The transmission sense of information
The transmission sense of information
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DOI：
10.1007/s10539-009-9180-z
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发表时间：
2011-03-01
影响因子：
2.5
通讯作者：
Rosvall, Martin
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Bergstrom, Carl T.;Rosvall, Martin
生物学家在很大程度上依赖于克劳德·香农（Claude Shannon）开发的信息论领域中常见的信息、编码和传输语言，但关于这种语言是否不仅仅是简单的隐喻，还有公开的争论。生物学哲学家认为，当生物学家谈论基因和进化中的信息时，他们谈论的不是香农理论所涉及的信息。首先，哲学家们认为香农的理论只对发展一种肤浅的相关性概念有用，即所谓的信息的“因果意义”。其次，他们通常认为在遗传学和进化生物学中，信息语言是在“语义意义上”使用的，而香农的理论故意省略了语义。这两种批评都没有充分的根据。在这里，我们提出了一个替代的因果和语义意义的信息：一个传输意义的信息，其中一个对象X传达信息，如果X的功能是减少，凭借其序列属性，不确定性的一部分，代理人观察X。当生物学家谈论基因中的信息时，传递意义不仅抓住了他们的大部分意图，而且还将香农的理论带回了前沿。通过采取通信工程师的观点，并专注于信息如何包装运输的决策问题，这种方法解决了困扰生物学中信息概念的几个问题，并突出了信息编码，存储和传输方式的一些重要特征作为基因序列。
Biologists rely heavily on the language of information, coding, and transmission that is commonplace in the field of information theory developed by Claude Shannon, but there is open debate about whether such language is anything more than facile metaphor. Philosophers of biology have argued that when biologists talk about information in genes and in evolution, they are not talking about the sort of information that Shannon's theory addresses. First, philosophers have suggested that Shannon's theory is only useful for developing a shallow notion of correlation, the so-called "causal sense" of information. Second, they typically argue that in genetics and evolutionary biology, information language is used in a "semantic sense," whereas semantics are deliberately omitted from Shannon's theory. Neither critique is well-founded. Here we propose an alternative to the causal and semantic senses of information: a transmission sense of information, in which an object X conveys information if the function of X is to reduce, by virtue of its sequence properties, uncertainty on the part of an agent who observes X. The transmission sense not only captures much of what biologists intend when they talk about information in genes, but also brings Shannon's theory back to the fore. By taking the viewpoint of a communications engineer and focusing on the decision problem of how information is to be packaged for transport, this approach resolves several problems that have plagued the information concept in biology, and highlights a number of important features of the way that information is encoded, stored, and transmitted as genetic sequence.