The Information - James Gleick [118]
“I just walked over to the shelf and chose one.”
“I wouldn’t call that random, would you?” said Savage. “There is a danger that the book might be about engineering.”♦ Shannon did not tell them that in point of fact it had been a detective novel.
Someone else wanted to know if Shannon could say whether baby talk would be more or less predictable than the speech of an adult.
“I think more predictable,” he replied, “if you are familiar with the baby.”
English is actually many different languages—as many, perhaps, as there are English speakers—each with different statistics. It also spawns artificial dialects: the language of symbolic logic, with its restricted and precise alphabet, and the language one questioner called “Airplanese,” employed by control towers and pilots. And language is in constant flux. Heinz von Foerster, a young physicist from Vienna and an early acolyte of Wittgenstein, wondered how the degree of redundancy in a language might change as the language evolved, and especially in the transition from oral to written culture.
Von Foerster, like Margaret Mead and others, felt uncomfortable with the notion of information without meaning. “I wanted to call the whole of what they called information theory signal theory,” he said later, “because information was not yet there. There were ‘beep beeps’ but that was all, no information. The moment one transforms that set of signals into other signals our brain can make an understanding of, then information is born—it’s not in the beeps.”♦ But he found himself thinking of the essence of language, its history in the mind and in the culture, in a new way. At first, he pointed out, no one is conscious of letters, or phonemes, as basic units of a language.
I’m thinking of the old Maya texts, the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians or the Sumerian tables of the first period. During the development of writing it takes some considerable time—or an accident—to recognize that a language can be split into smaller units than words, e.g., syllables or letters. I have the feeling that there is a feedback between writing and speaking.♦
The discussion changed his mind about the centrality of information. He added an epigrammatic note to his transcript of the eighth conference: “Information can be considered as order wrenched from disorder.”♦
Hard as Shannon tried to keep his listeners focused on his pure, meaning-free definition of information, this was a group that would not steer clear of semantic entanglements. They quickly grasped Shannon’s essential ideas, and they speculated far afield. “If we could agree to define as information anything which changes probabilities or reduces uncertainties,” remarked Alex Bavelas, a social psychologist, “changes in emotional security could be seen quite easily in this light.” What about gestures or facial expressions, pats on the back or winks across the table? As the psychologists absorbed this artificial way of thinking about signals and the brain, their whole discipline stood on the brink of a radical transformation.
Ralph Gerard, the neuroscientist, was reminded of a story. A stranger is at a party of people who know one another well. One says, “72,” and everyone laughs. Another says, “29,” and the party roars. The stranger asks what is going on.
His neighbor said, “We have many jokes and we have told them so often that now we just use a number.” The guest thought he’d try it, and after a few words said, “63.” The response was feeble. “What’s the matter, isn’t this a joke?”
“Oh, yes, that is one of our very best jokes, but you did not tell it well.”♦
The next year Shannon returned with a robot. It was not a very clever robot, nor lifelike in appearance, but it impressed the cybernetics group. It solved mazes. They called it Shannon’s rat.
He wheeled out a cabinet with a five-by-five grid on its top panel. Partitions could be placed around and between any of the twenty-five squares to make mazes in different configurations. A pin could