing the same. We interact with them without knowing we are interacting with them. We respond to our situations. We get chemical reactions going inside our brains every time a stimuli from what we sense from outside our bodies. And we react correspondingly according to what we have known from previous experiences or as per what is programmed as reflex actions. Agents do the same. They interact with their situations, including our queries and responses from other agents according to what is stored in their knowledge base or as per the codes in their program. A doubt can arise in us now, why are we not able to sense our programmers?(if there is any). Are the softwares aware of the programmer sitting in front of the computer? Softwares interact only with instructions, not with the programmer or user. Similarly, they(even they can be some agents/programs) can be interacting with our brain waves at the programming level and with our universe at an application level.

The Protocols

What kind of rules are governing our minds? Let's just think about what kind of thoughts let us do things or not let do things. Our actions are directed or restricted by some factors called morality, rationality, desire, fear etc. These factors are likely to be the protocols that govern the way we behave. For different type of agents, different set of rules. Plants, animals, micro-organisms , etc all have their set of behavioral patterns.

The Conclusion

This is not a subject that can be concluded in five or six paragraphs, but as I've said earlier just some random signals generated in my brain. I'm not stating a theory here. This is more like a comparative study between what we create and what we are. I'm looking forward for responses from other agents.

References used:

(1)www.it-architects.co.uk/a_-_z_glossary_index/Data_Warehousing___BI_Glossary/data_warehousing___bi_glossary.html

(2)http://neuropolitics.org/Conservative-Left-Brain-Liberal-Right-Brain.htm

Tools of Information.

Recently I heard someone saying "Saying Computer science is like calling astronomy, telescope science. Computer is just a tool, Information is what matters." Though it looks like true, it is completely not. Let's see how. At first, what is information? The definition for the word 'information' is that it is a message that's received and understood. So, there needs to be two components to make it a complete process , a message and a mind that understands the message. Some may argue that there is a sender too, but if we look around we can see minds gathering information that's not sent by anyone. If there is no sender, where does the message come from? The perceiving mind collect it from any information source. So to finalize, information has three major components: a message, a source(where the message is situated/ comes from), and a perceiving mind.

What are the roles of computers in Information science? The purpose of computers (in this context) are to reduce the work of mind. So, in the process of information gathering, which of the three components is computer? Computer stands as a part of the mind which analyses the message. That's how the message becomes an information. If that was the only role of computers, the quote in the beginning of this passage would be completely true, but sometimes computer itself is what is analysed. Then, computer is the source where information resides. That process of getting the information about computers is what is called computer science. So in conclusion, Computer science is just a part of Information science, not the other way around.