Travis Vocino Experiments in Art, Science & Technology.

Take two strings:

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

and

#!/usr/bin/perl
print ‘Hello World’;

If you were to ask the average person if these strings could evolve seemingly randomly by replacing characters over time or what have you, which would they say is more likely to be the result? They would undoubtedly say the first one would be much easier and thus more likely to occur randomly in “nature.” The first example is meaningless to us and so we view it as “dumb.” We view the second string as complex because it has meaning. You might even say it could only be produced by a designer. However, both are 36 characters and both occupy the same amount of space in the universe.

In Claude E. Shannon’s 1948 paper — A Mathematical Theory of Communication — in which started the science of information theory he explains:

“The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.”

Are we mistaking meaning for information?

How many possible strings could we create if we’re limited to 36 characters? How many would have meaning? The evolution of our strings could have gone either way. On the one hand, we had a simple and primitive repeating character string — on the other, a seemingly complex perl string. The differences in meaning are apparent only to someone that understands one more than the other and therefore perceives one as more complex (read meaningful).

Assuming each character is 8 bits wide (using only standard characters) and each string in the set is equal, the number of possible strings would be 2^8*36 - 2²⁸⁸. Furthermore, the amount of information that could be gathered from any of the strings chosen would be the same regardless of which one it is. Since the probability of any specific string being chosen is 1/2²⁸⁸, the amount of information represented by one string from the set is:

-log₂(1/2²⁸⁸) = 288 bits

It would take 288 bits to send one string from the set. So if you send a string of 32 “a” characters or a (seemingly) complex perl script, in reality the actual content of your string is the same regardless. The meaning is based on the viewer — they could be different for you, me or a dog or an alien or a God of some kind.

So, if we’re looking at the complexities of the human mind or the leaves in the trees, it’s appropriate to note that our assertion of complexity and meaning is based on what is already superimposed in our understanding. Is DNA extraordinarily advanced or a system so simple that it works?