Author’s note: What follows is a section from a longer article, for publication I hope in the next few months, on intelligence metrics. These metrics determine not so much whether something has an intelligent cause but rather the degree of intelligence involved. The connections among information, intelligence, and decision keep coming up in conversation with colleagues. Much of this is recycled, even verbatim, from other things I’ve written, but I want to make it available here in a way that is self-contained and succinct.
The key intuition behind the modern conception of information is the narrowing of possibilities. In this conception, drawn from Shannon’s communication theory and subsequent work on the mathematical theory of information,1 the key truth about information is this: the more that possibilities are narrowed down, the greater the information. This conception is consistent with Aristotle’s classical conception of information through his theory of substantial forms, in which a formal cause combines with a material cause to narrow down the precise structure and function of a thing. The modern conception, however, based as it is in mathematics, makes sense apart from a fully developed metaphysics, such as that of Aristotle.
To illustrate the modern conception of information, imagine I tell you I’m on planet Earth. In that case, I haven’t conveyed any information because you already knew that (let’s leave aside space travel). If I tell you I’m in the United States, I’ve begun to narrow down where I am in the world. If I tell you I’m in Texas, I’ve narrowed down my location further. If I tell you I’m forty miles north of Dallas, I’ve narrowed my location down even further. As I keep narrowing down my location, I’m providing you with more and more information.
Information as Exclusion
Information is therefore, in its essence, exclusionary: the more possibilities are excluded, the greater the information provided. As philosopher Robert Stalnaker put it: “To learn something, to acquire information, is to rule out possibilities. To understand the information conveyed in a communication is to know what possibilities would be excluded by its truth.”2 I’m excluding much more of the world when I say I’m in Texas forty miles north of Dallas than when I merely say I’m in the United States. Accordingly, to say I’m in Texas north of Dallas conveys much more information than to say I’m in the United States.
The etymology of the word information captures this exclusionary understanding of information. The word information derives from the Latin preposition in, meaning in or into, and the verb formare, meaning to give shape to. Information puts definite shape into something. But that means ruling out other shapes. Information narrows down the shape in question. A completely unformed shmoo, such as Aristotle’s prime matter, is waiting in limbo to receive information. Only by being informed will it exhibit the definiteness of real things.
The Modern Conception of Information
Aristotle’s conception of information overlaps with but is also separate from the modern conception of information. Aristotle’s conception is tied to his theory of formal causation, in which information is understood as the cause that gives shape to matter, thereby makes a material object what it is, and ultimately allows it to achieve its purpose (for Aristotle everything had a purpose). In Aristotelian thought, the formal cause determines an object’s structure and properties, defining its essence.
For Aristotle, information was thus more than a narrowing of possibilities. Instead, it was an intrinsic organizing principle that turns matter into a coherent and purposeful entity. The modern conception of information, though not wedded to Aristotle’s understanding of formal causation, is nonetheless consistent with it. Aristotelian information, by defining a thing’s essence, makes it this and not that. It is thus inherently exclusionary, which aligns with information in its contemporary sense as the narrowing down of possibilities.
A Top-Down Affair
Because information’s animating principle is ruling out possibilities, it is always a top-down affair. It understands reality by starting with a range of possibilities and then attempting to narrow them down. The range of possibilities comes first, laying out the things that might be true in detail. And then these possibilities are narrowed down, in an act or realization, realizing some possibilities to the exclusion of others. This is different from materialism, which is always a bottom-up affair, starting with material constituents and then attempting to build them into coherent assemblies of parts.
In ruling out possibilities, information is fundamentally about contraction and diminution, about starting with more and ending with less. Many things may be possible, but only few things end up being realized. With information one needs to start at the top and work down. What is the very top? It is the collection of all possible worlds. The ultimate act of information is therefore to identify the actual world, the world we inhabit, in all of its specificity, to the exclusion of all other worlds. All other acts of information can be viewed as subsidiary — as taking subsets of possible worlds and narrowing them further.3
Two Latin Words
The fundamental intuition of information as narrowing down possibilities matches neatly with the concept of intelligence. The word intelligence derives from two Latin words: the preposition inter, meaning between, and the verb legere, meaning to choose. Intelligence thus, at its most fundamental, signifies the ability to choose between. But when a choice is made, some possibilities are actualized to the exclusion of others, implying a narrowing of possibilities. And so, an act of intelligence is also an act of information.
If we trace the etymology of intelligent back still further, the l-i-g that appears in it derives from the Indo-European root l-e-g. This root appears in the Greek verb lego, which by New Testament times meant to speak. Its original Indo-European meaning, however, was to lay, and from there to pick up and put together. Still later, it came to mean to choose and arrange words, and from there to speak. The root l-e-g has several variants, appearing as l-o-g in logos and as l-e-c in intellect and select. This is all just basic etymology, easily confirmed in a good dictionary.
Darwin’s Great Coup
As a side note, this brief etymological tour reveals that Darwin’s great coup was to co-opt the term selection, previously associated with the conscious choice of purposive agents, and combine it with the term natural as a way of negating the role of such intelligent agency. In the term natural selection, Darwin therefore attempted to recover all the benefits of choice as traditionally conceived, and yet without requiring the services of an actual intelligence. Thus to this day we read such claims, as by Francisco Ayala, that Darwin’s greatest discovery was to give us “design without designer.”4Likewise, Richard Dawkins describes Darwin’s great coup as explaining the appearance of design in the absence of actual design.5
Darwinists, in coopting the term selection, obscure the idea of choice. Choice is a directed contingency that actualizes some possibilities to the exclusion of others in order to accomplish an end or purpose. A synonym for the word choice is decision, with the corresponding verb forms being choose and decide. The words decision and decide are likewise from the Latin, combining the preposition de, meaning down from, and the verb caedere, meaning to cut off or kill (compare our English word homicide).
An Intelligent Act
Decisions, in keeping with this etymology, raise up some possibilities by cutting down, or killing off, others. When you decide to marry one person, you cut off all the other people you might marry (assuming traditional one-to-one marital relationships). An act of decision is therefore always a narrowing of possibilities. It is an informational act. But given the definition of intelligence as choosing between, it is also an intelligent act.
Given the etymology of information and intelligence, it’s obvious that these two notions are related. It therefore makes sense to measure intelligence via information. This is not to say there might not be other ways to measure intelligence, but on its face using information to measure intelligence should at the very least seem promising.
Notes
- Thomas M. Cover and Joy A. Thomas, Elements of Information Theory, 2nd ed. (Hoboken: Wiley-Interscience, 2006).
- Robert. C. Stalnaker, Inquiry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 85.
- William A. Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2014), ch. 4.
- Francisco J. Ayala, “Darwin’s Greatest Discovery: Design without Designer,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104(1) (2007): 8567 – 8573.
- Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (New York: Norton, 1986).
Adapted and cross-posted from Bill Dembski on Substack.